Connell, "Ghost in Machine," Deposed in OH 04 Election Inquest

Source: RAW STORY, 11/03/08
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Scarborough_warns_ghost_in_machine_could_1... [16]

Scarborough Warns 'Ghost in the Machine' Could Upset Obama Victory

The Ghost in our Election Machine might well be a man named Michael Connell, or one of his colleagues. What this article does not mention is the fact that Connell is an advisor to the McCain Campaign and Karl Rove's top IT guru.

Michael Connell was deposed [Monday] in Columbus, Ohio by Cliff Arnebeck, lead lawyer in the civil lawsuit King-Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Brunner (Blackwell).

This news story was covered in national news by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now and Thom Hartmann on Air America. Transcripts and mp3s should be available at their respective websites. News from the deposition which began at noon today is expected soon.

Connell was first subpoenaed in the case in after Stephen Spoonamore, a renowned cyber-sleuth and information security expert, came forward as an expert witness.

On Democracy Now this morning, Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media culture and communication at New York University and author "Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000–2008" described Spoonamore as

"…a very unusual and particularly unimpeachable kind of whistleblower. He is a conservative Republican. He is a former McCain supporter, but above all he is renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. He works for big banks, he works for foreign governments, the Secret Service, his job is to figure out how computers are used to steal money or information, or votes."

Spoonamore affidavits filed in connection with the case along with arguments made in a Cleveland courthouse Friday led the judge in the case to reject a motion to quash a Connell subpoena. In a surprise ruling, the judge ordered Connell to appear in the deposition, on the eve of the election.

For lead lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, the timing is auspicious given his concern about the security of the 2008 election. Speaking to earlier pleadings to the court and State of Ohio litigants, Arnebeck explained, “We submitted two affidavits and argued that the same people who stole 2000, 2004 are still in business and are engaged in a plan to steal 2008."

That the Ohio litigants agreed to the consent order to lift a two-year-old stay in the case, is evidence of growing concern among the general public and elected officials that elections employing electronic voting machines and vote counting tabulators are seen as vulnerable to manipulation or theft by those who control or can gain access.

See also:

Mike Connell, Rove's IT fixer, ordered to testify on Monday
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Mike-Connell-Rove-s-IT-fi-by-Press-Rele... [17]

Investigate Why Bush/Rove IT Expert Mike Connell Asked How to Destroy White House Emails

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/investigate-why-bushrove-expert-mike/story.aspx?guid={5A2941D9-1DD5-4287-AD8E-E4A91D8A94DD}&dist=hppr

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/investigate-why-bushrove-expert-ik... [18]

Federal Judge Compels Testimony from Mike Connell
http://thejournal.epluribusmedia.net/index.php/state-news/ohio-news/205-... [19]

Documents reveal how Ohio routed 2004 voting data through company that hosted external Bush Administration email accounts
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Documents_reveal_how_Ohio_routed_2004_1031... [20]

GOP IT Consultant Subpoenaed Regarding OH '04 Rigging

Source: http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=12080 [21]
By Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane

COLUMBUS -- A high-level Republican consultant has been subpoenaed in a case regarding alleged tampering with the 2004 election.

Michael S. Connell was served with a subpoena in Ohio on Sept. 22 in a case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, is a website designer and IT professional who created a website for Ohio's secretary of state that presented the results of the 2004 election in real time as they were tabulated.

At the time, Ohio's Secretary of State, Kenneth J. Blackwell, was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio.

Connell is refusing to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections, lawyers say. His motion to quash the subpoena asserts that the request for documents is burdensome because the information sought should be "readily ascertainable through public records request" - but also, paradoxically, because "it seeks confidential, trade secrets, and/or proprietary information" that "have independent economic value" and "are not known to the public, or even to non-designated personnel within or working for Mr. Connell's business."

According to sources close to the office of Clifford Arnebeck, one of the Ohio attorneys who brought the case, Arnebeck intends to ask the court to compel Connell to testify. An emergency conference with the judge, originally scheduled for Monday, is to be rescheduled.

King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell

The case, known as King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, was filed against Kenneth J. Blackwell on Aug. 31, 2006 by Columbus attorneys Clifford Arnebeck, Robert Fitrakis and others. It initially charged Blackwell with racially discriminatory practices -- including the selective purging of voters from the election rolls and the unequal allocation of voting machines to various districts -- and asked for measures to be taken to prevent similar problems during the November 2006 election.

On Oct. 9, 2006, an amended complaint added charges of various forms of ballot-rigging as also having the effect of "depriving the Plaintiffs of their voting rights, including the right to have their votes successfully cast without intimidation, dilution, cancellation or reversal by voting machine or ballot tampering." A motion to dismiss the case as moot was filed following the November 2006 election, but it was instead stayed to allow for settlement discussions.

The case took on fresh momentum earlier this year when Arnebeck announced in July that he was filing to "lift the stay in the case [and] proceed with targeted discovery in order to help protect the integrity of the 2008 election." The new filing was inspired in part by the coming forward as a whistleblower of GOP IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore, who said he was prepared to testify to the plausibility of electronic vote-rigging having been carried out in 2004.

Arnebeck's hope was that in the course of the discovery procedure it would be possible to subpoena Michael Connell, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and others to obtain additional information and improve the focus of the case. The stay was lifted Sept. 19, 2008 by an order from Magistrate Judge Terrence P. Kemp of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, and a subpoena was served to Connell on the following Monday, Sept. 22.

Allegations Against Connell

The interest in Mike Connell stems from his association with a firm called GovTech, which he had spun off from his own New Media Communications under his wife Heather Connell's name. GovTech was hired by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to set up an official election website at election.sos.state.oh.us to present the 2004 presidential returns as they came in.

Connell is a long-time GOP operative, whose New Media Communications provided web services for the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Republican National Committee and many Republican candidates. This in itself might have raised questions about his involvement in creating Ohio's official state election website.

However, the alternative media group ePlubibus Media further discovered in November 2006 that election.sos.state.oh.us was hosted on the servers of a company in Chattanooga, TN called SmarTech, which also provided hosting for a long list of Republican Internet domains.

"Since early this decade, top Internet 'gurus' in Ohio have been coordinating web services with their GOP counterparts in Chattanooga, wiring up a major hub that in 2004, first served as a conduit for Ohio's live election night results," researchers at ePluribus Media wrote.

A few months after this revelation, when a scandal erupted surrounding the firing of US Attorneys for reasons of White House policy, other researchers found that the gwb43 domain used by members of the White House staff to evade freedom of information laws by sending emails outside of official White House channels was hosted on those same SmarTech servers.

Given that the Bush White House used SmarTech servers to send and receive email, the use of one of those servers in tabulating Ohio's election returns has raised eyebrows. Ohio gave Bush the decisive margin in the Electoral College to secure his reelection in 2004.

IT expert Stephen Spoonamore says the SmartTech server could have functioned as a routing point for malicious activity and remains a weakness in electronic voting tabulation.

According to Spoonamore's Sept. 17 affidavit, the "computer placement, in the middle of the network, is a defined type of attack." Spoonamore describes this as a "Man in the Middle Attack" or MIM.

"It is a common problem in the banking settlement space," he writes. "A criminal gang will introduce a computer into the outgoing electronic systems of a major retail mall, or smaller branch office of a bank. They will capture the legitimate transactions and then add fraudulent charges to the system for their benefit."

"Any time all information is directed to a single computer for consolidation, it is possible, and in fact likely, that single computer will exploit the information for some purpose," he adds. "In the case of Ohio 2004, the only purpose I can conceive for sending all county vote tabulations to a GOP managed Man-in-the-Middle site in Chattanooga before sending the results onward to the Sec. of State, would be to hack the vote at the MIM."

Hold letters were sent out in July to parties in the case, informing them of their obligation not to destroy relevant documentation. One such letter went to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to advise the federal government of its responsibility to preserve emails from Rove.

Arnebeck explained, "We expressed concern about the reports that Mr. Rove destroyed his emails and suggested that we want the duplicates that should exist [be put] under the control of the Secret Service and be sure that those are retained, as well as those on the receiving end in the Justice Department and elsewhere, that those documents are retained for purposes of this litigation, in which we anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."

More recently, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has revealed that John McCain's presidential campaign paid nearly a million dollars for web services to a firm called 3eDC, created and partly owned by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. According to an archived version of a 3eDC webpage from 2007, that firm's five "strategic partners" included not only Connell's New Media Communications but also Campaign Solutions - a firm run by Connell's sometimes-partner, Rebecca Donatelli - and a component of SmarTech called AirNet.

The Origin of the Case

The roots of the King Lincoln Bronzeville case go back to the case of Moss v. Bush, which Arnebeck, Fitrakis and other attorneys filed immediately after the 2004 presidential election. In that filing, they challenged the results of the Ohio voting on the basis of numerous irregularities and allegations of fraud and sought to depose President George W. Bush, Vice President, Dick Cheney, and then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, as well as Secretary Blackwell.

That case was dropped by the plaintiffs in January 2005, after the US Senate accepted the casting of Ohio's electoral votes for George W. Bush. Two weeks later, Ohio's Republican Attorney General James Petro attempted to sanction and fine the attorneys for what he described as a "frivolous filing," but they were supported by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) - then the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee - who had already held a hearing at which Arnebeck and Jesse Jackson testified concerning the suppression of minority votes. Those same concerns are now at the heart of King Lincoln Bronzeville.

####

Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories. Contact: [email protected] [22].

Muriel Kane is director of research for Raw Story.

Related Stories

- GOP security expert suggests Diebold tampered with Georgia election [23]


- Documents show Georgia Secretary of State knew about Diebold patch before election [24]


- Break-ins plague targets of US Attorneys [25]

Binomial Analysis of Clinton vs. Obama Contest in New Hampshire

Binomial Analysis of Clinton vs. Obama Contest in New Hampshire:

The Dichotomous Returns from Hand-Counted-Paper-Ballot Precincts and Diebold-Optical-Scan Precincts Are “Statistically Impossible"

"The Excel spreadsheet shown below gives the binomial probability that the boundaries of the hand-counted paper ballot (HCPB) and Diebold optical scan precincts should have, by sheer accident, corresponded to parts of New Hampshire that had bizarrely dichotomized into 6% pro-Obama and 6% pro-Clinton enclaves, respectively. That probability (corresponding to 17 standard deviations, or “SDs”) turns out to be so infinitesimally small that I haven’t yet found a look-up table for it. Seventeen SDs is about as close to “statistical impossibility” as one ever gets to see."

See full commentary on hypothesis and method, below chart

COMMENTARY by David L. Griscom [39], EDA Co-Coordinator for Investigations
January 20, 2008

As a Ph.D. research physicist for nearly 42 years, I am accustomed to gathering data and then deciding what these data mean. That is, I (and any physicist worth his salt) seek hypotheses suitable for explaining all existing data. Hypothesizing usually begins with an educated guess. But it can never end there. As soon as a guess is on the table, the challenge is to quantify its predictions. And to do that requires mathematics.

Since my retirement from the Naval Research Laboratory seven years ago this month, I have continued to carry out research and publish papers in peer-reviewed journals using data I had gathered at NRL but not yet published, data gathered as a visiting professor somewhere, or data gathered by colleagues still working in well equipped laboratories. It has really been impossible for me to give up the habit of being a physicist.

However, in recent years I have increasingly turned my attentions from physical phenomena to “political” phenomena, including the 9/11 attacks, insider manipulation of the financial markets, and insider-perpetrated election fraud. Once again, educated guesses have been my starting points, but I never stop there. Typically, I gather all data available from public sources and make sure that none of these data contradict the hypothesis I may be hatching. Then it comes time for the mathematics.

Binomial Analytic Method Evolved from Investigation of 2004 Presidential Election in Pima County, AZ

With my friend and colleague John Brakey, I have been on the trail of election fraud in Pima County, Arizona, ever since the 2004 election. This has culminated in the chapter I wrote for publication in a book being edited by Mark Crispin Miller entitled Loser Take All (which will also feature chapters by many of my distinguished colleagues from Election Defense Alliance and elsewhere, all of whom exhibit research skills and methodology matching those of any good physicist).

