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Investigations [71]
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About [74]
Chronology [72]
Legislation [73]
About [74]
2006 Election Investigations [NEW!]
If you know of additional case studies from the 2006 election please send them to our attention at: EDA Investigations [1]
Fired Federal Prosecutors and Election Fraud
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0703/S00213.htm [2]
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Fired Federal Prosecutors And Election Fraud
Sacked for Indicting Republicans
and Not Indicting Democrats?
Michael Collins [3]
“Scoop” Independent News
Washington, DC
Top U.S. law enforcement official Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez engineered a Pearl Harbor Day for eight Republican appointed federal prosecutors. From one end of the country to the other, previously well regarded prosecutors were summarily fired (allowed to resign) on December 7, 2006. Chief of the Office of U.S. Attorneys, Michael Battle [4] spread the news. In a rare case of the messenger shooting himself, Battle abruptly decided that he too would resign after the firings turned into a major scandal this month.
Even hard core Bush supporters were appalled. High profile Republican partisan and former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova made his opinion clear: “This is really a pathetic way of running government." Mark Corallo, a former close aid to Attorney General Ashcroft said: "These are people who worked hard in the pursuit of justice. To go out and trash their reputations -- it's galling." John Smietanka, deputy to George H. W. Bush’s Attorney General William Barr, offered this: “If they were going to ask for the resignations of people, they should have given reasons, just for pure tact and humanity." (Source of quotations: Law.Com, 12 Mar 2007 [5])
Working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seems to be the essential requirement to stick one’s head in the sand and support this process.
Why were these eight selected? The notion that they were somehow ineffective is a non starter. All eight prosecutors had positive personnel reviews by the Department of Justice (DOJ) according to the Wall Street Journal [6] whose reporters had access to the files. The conventional wisdom is that they were somehow disloyal to the Bush White House, either through acts of omission or commission. That’s obvious. But what were those acts?
Is there a common element to the firings? In the case of four of the eight, there might be.
David Iglesias, New Mexico. “Leaned on” by a Senator and his heir for failing to indict Democrats before 2006 elections.
Senator Pete Domenici, (R-NM), recommended David Iglesias as New Mexico’s federal prosecutor. Imagine the volatile senator’s outrage when he reportedly called and asked Iglesias for a favor. Domenici was concerned about the slow pace of expected indictments of Democrats in election related cases according to Iglesias. Should the indictments come just before the 2006 election, they would help Republicans in tight races. The alleged interference took its toll. Iglesias said [7] “I felt sick afterward. I felt leaned on. I felt pressured to get these cases moving.”
A big part of the pressure was from Congresswoman Heather Wilson, (R-NM [8]). She called Iglesias and reportedly pressured him to indict the same Democrats requested by Domenici. Iglesias would have none of it. Wilson later said that she’d called to help Iglesias with his investigation, an assertion that became the object of mockery among commentators. Regarded as Domenici’s political heir for the New Mexico Senate seat, she was one of those Republicans who would benefit form early indictments of high profile Democrats. Wilson needed every bit of leverage available to win re-election. She won by less than 1,000 votes in one of those controversial elections.
There were no pre-election indictments by prosecutor Iglesias.
The likely motivation for the firing was clarified by New Mexico Republican Party Chairman Allen Weh. In a just published account by McClatchy Newspapers, he described a 2005 phone call with Karl Rove [9], Weh asked, “Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?” referring to Iglesias’ failure to bring the requested pre election charges against Democrats. Rove’s response was direct, “He’s gone.” And he was, just a few months after the phone call.
John McKay, Washington State. Investigate “voter” fraud in 2004 Governor’s race or tell me why you didn’t!
John McKay of Washington State was apparently the object of a longer held grudge by the White House. He refused to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 election for Governor of Washington State. McKay told Senate investigators of receiving a call [10] from the chief of staff for Republican Congressman “Doc” Hastings. The call concerned a prosecution to challenge the Democrats in their 200 vote victory in the 2004 race for governor.
The Seattle Times [11] published a letter from trade association executive Tom McCabe to Rep “Doc” Hastings from July 2005. Talk about a demand letter. Hastings, a former chair of the House Ethics Committee, surely knew what this meant.
I urge you to call on President Bush to fire John McKay, U.S. Attorney for Western Washington.
…. If you decide not to do this, let me know.