In my paper, I exploit publicly-available data for the 2004 presidential vote at 63 precincts belonging to a single Tucson legislative district. My educated guess, or operating premise, was that on the average the Bush and Kerry vote shares for any given precinct should be closely the same for the three modes of voting used in 2004: mail-in voting, at-the-precinct voting, and voting by provisional ballots. I found this premise to be true within 95% statistical confidence (the math I brought to bear at that point) when comparing the mail-in voting to the provisional ballot voting.

I used data for provisional ballots that were accepted by the county registrar; therefore, the vote shares represented there had to have been honest since the registrar had to verify the name and signature on the affixed voter affidavits and check to see that those persons were voting in the correct precinct and had not voted by mail. Thus, to my surprise, I was force to conclude that the mail-in vote had not been stolen despite the ease with which this could have been done, given that these ballots are counted by Pima Election Department officials without witnesses.

But when I compared the at-the-precinct presidential vote shares to the now-shown-to-be-(mostly)-honest mail-in vote shares for these 63 precincts, I found a large shift favoring Bush that was outside of 95% statistical confidence. Still, the mathematics I was using then were crude – and I wanted to sharpen in my mind the concept that was to become my hypothesis. That is, there certainly must be random variations in people’s choices whether to vote by mail or in person at the precinct. And to prove fraud I must prove that differences in the public record substantially exceed the nominal limits of such random variations.

I realized that such situations are mathematically described by the binomial distribution function. So I searched for and found a handy calculator of this function on the Internet, and did the math. (N.B. This is the same function that gives you your chances of flipping heads x times in n tries.) In this way I proved that there was only one chance in 15,773 that the at-the-precinct vote for the entire legislative district (56,930 Bush-plus-Kerry voters) was not flipped by 3.4% from Kerry to Bush (for a net vote shift of 6.8%).

How the 2004 Arizona Methodology Applies to the 2008 New Hampshire Primary

The New Hampshire primaries were held only two days after I turned in the final version of my chapter to the publisher of Loser Take All. And there staring me in the face were these Clinton-plus-Obama data: Clinton took 46.8% of the hand-counted paper-ballot (HCPB) vote but fully 52.7% of the Diebold optically-scanned vote. Obama was virtually the reverse, taking 53.2% of the HCPBs but only 47.3% of the Diebold vote! Now, just how probable is that? Another job for the binomial distribution function calculator!

I reason that the boundaries of the Diebold op-scan precincts and those of the HCPB precincts had been drawn up years ago, either arbitrarily or with an idea toward somehow giving an advantage to Democratic or Republican candidates (depending on which political party did the deciding). Such a demographic bias, if it even exists, should in my view have little impact on a Democratic primary contest between two Republican-lite candidates. It was inconceivable to me that the distribution of HCPB and Diebold precincts was anything but random with respect to the Clinton-Obama contest. But, hey, why listen to my opinion when the binomial distribution function speaks with far greater authority?

The Excel spreadsheet shown above gives the binomial probability that the HCPB and Diebold precinct boundaries should have, by sheer accident, corresponded to parts of New Hampshire that had bizarrely dichotomized into 6% pro-Obama and 6% pro-Clinton enclaves, respectively.

That probability (corresponding to 17 Standard Deviations, or “SDs”) turns out to be so infinitesimally small that I haven’t yet found a look-up table for it. Seventeen SDs is about as close to “statistical impossibility” as one ever gets to see.

In my humble opinion, this should be sufficient proof that insiders hacked the Diebold GEMS central tabulator for the New Hampshire Democratic primary op-scan ballots. As a corollary, in the event that a recount should show the paper ballots in the Diebold machines to match the GEMS count, then the binomial distribution function would assure us that the ballot boxes had been stuffed as well.

Correcting Factual Errors in Salon: "Was the New Hampshire Vote Stolen?"

Jan. 22, 2008
by Bruce O’Dell and Theron Horton, Election Defense Alliance

Problems with Manjoo’s Source Data

In Farhad Manjoo’s article, “Was the New Hampshire vote stolen?” the author acknowledged in the text that he had based his article on an anonymous partisan website, checkthevotes.com, stating

“The most thorough analysis I've seen was performed by an anonymous supporter of Ron Paul.”

The origin of the http://www.checkthevotes.com [40] site was described by its webmaster as follows:

This site was birthed out of a late night whim to try to see if I could make better sense of the numbers I saw coming in from the New Hampshire primaries. It was originally just an exercise in data formatting, but during the night, with the great help of fellow Ron Paul supporters from http://www.RonPaulForums.com [41], I began to add data points to my charts.[1]

However, this “most thorough analysis,” though well intentioned, was initially based on incorrect data and on ad-hoc statistical categories.

In fact, the webmaster, who has consistently acted responsibly to correct all issues with his new site/project, subsequently removed the voting district size categories that Manjoo used as the basis of his January 11 article. According to a checkthevotes.com screenshot from the evening of January 12:

I have changed the size of the town breakdown because it was brought to my attention by another person offering vote stats that for the hand-counting in large towns, there wasn't enough data for it to be statistically significant.”[2]

Nor did Majoo check his source’s primary data. The official tallies were available on the Official New Hampshire Secretary of State Website on the morning of January 10. Yet as-of 9:18 AM CST on Monday, January 14, 2008, a full six days after the New Hampshire Presidential Primary, checkthevote.com still listed the total vote for Clinton as 112,238 and the total vote for Obama as 104,757, while the New Hampshire Secretary of State website’s official vote total for Clinton was 112,610 and the total vote for Obama is 105,007. Also as of that time, checkthevotes.com had not corrected the voting methods for numerous voting districts.

Errors on Size of Hand-count Voting Districts

In paragraph 11 Manjoo, utilizing the checkthevotes.com data, states “in places with more than 1,500 votes, here, Clinton, not Obama, did better in hand-count areas”.

However, there were no hand-counted voting districts that had “more than 1500 votes”. The largest Democratic hand-counted voting district had only 1,172 votes, in Newport in Sullivan County. When we brought this the attention of the author, he indicated that he was referring to “Claremont and Franklin Counties”.

The three voting districts that comprise each of these towns - rather than “counties” - had been consolidated into a single number on the website at the Concord Monitor Online[3]. The consolidation of the voting districts’ vote totals distorted Manjoo’s analysis of the data. But there is a more serious problem with his analysis.

Error on Voting Method in Claremont

If Majoo truly intended to use Claremont as one of the “places with more than 1,500 votes” to make the assertion that, “Clinton, not Obama, did better in hand-count areas” there is a problem. According to the Official New Hampshire Secretary of State Website, Claremont Wards 1, 2 and 3 are actually not hand-count voting districts; they use Accuvote optical scanners. In fact, the Claremont City Clerk’s Office verified by phone that they Accuvote[4]. Again in this case, Manjoo was using checkthevotes.com as his source. Checkthevotes.com has subsequently acknowledged that the Claremont voting method data that they had originally provided was incorrect.

Error on Clinton Performance in Large Hand-count Voting Districts

Additionally, the hand counted paper ballot analysis provided in paragraph 12 states (emphasis from the original document) :

Manjoo: “Let me say that again: In large areas, Clinton did better in places where votes were counted by hand than where votes were counted by machine.”

First, “large areas” is a spurious category; second, there is no apparent factual basis for Manjoo’s statement.

According to the Secretary of State’s original posted data, Clinton won 35.56% of the vote in “the larger hand-count voting districts” (defining those, as voting districts between the maximum size of 1,172 votes and ones half that size, or 550 voters) and Clinton got 41.02% of the vote in the “larger optical scan districts” (defining those as voting districts between the maximum of 5,542 and one half that size, or 2,771 votes). Even if you simply look at the 32 largest hand count v. the 32 largest optical scan voting districts, Clinton’s margin was 35.56% for the 32 largest hand count districts, and 40.85% for the 32 largest optical scan districts.

Finally, paragraph 13 identifies Amherst as a “county”; it is a voting district.

Errors Should Be Corrected

These factual errors should be corrected, and the thesis of the article should be re-examined.

Why Is It that People Vote Differently on Optical Scan?

We wish that it was possible to dismiss concerns about the outcome in New Hampshire simply by saying optical scan tallies vary from hand-count results because people who use optical scan equipment are clustered in communities that tend to vote differently. If you accept the basic integrity of the current voting system, that’s a reasonable and comforting position; but assuming the integrity of the vote as a premise of your argument against those impeaching the integrity of the vote is circular reasoning. It is also possible that optical-scan voting districts have different voting patterns than hand-counted paper districts simply because that’s how the equipment says they tend to vote.

There is no certain way to resolve which alternative is correct as long as votes are counted in secret by machine.

Where Do We Go from Here?

That’s why we do agree with Manjoo, when he says that that “…as many voting-reform experts have argued, manually counting the votes should be a routine in any race… we should, at least, conduct a randomized, accountant-approved audit of ballots” - but we would add, only if ballots can one day be handled with the same care – and controls - we apply to cash. You’ll not likely soon see boxes of cash at the corner bank stored in a cardboard boxes secured with stick-on paper seals, and grudgingly brought in to be double-checked weeks after their deposit - only if and when someone else offers to pay for it.

We wish we could share Mebane and Manjoo’s confidence that the host of well-documented computer system and voting procedural vulnerabilities are not being actively exploited, and specifically, their stated faith in the official outcome of the Ohio Presidential election and recount there in 2004. The jailed election officials who gamed the Cuyahoga County recount and their counterparts in the fifty seven Ohio counties that lost or destroyed their 2004 ballot records, despite court orders to preserve them, hardly require “conspiracy theorists” to call attention to their actions.

No one calls an IT auditor at a bank an “embezzlement theorist” when he or she states that security vulnerabilities discovered in accounting procedures or in the bank’s software might actually have been exploited.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] See: http://www.checkthevotes.com/faq [42] (note correction: changed from .../home on 01/23)

[2] See: screenshot of the checkthevotes.com website 1/12/07 10:06 PM CST

[3] http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/elections/2008/by_county/NH_Dem_0108.... [43]

[4] Claremont County Clerk’s contact information: VOICE 603.542.7003 • FAX 603.542.7014

Machine vs Paper Count Differential in NH Democratic Primary

Original source:  http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS
[44]

2008 New Hampshire State Primary Results

A Closer Look At The Count

UPDATE: WOW!!! Almost 65,000 views from over 33,000 unique visitors in the last 24 hours!!! Keep it up! (01/09/08 11:40PM MST)

With all the activity and stories today, the thousands and thousands of views to this page in the last 12 hours, I wanted to emphasize a few
key points.

First, all of the numbers here are either untouched from the latest polling results or pretty simple calculations using those results.

Second, these results by themselves are NOT enough to prove that any fraud occured. They simply show that some things stand out as being odd
and worthy of further investigation.

Third, my purpose in all of this is to simply bring attention to these apparent anomalies. The anomalies appear in the votes for both parties.
My only agenda is that the voters on both sides be accurately represented.

Last, please be civil and courteous with those whom you discuss these issues. Do not attack, slander, or otherwise disparage anyone until
there has been verified fraud if that happens to be the case. And even in that case, take the high road. Again, all we should be trying to do
is make sure that every vote is accurately reflected and counted.

TOTAL VOTES FOR DEMOCRATS: 287,580

Switch To Republican Results [45] OR Switch To Democrat Results [44]

Vote data sourced from: www.politico.com

Who's Here? [46]

Table Comparing Machine vs Hand Counts

Candidate	Total Votes	Avg. Overall	Votesby Machine	Avg. Overallby Machine	Votesby Hand	Avg. Overallby Hand	Machine VS Hand	Votesby Unknown**	Avg. Overallby Unknown
Clinton	112,166	39.003%	91,600	40.121%	20,529	34.703%	5.419% (15,584 votes*)	37	31.897%
Edwards	48,618	16.906%	38,210	16.736%	10,402	17.584%	-0.847% (-2,437 votes*)	6	5.172%
Gravel	402	0.140%	317	0.139%	85	0.144%	-0.005% (-14 votes*)	0	0.000%
Kucinich	3,893	1.354%	2,801	1.227%	1,090	1.843%	-0.616% (-1,771 votes*)	2	1.724%
Obama	104,639	36.386%	81,633	35.756%	22,944	38.785%	-3.029% (-8,711 votes*)	62	53.448%
Richardson	13,235	4.602%	9,936	4.352%	3,290	5.561%	-1.209% (-3,478 votes*)	9	7.759%
Other	4,627	1.609%	3,810	1.669%	817	1.381%	0.288% (827 votes*)	0	0.000%
TOTALS:	287,580		228,307		59,157			116

*Votes are tentatively won or lost with the assumption that the machines are conferring advantages or disadvantages.

**Unknown towns (where the data doesn't specify counting method) include: Harts Location, Waterville, Wentworth's Location

Table Comparing Machine vs Hand Counted Votes in Small Towns (less than 750 votes)

Candidate	VotesSmall Towns	Avg. OverallSmall Towns	VotesSmall Townsby Machine	Avg. OverallSmall Townsby Machine	VotesSmall Townsby Hand	Avg. OverallSmall Townsby Hand	Machine VS Handin Small Towns
Clinton	14,753	34.132%	2,167	37.369%	12,549	33.635%	3.733%
Edwards	7,609	17.604%	1,077	18.572%	6,526	17.492%	1.080%
Gravel	69	0.160%	10	0.172%	59	0.158%	0.014%
Kucinich	754	1.744%	65	1.121%	687	1.841%	-0.720%
Obama	16,865	39.018%	2,032	35.041%	14,771	39.591%	-4.550%
Richardson	2,489	5.758%	339	5.846%	2,141	5.739%	0.107%
Other	685	1.585%	109	1.880%	576	1.544%	0.336%
TOTALS:	43,224		5,799		37,309

Table Comparing Machine vs Hand Counted Votes in Medium Towns (between 750 and 1,500 votes)

Candidate	VotesMedium Towns	Avg. OverallMedium Towns	VotesMedium Townsby Machine	Avg. OverallMedium Townsby Machine	VotesMedium Townsby Hand	Avg. OverallMedium Townsby Hand	Machine VS Handin Medium Towns
Clinton	23,133	38.600%	17,044	40.233%	6,089	34.662%	5.572%
Edwards	10,805	18.029%	7,706	18.190%	3,099	17.641%	0.549%
Gravel	77	0.128%	55	0.130%	22	0.125%	0.005%
Kucinich	823	1.373%	453	1.069%	370	2.106%	-1.037%
Obama	21,463	35.813%	14,643	34.566%	6,820	38.823%	-4.257%
Richardson	2,847	4.751%	1,853	4.374%	994	5.658%	-1.284%
Other	782	1.305%	609	1.438%	173	0.985%	0.453%
TOTALS:	59,930		42,363		17,567

Table Comparing Machine vs Hand Counted Votes in Large Towns (more than 1,500 votes)

Candidate	VotesLarge Towns	Avg. OverallLarge Towns	VotesLarge Townsby Machine	Avg. OverallLarge Townsby Machine	VotesLarge Townsby Hand	Avg. OverallLarge Townsby Hand	Machine VS Handin Large Towns
Clinton	74,280	40.276%	72,389	40.184%	1,891	44.172%	-3.988%
Edwards	30,204	16.377%	29,427	16.335%	777	18.150%	-1.815%
Gravel	256	0.139%	252	0.140%	4	0.093%	0.046%
Kucinich	2,316	1.256%	2,283	1.267%	33	0.771%	0.496%
Obama	66,311	35.955%	64,958	36.059%	1,353	31.605%	4.454%
Richardson	7,899	4.283%	7,744	4.299%	155	3.621%	0.678%
Other	3,160	1.713%	3,092	1.716%	68	1.588%	0.128%
TOTALS:	184,426		180,145		4,281

Quick Overview of Hand-count/Machine-count Discrepancies

Original source: Notes from Underground blog [47], Mark Crispin Miller

Where Paper Prevailed, Different Results By Lori Price 09 Jan 2008
http://www.legitgov.org/nh_machine_vs_paper.html [48]

2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary Results
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS [44] --Total Democratic

Votes: 286,139 - Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008
Hillary Clinton, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 39.618%
Clinton, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 34.908%

Barack Obama, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 36.309%
Obama, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 38.617%

Machine vs Hand:
Clinton: 4.709%* (13,475 votes)
Obama: *-2.308%* (-6,604 votes)

=======================

2008 New Hampshire Republican Primary Results
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=REPUBLICANS [45] --Total

Republican Votes: 236,378 Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008

Mitt Romney, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 33.075%
Romney, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 25.483%

Ron Paul, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 7.109%
Paul, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 9.221%

Machine vs Hand:
Romney: 7.592% (17,946 votes)
Paul: -2.112% (-4,991 votes)
------------------------
NH: "First in the nation" (with corporate controlled secret vote counting)
By Nancy Tobi 07 Jan 2008

http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/5307 [49]

81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as "Premier").

The elections run on these machines are programmed by one company, LHS Associates, based in Methuen, MA.

We know nothing about the people programming these machines, and we know even less about LHS Associates.

We know even less about the secret vote counting software used to tabulate 81% of our ballots.

See also CLG

http://www.legitgov.org/coup_2004.html [50]

http://www.legitgov.org/index_hot_April5.html [51]

Recount Appeal Filed in New Hampshire Primary

GOP Candidate Albert Howard Files Recount Appeal with NH Ballot Law Commission

Petition of Appeal, noted violations, and weaknesses in NH recount cited below

Petition of Appeal to the Ballot Law Commission
c/o Office of the Secretary of State, William Gardner
State House
Concord, New Hampshire 03301

by Albert Howard, Republican candidate for President of the United States
New Hampshire Primary Election of January 8th, 2008
Date: February 15, 2008
Petitioner: Albert Howard, Pro Se 710 Apple St. Ann Arbor, MI 48105-1750

Subject of Petition: Appeal of results of the Presidential Primary recount completed February 11, 2008; examination of contested ballots in that recount.

Relief Requested: That the Ballot Law Commission and the Secretary of State’s office disclaim any opinion on the accuracy of the Presidential primary election AND the statewide Republican recount because checks and balances to maintain the integrity of the ballots and the total counts were either not followed, or not in place.

Introduction:

New Hampshire has the distinct honor of having the first Presidential primary in the country and has always been viewed as a model state because of its election system and methodology of holding elections in an open, transparent fashion. I, for one, thank you for keeping the tradition of being one of the few states in the country that still has a paper ballot for every person who votes. Your standards for transparency and support of the democratic process are admirable and much appreciated.

I ask that you view the following petition as an opportunity to improve your procedures and policies. The scrutiny of election observers has brought with it a chance to correct areas of vulnerabilities and potential breakdowns and holes in the system. As a candidate I am requesting you work with me and together we can open up meaningful dialogue to bring better procedures and amend areas that need attention based on my experience and in consultation with many experienced and dedicated election integrity advocates.

If this Commission chooses to follow through and act on my questions, requests and recommendations, I am certain it will make New Hampshire’s electoral system even stronger and an even better leader for other states to follow.

This Petition is not about me. This Petition represents the requests of the people this Ballot Law Commission represents. Every person who voted in this Primary election wants to know that their vote was accepted and counted as cast. They want to have no doubt about the integrity of New Hampshire’s election process.

I am asking for the opportunity to work with you, to initiate an open, meaningful dialogue regarding how we can bring further reform to an already good system. My goal is to walk away from this process with both sides feeling that meaningful agreement was reached for all parties. and that together we have identified and addressed the few weak spots.

New Hampshire has a long and proud election tradition. Transparency is a key component of this tradition and the remedy suggestions included in this Petition are intended to enhance that tradition.

PETITION:

Petitioner contends that the results of the statewide Republican recount are potentially invalid due to violation of various state election laws, procedures of the Ballot Law Commission, and written procedures governing the handling and securing of the ballots. Furthermore, discrepancies shown between the results of those ballots counted by hand versus those counted by Diebold optical scan counters (see Appendix 1), together with violations of HAVA requirements, indicate a high risk and opportunity for manipulation of ballots and vote totals, thereby invalidating the results of both the Primary election and the recount.

Examples of violations of statutes or procedures follows. The sequence, in accordance with that outlined in the statutes of the Ballot Law Commission, will be the violation, the remedy requested, and the citation of the appropriate statutes or regulations. Exhibits illustrating most of the violations will follow.

VIOLATION #1: Machine failures were handled improperly -- and possibly altered the outcome of the election.

Fact: Election Day problems with the Diebold Optical Scan machines clearly demonstrated that many of the machines malfunctioned during the Primary election. Do we have any way of knowing that the new memory cards had been examined and approved by the Ballot Law Commission (BLC) as required? Did local election officials allow illegal substitution of election devices that had not been examined and certified? Shouldn’t these machines have been declared unfit for service as dictated by state law?

Town clerks have told Dori Smith, a journalist from Connecticut, that memory cards were “switched out” in some towns by LHS employees, counter to state election laws, calling into question the chain of custody of these critical “electronic ballot boxes”.

Secretary of States MANUAL P. 34-35: The seal for the memory card should be replaced for each election when the newly programmed card is re-inserted into the machine for the pre-election testing of the card. The card should remain sealed until after the recount period ends following the election. The seal for the cover of the machine should only be broken by LHS when it services the machine. The cover must be resealed by the clerk when the LHS technician has completed any service work. Each time any of the two seals are broken and the machine is resealed it should be documented in the log.

Exhibit A documents the reports by LHS of (at least some of) the day’s problems. A few examples are included below from reports received by LHS and forwarded to the Secretary of State’s office.

Town of Manchester, two examples:

“solution listed (What happened here? This was the 3rd machine to be replaced that day in this location.)

Problem: P/U 3rd bad machine per John S.”

“Problem: Machine taking ballots but counter not incrementing

Solution: Swap to spare machine to reburn a new card.”

(What happened to the votes on the first machine and first memory card?

Does “reburn a new card” mean the memory card could have been illegally reprogrammed?)

Town of Barnstead:

“Problem: Ballots rejecting a lot, even during test. They did not call (?)

Solution: Told them I would have someone bring a new machine. They said no – It was working”

(What really happened here? Improper testing or a machine failing a test should have disqualified the machine from usage in an election. State statute VI. cites as a misdemeanor violation a person knowingly violating testing procedures and/or ignoring a machine failing testing.)

REMEDIAL ACTION REQUESTED: Some states have approved their equipment conditionally, so that investigations such as this would be paid by the vendor, in this case Diebold. As well, the New Hampshire statutes could be tightened so that, just as LHS must bear the cost of an invalid recount due to an employee’s failure to properly program and test LHS’ machines (RSA 656:42: V), LHS could as well be obliged to reimburse all costs related to investigation of their procedures. In the case of this Violation, it would mean that they would bear responsibility for investigating the accountability for every memory card

Their records and their doors must also be open to you for all testing, all maintenance, programming, bookkeeping, etc. The State, perhaps the Office of the Secretary of State or the BLC with the addition of a few citizen election activists should be welcome at all times to review/witness their work, their procedures, their books, etc.

An inquiry should be undertaken immediately for accountability of each memory card used in the Primary election, as well as the whereabouts and the sequence of events surrounding all memory cards used, including all delivered cards, all cards found to be problematic on Election Day, any substitute cards, “reburned” cards, and any unused cards delivered to the jurisdictions. Results of inquiry to be delivered to Petitioner.

I, as Petitioner, pursuant to RSA 656:42, request the opportunity to inspect the offices of LHS along with at least two computer technical experts of my choosing. (RSA 656:42, Section IV: Each person described in paragraph III shall designate, in writing, an agent for service of all process, including, but not limited to summonses, writs, orders, petitions, and subpoenas, and shall agree in writing that the Attorney General, in conjunction with any election investigation, may inspect its records, machines or other devices, and premises.)

I also request a full report of every visit by an LHS-related technician to a jurisdiction on January 8th, 2008 and ask that this report be compiled and examined as part of this inquiry. In the meantime, we are requesting that the Secretary of State consider sending out an order that all voting machines used in the State be impounded and vote totals NOT BE CLEARED until this formal inquiry is completed. I further request that no ballots or other election materials be destroyed prior to the 22 month waiting period as mandated by federal law. Several of the boxes of ballots received at the State Archive Building for the recount were marked: “Destroy November 2009” and these must be corrected to “2010.” See Exhibit A.

CITATIONS:

656:41 Approval by Ballot Law Commission. The Ballot Law Commission shall act as a board to examine voting machines and devices for computerized casting and counting of ballots. … Any voting machine or device that is altered must be re-approved before it is used in any election in this state. For the purposes of this section, a machine shall be considered altered if any mechanical or electronic part, hardware, software, or programming has been altered.

RSA 656:42 III. Any company, partnership, proprietorship, or other person, wherever located, which supplies, maintains, or programs voting machines which are used in elections in New Hampshire is subject to regulation by this state. (The following amendment to RSA 659:42 will take effect January 1, 2007)

RSA 659:42 Tampering with Voting Machines. Whoever shall tamper with or injure or attempt to injure any voting machine or device for the computerized casting and counting of ballots to be used or being used in an election or whoever shall prevent or attempt to prevent the correct operation of such machine or device or whoever shall tamper with software used in the casting or counting of ballots or design such software so as to cause incorrect tabulation of the ballots or any unauthorized person who shall make or have in his or her possession a key to a voting machine to be used or being used in an election shall be guilty of a class B felony if a natural person or guilty of a felony if any other person.

Secretary of State Manual page 34 - 35: The seal for the memory card should be replaced for each election when the newly programmed card is re-inserted into the machine for the pre-election testing of the card. The card should remain sealed until after the recount period ends following the election. The seal for the cover of the machine should only be broken by LHS when it services the machine. The cover must be resealed by the clerk when the LHS technician has completed any service work. Each time any of the two seals are broken and the machine is resealed it should be documented in the appropriate log.

Bal 604.02 Zeroing and Sealing Machines. (b) When a voting machine or device has been prepared for election, it shall be locked against voting and sealed and the keys shall be retained by the designated election officials. After the voting machine has been transferred to the polling place, it shall be the duty of the designated election official to provide protection against molestation, tampering or injury to the machines or devices.

Bal 606.04 Damaged Machines. In the event that any voting machine or device used i n any voting district during the time the polls are open, become damaged or disabled so as to render it inoperative in whole or in part, the election officials shall forthwith if possible, substitute a perfect machine for the damaged one. At the close of the polls, the votes shown on the counters of each machine shall be added together in ascertaining the results of the election. In the event that no other machine can be prepared forthwith for use at such election and the damaged one cannot be repaired in time, the provisions of RSA 658:35 shall apply.

VIOLATION # 2: Machine failures render equipment non-compliant with HAVA regulations.

Fact: HAVA requires that the error rate of machines used be no greater than one error in 500,000 ballot positions. In one of the most recent tests, at the University of Connecticut, the Diebold Precinct-Based Optical Scan Accuvote 1.94W system (AV OS), demonstrated a failure rate of roughly 3.4 %. This puts New Hampshire in an unfortunate situation and the integrity of its election results in question. I urge the Ballot Law Commission and the Secretary of State’s office to seriously consider restoring elections utilizing 100% hand counted paper ballots. The fundamentals are in place for a meaningful and transparent election. The Diebold Optical Scan equipment you currently use is indeed problematic due to its proven vulnerabilities and inaccuracies. Diebold itself issued a Product Advisory Note about this machine on January 25, 2008 describing a known failure. http://www.votersunite.org/info/DieboldAdvisory25January2008.pdf [52]

See Exhibit B for articles describing the serious vulnerabilities and high error rate for the Diebold Optical Scanner.

REMEDIAL ACTION REQUESTED: The very best thing New Hampshire could do is decertify the current equipment and find alterative means of vote counting. I strongly recommend hand counting all of the ballots. New Hampshire has established such an excellent system for community vote-counting, and the hand count method - especially the sort and stack method as was used for the recounts --that has time and time again proven to be the most accurate and by far the least costly method of counting citizens’ votes.

CITATIONS:

HAVA 301(a)(5) references the rate in the VSS - FEC Voting System Standards: Error rates: The error rate of the voting system in counting ballots (determined by taking into account only those errors which are attributable to the voting system and not attributable to an act of the voter) shall comply with the error rate standards established under section 3.2.1 of the voting systems standards issued by the Federal Election Commission which are in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act. (HAVA is referencing the 2002 VVS.)

Section 3.2.1 of the 2002 VVS: Accuracy Requirements: Voting system accuracy addresses the accuracy of data for each of the individual ballot positions that could be selected by a voter, including the positions that are not selected. For a voting system, accuracy is defined as the ability of the system to capture, record, store, consolidate and report the specific selections and absence of selections, made by the voter for each ballot position without error. Required accuracy is defined in terms of an error rate that for testing purposes represents the maximum number of errors allowed while processing a specified volume of data. This rate is set at a sufficiently stringent level such that the likelihood of voting system errors affecting the outcome of an election is exceptionally remote even in the closest of elections. The error rate is defined using a convention that recognizes differences in how vote data is processed by different types of voting systems. Paper-based and DRE systems have different processing steps. Some differences also exist between precinct count and central count systems. Therefore, the acceptable error rate applies separately and distinctly to each of the following functions: a. For all paper-based systems: 1) Scanning ballot positions on paper ballots to detect selections for individual candidates and contests; (partial omission here) For each processing function indicated above, the system shall achieve a target error rate of no more than one in 10,000,000 ballot positions, with a maximum acceptable error rate in the test process of one in 500,000 ballot positions.

VIOLATION #3: The location of the memory cards post-election were reported “unknown.”

Fact: According to election observers who spoke with Secretary Gardner during the recount, the location of memory cards used in the Primary Election on January 8th, 2008 was unknown. In conversations with observers he referenced the likelihood that town clerks/moderators had secured the cards but he was unaware of their exact location. Each memory card equates to an entire electronic ballot box. Ballots (which should include paper or electronic ballots) according to federal law must be preserved for 22 months following an election.

REMEDIAL ACTION: Since the memory cards are key to transparency, I request the State amend current procedures/statutes by creating a rigorous set of statutes regarding chain of custody for the memory cards, ballots and equipment as well as the memory card holders and workers, and further define how citizens can, in a timely manner, monitor the chain of custody and the content of said cards. I ask you to consider appropriate disciplinary actions, including felony or other charges to be filed against all persons whose responsibility it is to follow the laws pertaining to ballot retention but who failed to do so. One central location, through the Secretary of State, should be made responsible to account for all memory cards before, during, and after an election, and make those records available to the public in a timely manner if requested.

CITATIONS: I believe this is an implicit responsibility. The security of the ballots is tantamount and it is understood that they should be safeguarded at all times. The memory cards, as has been stated elsewhere, are equivalent to a ballot box filled with ballots.

VIOLATION #4: The boxes of ballots were not picked up for the recounts by State Police.

Fact. A van driven by two state employees, followed by a state trooper, drove around to pick up boxes of ballots at the various jurisdictions throughout the state. Their transport in a van driven by two state employees is not the same as the ballots being in the custody of the State Police. Election observers following the vans observed them speeding at 85 and 90 mph in 55 mph zones; speeding through school zones with school zone lights flashing; going 45 and 50 mph in 25 and 35mph residential areas, and making obvious and successful attempts to “lose” the citizen observers. The observers were left to wonder what was being done with the unsecured ballots inside the van and during the times after the van successfully “lost” their vehicles.

See Exhibit C.

REMEDIAL ACTION: I request that in the future that state police do transport the boxes. If one additional state employee rides with the trooper to carry the boxes, the statute should direct him to be in sight of said trooper at all times, including when the vehicle is in motion. When the vehicle is traveling all troopers and/or trooper and other state employees must be in passenger seats, separated from the boxes of ballots. This will prevent any appearance of possible ballot tampering while the ballots are being transported.

CITATIONS:
660:5 - Conduct of Recount. If directed by the secretary of state, the state police shall collect all ballots requested from the town or city clerks having custody of them and shall deliver them to the public facility designated by the secretary of state.

VIOLATION #5: Ballots were not stored and transported in boxes provided by the Secretary of State’s office.

Fact: Boxes arrived at the State Archive Building for the recount in non-uniform boxes, with various methods of taping, many not properly sealed. One jurisdiction sent their ballots in bundles wrapped in newspaper. Others came wrapped in brown paper. Some boxes came with no tape. Many ballots were returned in the same boxes in which they were received from the printer/Secretary of State’s office, but this led to some ambiguity about when and by whom openings in the boxes had been made.

See Exhibit D.

REMEDIAL ACTIONS REQUESTED: In the future, the boxes for transport of the ballots from the municipalities following an election, will in fact be different from the ones in which the ballots were delivered to the jurisdictions, to prevent any ambiguity about former openings in the boxes. The boxes should have no ‘clutter’ on them; and the boxes should be new, never used prior and be devoid of any writing other than instructions found in State Statutes (The New Hampshire government may take as many measures as possible to be frugal and mindful of expenditure of taxpayer money, but the additional boxes in this case would be a very small expenditure in the broad scheme of things and would go a long way to allay/prevent any suspicions, as well as to ensure security.) I am also requesting that the seals used on the boxes be of a more permanent nature where any unauthorized entry can be easily detected. In all future elections, I am requesting that the Office of the Secretary of State f ollow the statutes and procedures more closely regarding the conduct of elections. I also ask that greater scrutiny be paid by the Attorney General to all election and election recount operations. I would request that disciplinary consequences be mandated and enforced by the Secretary of State’s office for any future violations of any current regulations, of any remedial measures requested in this Petition of Appeal, or other future regulations.

CITATIONS:
659:95 Sealing and Certifying Ballots. I. Immediately after the ballots cast at a state election have been tabulated and the result has been announced and the return has been made, the moderator or the moderator's designee, in the presence of the selectmen or their designee, shall place the cast, cancelled and uncase ballots, including such ballots from any additional polling places, and further including the successfully challenged absentee ballots still contained in their envelopes, in the containers provided by the secretary of state as required by RSA 659:97 and shall seal such container with the sealer provided by the secretary of state as required by RSA 659:97. The moderator or the moderator's designee shall then enter in the appropriate blanks on such sealer on each container the number of cast, cancelled and uncast ballots in such container and shall endorse in the appropriate place on such sealer a certificate in substance as follows: Enclosed are the ballots from the state election in the town of (or in ward____ in the city of ) held on ________, 200__ required by law to be preserved. The moderator and the selectmen or their designees shall sign their names in the appropriate blanks on the sealer.

659:97 Secretary of State to Prepare Containers, Sealers. The secretary of state shall, before any state election, prepare and distribute to each town and ward clerk containers to be used for preserving ballots and sealers to seal each such container. He shall prepare special containers and sealers to be used for preserving any special and separate ballots for questions to voters and shall prescribe the form of any endorsement blank printed upon the sealers provided that the blank is in substance consistent with the provisions of RSA 659:95.

VIOLATION #6: Many ballot boxes were not properly sealed, and what were referred to as “seals” would not safeguard the ballots from tampering.

Fact: “Seals” meant to secure the boxes were in fact “labels”; they did not stick securely to the boxes, could be easily removed and re-attached, and left no evidence of having been removed and reattached from the box on which they’d been placed. As such they were not “seals” to the boxes; in order for the ballots to be secure, real tape was needed to bind the boxes. Many ballot boxes were delivered to the State Archive Building for recounting with tops not secured and with slits in them large enough for a hand to fit through.

See Exhibit E.

REMEDIAL ACTION REQUESTED:
In all future elections, the Office of the Secretary of State would clearly regulate for the cities and towns the appropriate means of securing all boxes of ballots. The seals ordered in the future must indeed be seals that seal the boxes in an unequivocally secure manner; if such seals are removed from any box prior to the time of any recount, it must be easily apparent to all observers. In any future recounts where boxes are found not to comply, the entire election would be deemed invalid.

CITATIONS:
659:95 Sealing and Certifying Ballots, cited above 659:97 Secretary of State to Prepare Containers, Sealers. The secretary of state shall, before any state election, prepare and distribute to each town and ward clerk containers to be used for preserving ballots and sealers to seal each such container. He shall prepare special containers and sealers to be used for preserving any special and separate ballots for questions to voters. The secretary of state shall prescribe the size and form of such containers and sealers and shall prescribe the form of any endorsement blank printed upon the sealers provided that the blank is in substance consistent with the provisions of RSA 659:95.

VIOLATION #7: The uncounted ballots were not always kept overnight in the security of the “ballot vault.”

Fact. At least on the night of the recount January 17 (and possibly other nights as well) boxes of uncounted ballots were not stored in the “vault” in the State Archive Building, but rather in the “counting room”, which is not a secure room. Election observers heard Secretary Gardner claiming that the room was secure because he put one of the easily-removable and easily-restick-able “seals” (see #6 above) across each of the double door entries to the room. See Exhibit F.

REMEDIAL ACTION REQUESTED:
New Hampshire could indeed lead the nation as an example of chain of custody security. Much is already in place. I ask you to consider adding some statutes that cover every aspect of the “chain of custody” of the ballots, such that every stage of the “chain of custody” is explicitly spelled out by future statute. These statutes would in turn be distributed to every office employee of the Secretary of State, to every city and town clerk and selectperson, to the state police, and to every other person involved in said chain of custody. Such future regulations must be complied with to the fullest degree. We recommend that you consider adding penalties and charges for any violations to every chain of custody statute. I feel it is important and critical to any democratic election that every step of the chain of custody of ballots, software, hardware and voting equipment be open to citizen scrutiny and observation. I am hopeful that you would also consider requiring all election officials to keep a log of every time any employee or outside companies such as LHS work on and/or make any changes to any aspect of the system. Ideally, cameras should be set up to be on the ballot boxes at all times and broadcast election day events live over the internet for citizens to oversee. (This could be extended to include the counting procedures as well.) Such a system -- and New Hampshire has much of it already in place -- would exemplify a secure chain of custody of ballots and of all related election materials that must be protected. The security of the ballots is tantamount and it is understood that they should be safeguarded at all times.

VIOLATION #8: Ballots were not always delivered in an open and public manner.

Fact: On many days of the recount, ballots were delivered after the recount had ended for the day, after dark, when most of the employees were gone from the building, and their delivery was not witnessed by any member of the public or citizen monitors.

See Exhibit G.

REMEDIAL ACTION REQUESTED: Same as # 7 above.

CITATIONS. Same as # 7 above.

WEAKNESSES IDENTIFIED:
In the process of analyzing the recount and election procedures, I have identified the following two items as “ weaknesses” in current procedure:

1. The candidate in a recount cannot get access to all the different categories of ballots: Cast,. Spoiled, Blank, Uncast.It's critical for the integrity of the process that the candidate be able to account for the total number of all ballots in each category

Remedy: Either we have to adjust the recount procedure so that the uncast ballots are NOT excempt from Right to Know requests, OR have the Right to Know requests for all of these categories of ballots honored immediately upon submission of request.

2. There are inconsistencies in the execution of some election and recount protocols.

Remedy: We would like to be able to examine the actions and responsibilities of each Assistant and Deputy Secretary of State in order to determine which party is responsible for each step of the election and recount process.

To reiterate: Petitioner is proud to be an American when witnessing the organized, orderly, open and communal vote-counting process as executed in New Hampshire. Unfortunately, I also observed some gaps in ballot security and understand the vulnerabilities of the machines used in vote tabulation. I submit this petition with the desire and the belief that with a little attention and a few statutes addressing such things as ballot security and chain of custody, we can close those gaps. New Hampshire will be first in the nation to hold its Presidential Primary and it will be first in the nation in this century to have elections with observability, accountability, checks and balances, and real transparency.

The Ballot Law Commission’s rules places the burden of proof on the Petitioner for any and all complaints and allegations. Yet, it is impossible to completely fulfill the “burden of proof” obligation when the State refuses to provide me in a timely fashion with requested election data through the “Right to Know” law, and without giving me sufficient time to review the requested data prior to filing this petition within the three day period as required by law.

I am therefore requesting that the Secretary of State provide me with copies of all the data I have requested (on January 14, 2008 and February 1, 2008) from him and from LHS through the New Hampshire “Right to Know”; that I be given 14 days to review this data once received; and that I be allowed to re-file this petition if I so desire and to add additional violations and/or Exhibits if applicable.

As required by RSA 665:6, I am filing these Complaints today, February 15, 2008.

Signed and attested to by Albert Howard

Register for the "I COUNT" Corps to Hand Count Paper Ballots

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andi_nov_080110_sign_up_to_take_... [53]

January 10, 2008

Sign Up to Take Back Our Elections – Register for the "I COUNT" Corps

By Andi Novick and Sally Castleman

At best there is “uncertainty” about the reported outcomes of the NH primary. Undoubtedly many other articles in this issue of OpEd News will be discussing them.

What we do know is that once again some doubt is being cast on the viability of machine counting of our votes. We believe it is time for us, the citizens of our nation, to take the actions that our ‘leaders’ have been refusing to take.

We are entitled to honest, transparent elections with appropriate checks and balances that the oblique processes of a computer prevent.

It is time for us to build our own corps of citizen counters. WE will count the ballots on election night. We propose that we, the people, sign up to count ballots on election night after the polls close. Much like jury duty, only one needs to commit for only 4 hours.

Our proposal is to hand count the federal races, which is never more than 3 races – President, Senator (some years), Representative. Calculation shows that only 1 in 4 citizens will ever be needed just once in their lifetime for a 4-hour stint to fulfill this highest order civic duty. Some, of course, may choose to do it more often.

Every team of counters would have a representative of at least two different parties. Citizens would be vetted, just as they are before being chosen to sit on a jury.

We urge anyone interested in learning more or anyone ready to sign up for the “I COUNT” corps, to sign up at [email protected] [54]. We will send you more details.

Andi Novick & Sally Castleman
Election Defense Alliance
______________________

Had Enough of "Faith-Based" Elections Entrusted to a Corporate Machine?

Tell Congress and the Media You Want Paper Ballots Counted By Hand in The Precincts

Click Here [55] for a quick, one-click way to write
your U.S. Senators, your Representative, and your regional newspaper all at once.

We provide a sample letter you can adapt to make your own. Copy, paste, alter, and add what you want to say.

Click here to Act [55]

When you're done, click to see the messages other citizens are sending too.

2008 Texas Primary

Tall tales coming out of Texas, and some citizens riding to the rescue.

Big Julie's Blank Dice and the Texas Two-Step

Big Julie’s Blank Dice and the Texas Two-Step:
Thoughts on March 4th and Computerized Elections

by Jonathan Simon, Election Defense Alliance

Last week, as I was watching what could be watched of the crucial March 4th Democratic primary elections and downloading for analysis such data as was made publicly available, a hilarious scene kept coming unbidden to mind. The scene is from Guys and Dolls and it takes place somewhere in the sewer system of New York, where Nathan Detroit’s floating crap game has found a temporary and rather sarcastically colorful and well-lit home.

Big Julie, a scar-faced high-roller in from Chicago to “shoot crap,” is down on his luck and out about 10 Gs. Nathan (Frank Sinatra) says it’s time to go home, but Big Julie is not the kind of mug to go gentle into that good night without his 10 Gs, plus interest. So he challenges Nathan to roll him personally for the dough and Nathan (putting up cash to Big Julie’s “marker” and, to narrow down his choices somewhat, at gunpoint) accepts.

Big Julie, to change his luck, is going to use his own dice. The trouble (for Nathan at least) is that the dice don’t have any spots; they’ve worn off. But, not to worry, Big Julie remembers where they were.

The results (“Hah! Seven! I win . . . . Hah! Snake Eyes! You lose”) are, shall we say, predictable—though Nathan does manage to win when Big Julie rolls him for $1—and Nathan kisses off his last few grand with a resignation worthy of Gore, Kerry, a host of other candidates who would not appear on Karl Rove’s A-list, and the Democratic Party as a whole.

The scene is hilarious, but Tuesday night was not. Nor was New Hampshire, nor 2006, nor 2004, nor 2002, nor any election in America since the vote counting went wholesale into the darkness of proprietary cyberspace and the spots were rubbed off the dice, leaving the equipment vendors, with their avowed partisan proclivities and their secret computer code and memory cards, to tell us who won (“Hah! Seven!”) and who lost (“Hah! Snake Eyes!”).

Before proceeding to analyze yet another evening of bizarre numerical happenings, I want to suggest that we look at some of the occurrences in our New Millennium elections as if they hailed not from our own beloved Beacon of Democracy but from Vladimir Putin’s Russia—from a place, that is, where we have learned to discount the official story as the typical cover job of a pretend democracy. We will find—as we might in Russia, or Kenya, or Ukraine—a parade of numbers and patterns that don’t add up, don’t fit the official story. And all we have to assure us that our democracy and our nation are not being subverted are code and memory cards we are never permitted to see, providing us with very shiny and precise-looking vote totals that may or may not have any correspondence to the votes actually cast—in other words, a pair of Big Julie’s blank dice.

The Democratic primaries held Tuesday shared with the New Hampshire primary the distinction of being do-or-die contests for candidate Clinton. It was effectively conceded by the Clinton campaign that losses back in New Hampshire in January and in Texas or Ohio last week would have spelled curtains for her candidacy. There were four primaries held on March 4th and, leaving aside the delegate-poor and noncompetitive contest in Vermont, there were New Hampshiresque—which is to say somewhere between suspicious and stunning—developments in each of them. Taking them in alphabetical order:

Ohio

The numerical story in Ohio was the old familiar one of exit poll-vote count disparity. Without examining any specific incidents or allegations of foul play, we are confronted with an initial exit poll (EP), posted shortly after poll closing, showing a 3% Clinton margin (51.1% to 47.9%) and a final votecount (VC) showing a 10% Clinton margin (54.3% to 44.0%). This disparity is outside the EP’s margin of error (MOE) even allowing for the “cluster effect.” The VC is, moreover, a significant departure from a compendium of pre-election polls (PEP), showing Obama gaining ground and approaching equality (http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/poll-tracker.htm [68]).

Viewed in isolation, Ohio could be explained as a late Clinton surge that caught the pre-election pollsters on the hop. Primaries are indeed more fluid and volatile as elections go, and there is the crossover voting phenomenon to be considered. But Ohio takes its place among a parade of contests in important states in the 2008 nomination battle in which a substantial EP-VC disparity worked in Clinton’s favor: New Hampshire obviously, but also Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Arkansas, Arizona, California, and now Ohio and, as we will see, Texas and Rhode Island. In contrast, we have observed no battleground states with an EP-VC disparity working in the other direction. As anyone who has spent any time in the countryside of Ohio (or NH, MA, IL, NJ, AR, AZ, CA, TX or RI for that matter) can tell you, when all the cows are facing in one direction, there’s a reason for it (it’s going to rain).

Given the directionality of the disparities, it is also worth noting that we have received no assurance that the first posted EP of the evening has not in fact already been partially adjusted toward conformity with the incoming VC, a process which continues in several steps throughout the evening until virtual full conformity with the final VC is achieved. Edison/Mitofsky, which performs and processes the EPs for the media consortium known as the National Election Pool (NEP), acknowledges that the adjustment process begins with “Quick Counts,” which are available from selected precincts and early voting tabulations immediately upon poll closing. Especially in instances where the first EP posting is delayed by more than a few minutes after poll closing, there exists ample opportunity to begin the process of adjustment, which of course has the effect of minimizing the observable EP-VC disparity.

Rhode Island

There’s not a whole lot to say about Rhode Island other than if exit polls are this far off, why bother exit polling? And if vote counts are this far off, why bother voting?

The EP-VC disparity in RI was 14.1%; that is, the exit poll posted after poll closing had Clinton up 4.1% (51.6% to 47.5%) over Obama, and the official vote count had Clinton up 18.2% (58.8% to 40.6%). This is far outside the most generous calculation of the EP's MOE, and on a par with the similarly perplexing 15.5% disparity favoring Clinton in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday.

Now since EP-VC disparities of suspect, if not outright stunning, magnitude have become commonplace in the era of computerized vote tabulation, it is clear enough that something is not happening according to Hoyle. What that something is has been settled on by the mainstream media and all analysts under contract to such: Since we dare not question the vote counts, the exit polls must be off again. . .and again . . .and again. In fact it is now established that the exit polls are always off (recently joined by the pre-election polls, especially in the wake of New Hampshire 2008) and no longer worthy of our attention, because they just keep on disagreeing with the vote counts—pretty much always in the same direction—and we dare not question the vote counts. . . .

And so the circular argument goes, by now repeated with enough reassuring smiles to take on the polished finish of fact. Except if they really cared to find the truth, the logic of the denialists would puncture, like an overinflated balloon, with one prick of a pin, and all would agree that without first investigating and verifying the vote counts—without, that is, putting the spots back on the dice—no one can conclude that all those polls are “off.”

Texas

The striking phenomenon in Texas was the magnitude not of the EP-VC disparity (it was a relatively modest 4%, in the usual direction, but withheld from the public until more than an hour after poll closing, allowing ample opportunity for extensive adjustment toward conformity with the in-coming vote count) but of the early voting (EV) vs. at-precinct voting (APV) disparity, which was of staggering proportions that at first seemed to defy explanation.

The earliest returns posted on network websites showed a total of approximately 740,000 votes cast in the Democratic primary with 0% of precincts reporting. This then was the early/absentee vote tally, which in most states is pre-counted and available for release immediately upon poll closing. Obama’s margin at that point was 436,034 to 303,276 for Clinton, or 59% to 41%. By the time the counting was done the next morning, Clinton had a 51% to 48% victory, a whopping 21% margin reversal.

What was even more stunning, however, was that Clinton had caught up to Obama before even a quarter of the precincts had reported: with 23% of the precincts reporting (and almost exactly as many APVs as EVs counted), the count stood at Obama 711,759, Clinton 711,183 (49%-49%), a dead heat. To catch up so quickly and produce those numbers, Clinton had to win the APV in that quarter of Texas precincts by 59% to 41%, an exact reversal of the EV Obama landslide. Judging by the county-level results posted, that APV Clinton landslide came predominantly from the rural areas of the state.

So what we saw until that point were essentially equal and opposite landslides, as if we were observing two not only separate but radically divergent electorates, one that chose to vote early and one that chose to go to the polls. Ordinarily explanations for a divergence of such magnitude, particularly in intra-party contests, would be found only in such time-specific phenomena as late-breaking gaffes, scandals, debate blowouts and the like. But there was no such occurrence. The early voting period inTexas extends from 17 days to 4 days prior to the election. During this period the average of 13 pre-election polls was Clinton 45.6%, Obama 46.7%. In the three days before the election, after the early voting period had ended, the average of eight polls was Clinton 46.8%, Obama 46.1%, a very modest change and certainly not the 21% mega-reversal displayed by the EV and APV vote counts.

Since ordinary political dynamics fail to explain the bizarre Texas numbers, we look to the extraordinary. There has been much made in the March 4th post-mortem period of the impact of crossover voting, specifically Republican voters exhorted by Rush Limbaugh and other lesser-known leaders, to hold their noses and vote in the Democratic primary for Clinton.

To digress just a bit from our analysis of the March 4 numbers, the Limbaugh appeal brings into the open the motive and strategy that go a long way to explaining virtually all of the bizarre disparities and anomalies that have beset at least the Democratic side of the 2008 primary season. It has for some time been quite apparent that the goal of Republican strategists, finally exposed in Limbaugh’s rather desperate public exhortation, has been to make sure the Democratic nomination process is as drawn out, bitter, procedural, and ugly as possible, culminating in a brutal battle involving superdelegates and credentialing, one that will turn off (to say the least) the public and leave festering wounds in the party itself.

If the goal had been simply to have Clinton win, that could have been easily achieved through cross-over voting and/or rigging--remember that Obama won something like a dozen contests in a row, most of which could have been pushed far enough in Clinton's favor to give her a decisive delegate edge. This wasn't done. What was done instead was to revive Clinton's campaign (it appears by rigging) when she was on life-support in NH, keep her within striking distance on Super Tuesday, let Obama gain popularity and momentum, then revive Clinton again on March 4, just when the Democrats nationally were getting comfortable with Obama as their candidate (again see http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/poll-tracker.htm [68]).

Now it will get really ugly and whoever emerges as the nominee will have been undermined enough--so the story will go, anyway--to manage to 'lose' to McCain; i.e., either Clinton or Obama will have accumulated plenty of plausible defeatability. And the story of Democratic 'civil war' (as the MSM is already gleefully framing it) and disarray may even be good enough to 'explain' how they failed to capitalize on the enormous structural and dynamic advantages they hold on the Congressional side, setting the stage for currently unimaginable Republican gains in Congress in November.

Perhaps crossover voting accounts for both the magnitude of the Clinton victory in Ohio and the miraculous reversal of Obama’s early voting margin in Texas. Or perhaps it was crossover voting and some computer voting (that is, voting by computers) for good measure. Is there any way to know? It does not take all that much imagination to see Clinton’s successive resuscitations as Karl Rove's specialty of the house, his apotheosis as conscienceless strategist: to go into 'retirement' and apparent seclusion, give scholarly and apparently appealing speeches from above it all on the lecture circuit, and meanwhile find the exact alchemic strategy to turn a pile of rusty Republican political scrap metal into gold. But strategy is one thing and rigging something else entirely. Or is it?

Of course a “fit” is not tantamount to proof. But when you have a multi-year parade of numerical anomalies combined with unexpected outcomes that a brilliant and apparently conscienceless strategist would bring about if he could, must it not at least shake the blind faith that Americans, cued by their opinion leaders, continue to place in the honesty of their black-box electoral system?

Isn’t it time to stop rolling for our nation’s future with blank dice?

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Little Stat Helper: A Guide to Sampling Statistics and Election Assessment

Little Stat Helper

By Jonathan Simon, Election Defense Alliance

The benefit of statistical sampling lies in the surprisingly strong power of a small part to predict the behavior of a large whole. Although we tend to accept the results of polls and other research based on sampling, most people if they really thought about it would find it quite a head-scratcher that you could predict with great accuracy the preferences of a nation of 300 million--whether in candidates, policies, or favorite kind of cheese--by questioning a mere 3000, or .001%, of them. This is nevertheless the case, providing that certain conditions apply and certain procedures are followed.

To get highly reliable results it is important that the sample be done as randomly as possible. If bias or convenience enter into the sampling process all bets are off and statistical process loses its "crispness," the cut-and-dried rule of simple equations. More on that in a moment, but the key stumbling block I have found for acceptance of statistical sampling is the mind's natural and intuitive protest that larger wholes require larger samples. Once we reach a whole of a certain size--i.e., the size we are dealing with in federal elections--though, larger wholes in fact do not require larger samples, however counterintuitive this may seem. Not only has this been established theoretically, it has also been demonstrated in thousands of experiments. It's just the way it is. High-school statistics, chapter 1.

Now, bearing this basic concept in mind, here are the terms that get thrown around, and that must be understood to have a rational discussion of any statistical protocols and proposals:

Margin of error (MOE) of a sample refers to the range in which we expect to find the discrepancy between the count of the sample and the count of the whole from which the sample is drawn. In most research a +/- x% MOE means that 95% of the time, or 19 out of 20 times, we expect the count of the sample to fall within x% of the count of the whole; that is, the "confidence level" for that MOE is 95%, the standard used in most scientific research. 5% of the time a random sample with an x% MOE will count up more than x% off from the whole.

That's just the way it is. You don't get 100% certainty. But what is certain is that if you ran that sample a billion times, the number of times it missed the whole by more than x% would approach 50 million (5%) very closely. That's why computer simulations are so helpful, because you can actually do this and check the results.

A confidence level of 99% (or better), which I've recommended for votecount checking, would tell you to expect a result within the MOE 99 out of 100 times (or better).

The size of the whole numerically has virtually zero impact on the size of the sample needed (once you get above a whole of, say, 50,000; although there is a simple formula, irrelevant here, used for adjusting for such small targets).

As I've said, probably the most difficult and counter-intuitive thing to swallow about sampling is that you don't need to increase your sample size when the size of the target whole jumps from, say, 1,000,000 to 250,000,000; your 30,000 ballots would work about as well as a sample of the whole country as of Rhode Island. Hard to accept but it's true and very elementary statistics.

Given a random sample of a large (numerous) whole, the MOE and Confidence Level as defined above can be calculated quite easily. For a competitive election (60%-40% or closer), the magic formula boils down to: MOE at 95% Confidence = 1/square root of the number of ballots sampled (generally referred to as "N").

So, to plug in a few numbers: If you sample 10,000 ballots, then 1/sqrtN = 1/100 = 1%, and you'd say that your MOE is +/-1%. You would expect the sample results to differ from the total tabulated results by less than 1% in 19 out of 20 such elections. If you looked at, say, 1000 such elections, you'd find that the sample/whole difference was less than 1% in just about 950 of them. The more elections you ran, the more exact that 19 out of 20 would become.
If you sampled only 400 ballots, then 1/sqrtN = 1/20 = 5%, and you'd say the MOE is +/-5%, and you'd expect the sample results to differ from the total tabulated results by less than 5% in 19 out of 20 such elections.
If you sampled 30,000 ballots then 1/sqrtN = 1/173.2 = 0.58%, and you'd say your MOE is +/- 0.58%, and you'd expect the sample results to differ from the total tabulated results by less than 0.58% in 19 out of 20 elections.

Now all those examples presumed a Confidence Level of 95%, the standard for most research. But what that would mean is that if the MOE were used as a trigger for full hand counts or any other relatively drastic check of the results, elections officials would be obliged to proceed to such a step once in every 20 elections or races in the absence of mistabulation, in essence because we set the trigger at an MOE that's only expected to "work" 19 out of 20 times. The Confidence Level that is standard for most research would probably be seen as inadequate for checking on elections.

Fortunately, given a sample size N, a MOE can be easily calculated for any Confidence Level. To find the MOE at a 99% Confidence Level, for example, just take the MOE numbers above and multiply by 1.29: 10,000 ballots would give you a MOE of +/-1.29%; 400 ballots would give you a MOE of +/-6.45%; 30,000 ballots would give you a MOE of +/-0.75%; all at 99% confidence. This would mean that in only one out 100 elections would the difference between sample and whole exceed the MOE in the absence of mistabulation. We believe that one such "false positive" per 100 races would be tolerable to most BOEs (especially since the sample can be run again--that is, resampled--after such a result, rather than proceeding directly to a full hand count).

By the way, the "magic number" of randomly sampled ballots needed for a +/-1% MOE at a 99% Confidence Level is about 16,500, as can be checked on a nice website -- http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html [70] -- very helpful in such calculations.

And, to illustrate an earlier point about the irrelevance of the size of the whole: For a state with 5,000,000 votes, you'd need 16,533 ballots, for a state with 10,000,000 votes, you'd need 16,560, and for a country with 100,000,000 votes, you'd need 16,585. To boost the confidence level to 99.9%, so that you could tell a BOE that they'd have to deal with a "false alarm" only once in 1000 elections, the magic number would be 27,000 ballots.

For a given venue (be it state or Congressional District) of known or predictable size (i.e., number of votes expected to be cast) coming up with sample sizes is child's play, just a question of plugging in a few numbers on a calculating website such as that given above. What's left to tackle is randomness.

There are several factors that can get in the way of randomness in sampling, but in the context of elections they all boil down to convenience or bias. And, given the proper protocol, they all can be avoided. Bias generally crops up when interviews are necessary, as with polling and exit polls. Interviewers may select respondents they "like" rather than say every 7th person to walk through the door; they may frame questions in a leading manner; they may hear what they want to hear in the response and mark it accordingly. Respondents, for their part, may be more likely to participate with an interviewer they like, or may give the interviewer answers the respondent thinks the interviewer wants to hear.

All of these possibilities create higher potential for error and are very difficult to quantify. Convenience can take the form of trying to capture your respondents in "bunches," such as at a few precincts (no exit pollster, for example, has the resources to send interviewers to every precinct, so they pick a few precincts carefully based on their likelihood to reflecting the whole), or at a certain time of day, or from the top of a big stack of ballots. Here too error is increased, in a way that is very difficult to quantify, turning statistics from crisp to soggy, straight science to a science-art hybrid.

A well-designed and administered hand-count sampling of ballots avoids all of these pitfalls, and is indeed "crisp" (and in this way very different from exit polling and targeted audits). Since we're counting ballots rather than interviewing, the bias pitfalls are eliminated. Since we propose counting a fixed proportion of the ballots at every precinct (rather than counting all or some of the ballots at selected precincts, as some have proposed), we avoid the principal convenience pitfall of a "clustered" sample.

All that remains is to insure that the ballots to be sampled at each precinct are, in effect, "shuffled" and a good random sample drawn. This can be achieved by literally shuffling the ballots after they are retrieved from their bin and then selecting ballots from the pile according to a predetermined choosing scale: say, every 15th ballot or every 87th ballot, depending on the overall number needed from the venue. With a modicum of observation and supervision, a random sample can be guaranteed.

Questions will surely arise as to cheating, attempting to rig the handcount sample as well as the machine count. The best answer is in the purpose of the handcount protocol and what cheating would in fact achieve. Since, unlike that of the machine count, the purpose of the handcount is not to get as many votes as possible for your guy, but to match the machine count within the MOE and thereby avoid a full handcount, the incentive for "stuffing" the handcount with extra ballots for your guy wherever possible vanishes.

In fact election officials' goal becomes to do the handcount sample as accurately as possible in order to avoid triggering a full hand count. Even granting that a given official or group of officials knew that the machine count had been rigged to add an extra 5% to "their guy," consider how difficult it would be for them to add the necessary number of handcount ballots to hit that rigged number within the MOE, given that it would have to be done in dozens if not hundreds of precincts in view of both partisan and neutral observers. Effectively impossible.

Now let's turn to a few more concrete numbers. In a Congressional District (CD), a competitive race draws between 200,000 and 250,000 voters. Picking the lower bound, we can achieve a +/-1% MOE at 99% Confidence Level by sampling about 15,000 ballots, or 7.5% of the total cast. Given an average precinct size of 500, that would work out to an average of just about 40 ballots to count at each precinct. Not very labor intensive.

Looking at a medium sized state such as Ohio, with 5,000,000 voters and 11,000 precincts, we'd need about 16,500 ballots, or 0.33% of the total cast. This works out to an average of just 1.5 ballots per precinct. This is so easy that it leads naturally to the idea of a bigger sample, so that the Confidence Level can be improved even further. And indeed it turns out that you can reach a 99.99% Confidence Level (that is, one false alarm in every 10,000 elections!) with a +/-1% MOE by sampling 37,500 ballots or an average of less than four (4) per precinct. Woo hoo!

In the state of California a Confidence Level of 99.99% requires those same 37,500 ballots, which boils down to an average of less than two ballots per precinct. In such a large venue, therefore, we can do even better: we could go to a MOE of +/- 0.5% at 99.99% confidence by taking 150,000 ballots, or about eight ballots per precinct. Such a MOE would sound the alarm on outcome altering mistabulation of any race decided by greater than one half of one percent. Woo hoo times two!

In conclusion, we propose a uniform, omni-precinct, proportional handcount sampling of ballots -- the Universal Ballot Sample [71] method* -- be used as the most reliable check mechanism of machine counts, where full hand counting of paper ballots is not yet an acceptable alternative. Such a protocol obeys "crisp" laws of statistics and is highly reliable, with little or no incentive for gaming or practical way to do so.

It can be implemented where paper ballots are in use, whether with opscan systems or, somewhat more problematically, where DREs are fitted with a paper ballot printer. The labor involved at the precinct level is reasonable and within the capacities of virtually every local BOE. The consultant work to generate the parameters is also minimal.

The uniform, omni-precinct, proportional handcount sampling of ballots is a viable and practical protocol that can be rapidly implemented to serve as a check mechanism on computerized recording and tabulation of votes where full hand counts have not been adopted.

Download link for the UBS paper: http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/files/New_UBS_811Update_061707.pdf [71]

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Managing Electoral Dynamics Via Covert Vote-Count Manipulation

Published by EDA, May 21, 2008. Click to download a PDF copy of this article. [73]

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The Democratic Primaries 2008:

Managing Electoral Dynamics Via Covert Vote-Count Manipulation

By Jonathan Simon and Bruce O’Dell, Election Defense Alliance

Summary Statement

We present evidence supporting the hypothesis that systematic attempts are being made to manipulate the results of the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination contest, through overt means such as crossover voting by non-Democrats, and through covert means targeted at the electronic vote tabulation process itself. The net effect has been to prolong the nomination battle and sharpen its negativity, thereby boosting the prospects of the Republican nominee and making more plausible his “victory” in November—either by an honest count, or through continued exploitation of the proven security vulnerabilities in American voting systems.

Introduction

Perhaps John McCain is, as Humphrey Bogart says of the young Bulgarian who wins the money for his family’s exit visa at the roulette table in Casablanca, “just a lucky guy.”

Lucky that the Democrats find themselves locked into a protracted primary season inexorable in its dynamics and increasingly destructive in its impact. Lucky that Hillary Clinton has been magically revived each time she has found herself on electoral life support, to assume a position just far enough behind Barack Obama to be induced to resort to desperate measures and increasingly-negative ads, yet not so far behind as to be forced to bow out.

Lucky that dynamics ostensibly out of McCain's control have combined to give him such material assistance. Perhaps.

But there is compelling evidence that something other than luck is at work. With 82% of Americans polled convinced the nation is on the wrong track, self-destruction by the Democratic party is the only remaining credible means by which, come 2008, the GOP could sustain the perpetual rule envisioned by Karl Rove. (Rove, of course, has hardly retired and is now working from home, beyond the reach of the mandatory email backup system installed at the White House just before he left to “spend time with his family.”)

The goal of Democratic party self-destruction in 2008 could most reliably be brought to pass by one progression of events, one choreography: if a candidate, Hilary Clinton, known for her sense of entitlement, lifelong ambition, tenacity—and willingness to go negative—could be placed and kept in a desperate but not quite hopeless position, the result would follow, quite predictably.

What the mainstream media have now set up and trumpeted as an epic “blood feud” in the Democratic Party, whether or not it actually undermines the party’s prospects in November, will certainly pre-establish a plausible “explanation” for the defeat of whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be.

The same is true for US Senate and House races, where Democrats are heavily favored to expand their majorities, given the large number of open seats this November that were formerly held by Republican incumbents and a string of recent special election victories. But Democratic congressional candidates in both houses are arguably now facing the prospect of negative coattails.

By setting the stage for post-election “spin” for the Presidential and congressional races in November, any outcome-determinative electoral manipulations would become much less “shocking,” and that much less likely to trigger investigation and ultimate detection. This jaundiced overview of the Democratic primary season¹ is unfortunately supported by a body of evidence that goes well beyond the odd anomaly or two.

When we examine—as the media has steadfastly refused to do—the numbers and disparities discovered in a parade of key states that determined the path the Democratic contest has taken to date, we find a telling pattern. This pattern is consistent with a tactical manipulation of the primary election vote counts in the service of the strategic choreography alluded to above: Keeping Clinton in the race and desperate. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ¹ There were significant oddities on the Republican side as well, beyond the scope of our analysis here. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There are sound reasons why the Clinton campaign itself is not among the suspects: If Clinton’s campaign or supporters had the capacity and the will to alter election outcomes, it is reasonable to conclude that she would have won, or at least be ahead in, the race; and the ownership and operation of electronic voting equipment remains almost exclusively in the secretive hands of vendors (Diebold/Premier, ES&S, Hart, and Sequoia) with avowedly right-wing Republican political sympathies.

Our examination includes the Democratic primaries in the following key states: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, each of which had surprising and unexpected results. In each of these critical elections there was a significant pro-Clinton disparity when comparing pre-election surveys and Election Day exit polls against the official vote counts.

1/8/08: New Hampshire

This was the first of the “must-wins” for Clinton. She went into New Hampshire on the heels of an embarrassing third-place finish in Iowa and a 20%+ defeat in Wyoming, had lost momentum, and was trailing by substantial margins in every pre-election poll in the Granite state (the range was from 5% to 13%, with both Obama’s and Clinton’s internal polling also showing a double-digit Obama margin).

Observers consistently reported Obama rallies that were far larger and more enthusiastic. There was no sign of a Clinton groundswell. Yet on Election Night the voters apparently changed their minds, and gave her a 3% victory. The media pundits scratched their collective heads and scrambled to explain this stunning reversal, which would have been remarkable enough if it had been a double-digit shift from a single reputable tracking poll, but was truly staggering when viewed against the backdrop of the entire phalanx of tracking polls.

There was palpable grasping at straws—but never even a hint that perhaps the polls had it right and something was wrong with the vote counts. Nor was there a mention that the first posted National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll had Obama ahead 39.4% to 38.1%, while earlier unposted NEP exit polls put Obama further ahead.

The first posted exit poll was already weighted to a carefully calibrated demographic profile of the electorate, and therefore as reliable an indicator of voter intent as is available. Indeed, that first-posted exit poll may already have been partially adjusted toward conformity with the incoming vote counts, thereby understating the apparent exit poll-vote count disparity.

That exit poll was largely spot-on for the other candidates; only Clinton and Obama's exit poll numbers shifted significantly as votes were tabulated. The mainstream media also did not mention the extraordinary disparity between votes that were counted by hand (Obama + 6.5% head-to-head with Clinton) and those tabulated by computerized optical scan devices (Clinton + 5.5% head-to-head with Obama).

Although the counting method (machine vs. hand) was not strictly homogeneously distributed throughout the state, neither was it clustered in such a way that would readily explain the huge statistical disparity in results. When considering benign reasons for such surprising and unexpected outcomes, conventional explanations all begin and end with the unquestioned belief that the computerized vote counts are valid. Quite an assumption in light of the parade of anomalies, disparities, and machine failures witnessed nationwide since the advent and proliferation of computerized vote counting.

Official election results are assumed valid, even though the votes are tabulated by secret software² concealed on memory cards immune to inspection and under the strict proprietary control of an outsourced corporate vendor; in New Hampshire, the vendor is LHS, about which unanswered questions abound. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ² Remarkably enough, we know with certainty that the precise model of optical scan voting equipment in use in New Hampshire, Diebold Accuvote OS Model 1.94W, is vulnerable to outcome-altering manipulation by insiders. A live demonstration on that very Diebold model was captured in the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy". _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In an on-going epilogue, the New Hampshire primary remains under scrutiny. Investigators are amassing detailed evidence of pervasive mistabulation, focused in certain counties. On the Democratic side, there were an alarming number of polling sites reporting more votes than voters. Recounting was rendered effectively useless by a nonexistent chain of custody, which permitted more than ample opportunity for ballot substitution and revision.

Memory cards were reported as having been erased and were never made available to investigators. Even something as basic as a reconciliation of the number of ballots delivered to number of ballots voted, spoiled, and uncast was lacking. Nor was there reconciliation of number of voters checked in at the polls to number of ballots cast.

At this first critical turning point in the Democratic contest an Obama victory would have, in the view of most analysts, effectively ended Clinton’s campaign. That victory—augured in pre-election polling, exit polls, and hand-counted ballots—vanished into the black box scanners provided by Diebold and programmed by LHS. Instead, Clinton was credited with a stunning comeback, given new life, and the nomination battle continued.

2/5/2008: Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday was essentially a standoff, each candidate doing what was necessary to remain viable. There were, however, several exit poll-vote count disparities far beyond the expected margin of error, each involving a shift toward Clinton.

In Massachusetts, another LHS state like New Hampshire, the shift was a whopping 15.5%, turning a projected narrow Obama victory into a 15% Clinton rout.

In Arizona, site of some of the most dubious counting antics over the past several election cycles, the pro-Clinton shift was 11%, again reversing the outcome.

And in New Jersey, where machines are currently under high scrutiny supported by a court order, the shift was 8.6%.

Each of these shifts was well beyond the margin of error of the respective polls. Each resulted in shifts in delegate count to Obama’s detriment, as well as the loss of two victories that would have put a very different complexion on the outcome of Super Tuesday as a whole. The overall effect was, again, to maintain Clinton’s viability.

3/4/2008: Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas

In the weeks following Super Tuesday, Obama racked up a succession of impressive wins—including every caucus state, where vote counting is often face-to-face, and subject to greater scrutiny. As a result he pulled well ahead in the delegate count, and began to take on the mantle of inevitability.

Once more, pundits were calling the race all but over, and Texas and Ohio were often described as Clinton’s last stand. She needed wins in both states, it was flatly stated, to continue in the race. Even Clinton’s own campaign conceded as much. In the weeks before the election, Obama had closed an initial gap in both states and was running even or ahead in pre-election polling.

Ohio

In Ohio once again we are confronted with a discrepancy between exit polls and official tallies. The initial published exit poll, posted shortly after poll closing, showed a 3% Clinton margin (51.1% to 47.9%), while the final official vote count showed a 10% Clinton margin (54.3% to 44.0%). This disparity was well outside the exit poll’s margin of error. The official vote count was also a significant departure from a compendium of pre-election polls, which showed Obama gaining ground and approaching equality.³

Viewed in isolation, Ohio could be explained as a “late Clinton surge” that caught the pre-election pollsters by surprise. Primaries are indeed fluid and volatile, as elections go, and there were reports of organized attempts to encourage Republican crossover voting for Clinton, though the Republican crossover vote may have been less robust than initially reported.

It can also plausibly be viewed as another in a succession of “cover stories” (for example, the massive but phantom after-dinner Evangelical turnout offered up by Rove as a factor in reversing the outcome in 2004) that could well provide a relatively benign explanation for more nefarious operations. But instead there was a parade of contests in important states in the 2008 nomination battle in which a substantial exit poll-vote count disparity worked in Clinton’s favor—including New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Arkansas, Arizona, California, and now Ohio and, as we will see, Texas and Rhode Island.

In contrast, we have observed to date no battleground state primary with a significant⁴ exit poll-vote count disparity in Obama's favor. Some have invoked the so-called “Bradley effect” to account for this string of disparities. According to this theory, some white voters who would not vote for a black candidate in the privacy of the voting booth are “shamed” into indicating to pollsters (i.e., in public) that they chose that candidate.

But research into the Bradley effect has established that it is, at best, an inconsistent and relatively rare phenomenon, very unlikely to account for such a pervasive pattern as identified above. It is only if one is unwilling to consider any possibility of computerized vote mistabulation that such superficially plausible theories as the Bradley effect take their place in the front of the line of explanations. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ³ See http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/poll-tracker.htm [68] ⁴ In this case, significant means "larger than the exit poll margin of error." _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rhode Island

The exit poll-vote count disparity in Rhode Island was 14.1%; the exit poll posted after poll closing had Clinton up 4.1% (51.6% to 47.5%) over Obama, yet the official vote count had Clinton up 18.2% (58.8% to 40.6%). This is far outside the exit poll’s margin of error, and on a par with the similarly perplexing and bizarre 15.5% disparity favoring Clinton in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday. It is reasonable to ask, if exit polls are this far off, why bother exit polling? (Or perhaps just as reasonable to ask, if vote counts are this far off, why bother voting?)

Texas

In Texas there was a relatively modest 4% discrepancy between the first posted exit polls and official tallies—in the usual direction and larger than the margin of error, and also in this case, withheld from the public until more than an hour after poll closing.

While most primary exit polls are posted a few minutes after the polls close, an hour's delay enables ample opportunity for adjustment of exit polls toward conformity with the incoming vote count, and so the posted exit polls may understate the magnitude of the discrepancy.

But the disparity in Texas between early voting results vs. Election Day in-precinct voting was of staggering proportions that seemed to defy explanation. The earliest returns posted on network websites showed a total of approximately 740,000 votes cast in the Democratic primary with 0% of precincts reporting. This was the early/absentee vote tally, which in some states is tabulated and available for release immediately upon poll closing. Obama’s vote at that point was 436,034 to 303,276 for Clinton, or 59% to 41%, an 18% margin.

But by the time the counting was done the next morning, Clinton had a 51% to 48% victory . . . a whopping 21% margin reversal. What was even more stunning, however, was that Clinton had caught up to Obama before even a quarter of the election day vote had been tallied: with 23% of election day precincts reporting and almost exactly as many at-precinct votes as early votes counted, the overall count stood at Obama 711,759, Clinton 711,183 (49%-49%), a dead heat.

To catch up so quickly and produce those numbers, Clinton had to win the at-precinct vote in that quarter of Texas precincts by 59% to 41%...an exact reversal of the early voting Obama landslide. What we saw in Texas were essentially equal and opposite landslides, as if we were observing two not only separate but radically divergent electorates, one that chose to vote early and one that chose to go to the polls.

The early voting period in Texas extends from 17 days to four days prior to the election. Ordinarily explanations for a divergence of such magnitude, particularly in intra-party contests, would be due to time-critical phenomena such as late-breaking gaffes, scandals, debate blowouts and the like. But there was no such occurrence.

During the early voting period the average of 13 pre-election polls showed Clinton 45.6%, Obama 46.7%. In the three days before the election, after the early voting period had ended, the average of eight polls was Clinton 46.8%, Obama 46.1%, a very modest change and certainly not the 21% mega-reversal displayed by the early voting and at-precinct vote counts.

While there is no obvious explanation for the pattern observed, one hypothesis worthy of investigation is that one set of counting equipment (either early-voting or at-precinct voting) was accessed by malicious insiders and manipulated. If the pattern of pro-Clinton shifts were to hold, the place to investigate first would of course be the at-precinct voting equipment and county central tabulators.

Having won Ohio and Texas, Clinton remained viable but still in dire straits, leading directly to the most polarizing and divisive phase of the nomination battle.

4/23/08: Pennsylvania

In the ‘quiet’ interval during the six weeks prior to the Pennsylvania primary, the effects of Clinton’s revived (but precarious) position had ample opportunity to play out. The Clinton campaign went on the offensive, with the type of personal, negative attacks that both campaigns had previously eschewed. Obama was relentlessly portrayed as elitist and out-of-touch by the Clinton campaign (and by Clinton herself), a depiction the mainstream media began to echo almost as relentlessly.

And, sure enough, incidents emerged that played into this depiction—most notably Reverend Wright’s sermons and Obama’s own quote that seemed to both pigeonhole and patronize the working-class voters of Pennsylvania. These were replayed by the mainstream media in an endless barrage of coverage, all keyed to the theme that Obama might be too out-of-touch, and too close to the radical black fringe, to be president. Obama appeared to successfully counter that round of negative attacks, and it appeared to have little or no impact in his polling support nationwide – nor, indeed, in Pennsylvania.

Obama went into the April 23 primary trailing Clinton by 5% or less in pre-election polls, with no late movement to Clinton detected. It was viewed as essential by mainstream media pundits that Clinton win “by double digits” to maintain her viability and pick up the momentum required to win decisive superdelegate support.

First-posted exit polls⁵ for Pennsylvania reflected pre-election expectations, with Clinton leading 51.6% to 47.8%, a 3.8% margin. By late in the evening, however, with the count mostly in, it was Clinton by 9.4%--close enough somehow for the morning papers, networks, and websites to lead with Clinton’s “double-digit” win.

As with New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas, there was a wide range of irregularities, glitches, and vote suppression incidents reported. Again, an exit poll disparity beyond the margin of error. Again, a departure, in the familiar direction, from the range of pre-election polling. And once again the final result was that Clinton received just enough to sustain her campaign, her “double-digit” victory, courtesy of a generous round-off. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ⁵ Weighted, 1421 respondents, approximate margin of error +/- 3%. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Upshot

Just as with a spaceship's carefully-calibrated mid-course corrections that make an ultimate difference of millions of miles, it does not take much to radically change the course of a multi-election political contest. A few quick bursts from the retrorockets at the right moment(s) will do the trick. Of course the dynamics of a campaign can change legitimately, as a result of the thrust and parry process, exposure of weaknesses, refutation of apparent inevitability, etc.

But the shift in dynamics of the 2008 Democratic nomination contest strongly correlated with a string of election results that raised serious red flags independent of their impact on the race. Glaring discrepancies far beyond the margin of error of exit polls and pre-election polls, and the confounding of the expected electoral dynamics, produced results that had the precise impact of prolonging and intensifying the nomination battle. Had the primary election results jibed with those independent measures and expectations, it would long since have been wrapped up.

Anyone actually in a position to take advantage of the vast array of security vulnerabilities in the computers that run our elections would have an obvious interest in remaining undetected. The safest path would be to take only what you need to achieve your bottom-line goal, and not one vote more. Anything beyond adds risk without reward.

Thus, in keeping with our hypothesis that the fundamental goal of primary contest electoral manipulation was to create “plausible defeatability” for the Democratic ticket in November, we would expect little additional manipulation in the last stages of the Democratic contest. It is apparent that an Obama defeat in November (and more extensive Democratic losses in down-ballot races) can be spun as a plausible consequence of the intra-party strife that has already been depicted as weakening the party and its nominee, and of apparent Obama weaknesses exposed in the course of the grueling nomination battle.

With such a cover story safely in place, even an against-the-odds Republican “victory” in November could be successfully spun and sold to the candidates, their parties, the media, and the voters.

The “Mystery Adjustment” Factor in Polling

One final observation concerning the pre-election polling that sets expectations for candidates, the mainstream media, and the voters themselves. We are deeply concerned that these polls too paint a false backdrop against which the signs of computerized electoral manipulation by insiders will appear diminished in magnitude over time, or even disappear.

The reason for this concern is obviously not that the fraternity of pollsters are knowingly acting to support or conceal systematic computerized electoral manipulation, but rather that pollsters simply cannot expect to stay in business if they consistently fail to predict the “actual” electoral results. The worst problem for a pollster is to be consistently “off” in the same direction.

Put another way, pollsters are not paid for achieving some abstract statistical purity but rather for accurate predictions—however achieved. If one places oneself in the position of a pollster who, time and again, is faced with results that are, say 6 – 8% more Republican than their predictions, or shifted in the direction the right wing would desire, it becomes clear that one would begin making a “mystery adjustment” to whatever data emerges from a clean survey methodology.

Such an adjustment can be easily generated by changes in demographic weighting that can at least in part be justified by reliance on data emerging from previous elections, themselves manipulated. Call it a fudge factor if you will, but it keeps the pollster in business, while failing to make such a correction would be professional suicide.

By way of corroboration of this phenomenon, in public dialogue with a major-party polling consultant, the following shocking admission was made: If the Democratic candidate is not leading by 10% going into the election in their internal polling, they expect the race to be a toss-up. This internal candidate polling is—unlike polls published for public consumption—intended to paint a ruthlessly accurate picture of contest dynamics to help the party prioritize expensive get-out-the-vote drives and last-minute media blitzes.

The fact that even major-party pollsters must adjust their own results to account for the “mystery swing” to the right is a strong indication that much the same distorting protocol is already being employed in public pre-election polling. When manipulated elections serve as the calibration tool for pre-election polling, we lose yet another independent check mechanism on the official computerized vote tabulation process. This only deepens the crisis.

Conclusion

Election theft is certainly hard to prove, with virtually all hard evidence withheld as proprietary; and even well-supported allegations by credible journalists, computer scientists, security professionals and election integrity activists are given a wide berth by both the mainstream media and the established political powers of both major parties.

Yet, even with the limited tools at our disposal, we keep discovering evidence—in pre-election polls, exit polls, and published election results–that is consistent with a pattern of widespread covert manipulation of vote counts.

We will continue to investigate and report these anomalies until a thorough and unblinking investigation of suspicious results is undertaken by those in position to collect the additional evidence needed to establish incontrovertible proof.

But since many of those in the best position to investigate election anomalies are themselves elected officials, our best hope may be to follow the recent example of Ireland and the Netherlands—dispense with voting computers, and simply count our own paper ballots by hand.

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