Tom McCabe
Executive Vice President(N.B. The cc. list on this letter includes one “John Fund.”)
After receiving the letter, Hastings staffer Ed Cassidy [12] called prosecutor McKay making inquiries about the status of the 2004 allegations. McKay quickly cut him off expressing concerns about illegal influence (it’s a crime to try and influence a federal prosecutor's decisions in this way).
The call ended and a few months later so did McKay’s federal service. His reward for service to his country was a threat that DOJ would release information [13] damaging to his reputation. They did. It was widely dismissed.
Daniel Bogden, Nevada. Getting too close to corporate gifts for a Republican Governor
Nevada federal prosecutor Daniel Bogden may have been undone by an explosive FBI probe of just re-elected Governor Jim Gibbons. Gibbons’ dealings with friend and defense contractor Warren Trepp are a part of the investigation. It isn’t hard to figure out why.
Among the dozens of e-mails is one allegedly sent days before Trepp and his wife prepared to set sail on a Caribbean cruise with (Governor) Gibbons and his wife. In it, Trepp's wife allegedly wrote to her husband: "Please don't forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn." Trepp's reply, according to the Journal report, was: "Don't you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer right now!” Washington Post [14]
There are other examples of Trepp’s cash and carry relationship with his friend and traveling companion, the governor. The possible resignation of Gov. Gibbons due to a scandal was apparently too much for the White House to bear. Senate testimony indicated that there was really no reason to remove Gibbons other than to make room for a political appointee. Long service and an excellent record offered no protection for this loyal civil servant.
Another layer of protection for the governor was provided when intelligence czar, John D. Negrponte [15] filed a statement saying any investigation of the Gov. Gibbons – Trepp connection would compromise vital national security interests.
Is this the security of knowing that you’ll be able to actually spend the walking around money your patron gave you during your Caribbean vacation together? Time will tell.
Carol Lam, California. Poking around the mother of all political scandals, Hookergate.
Carol Lam’s courteous demeanor masks a prosecutor tough as nails. It was Lam who brought charges against Republican Congressman Randall H. “Duke” Cunningham. Lam indicted and convicted the former Naval flying ace and Republican icon for bribe taking in 2005. She wasn’t done yet.
Exposed and disgraced, Cunningham resigned after the indictment and apparently began singing the right tunes for the prosecutor. Lam widened her investigation and connected Cunningham’s cash cow, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, with a broader potential scandal involving Wilkes and former CIA executive Dusty Foggo.
Hookergate [16] has it all – politicians participating in prostitution, gambling, and influence peddling. It’s alleged that federal money was provided to a Virginia based limousine company to carry Congressmen [17] between Capitol Hill and the Watergate complex for recreational sex with prostitutes and gambling with each other. It appears that both Foggo and Wilkes are closely connected to the merry making.
The implications of this scandal are staggering. Any member of Congress caught up in this scheme, particularly if photographed, will be forced from office immediately. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out which political party will be totally decimated if this scandal explodes.
After Lam’s previously announced resignation was moved up, she remained undeterred. Just before leaving office, she filed an incredibly detailed indictment [18] of Wilkes and Foggo that will be at the top of her replacement’s to do list. This more than justifies a Congressional investigation into the more explosive Hookergate affair.
Emerging Pattern?
It is apparent that the four dismissals are related to politics and not performance. A pattern begins to emerge. Political leverage is brought to bear on past, current or future elections through the use of federal prosecutors, clearly not a part of the job description. Two prosecutors were dismissed after failing to indict citizens in order to influence an election. The Nevada prosecutor was sacked in the midst of an investigation that had the potential to remove a sitting Republican governor. But Lam takes the cake.
It appears that she was dismissed early to discourage the very indictment she brought just before leaving, an indictment that has the potential to literally wipe the Republican Party off of the political map. If it ever breaks, Hookergate will be the mother of all political scandals with corruption, influence peddling, and prostitutes paid for with government funds.
It’s no coincidence that the eight were removed when they were. This process was a gift to the President by Republican Senator Arlen Specter. In a clever move before the bill was finalized, Specter [19] included a few sentences in the Patriot Act broadening the options for the midterm dismissal of federal prosecutors. The White House noticed this loophole and used it when needed, without restraint.
Hovering at a paltry 30% approval rating with no hope in sight, the White House operation needs every bit of help it can get. Given the reaction of even their staunchest supporters, the troubles are just beginning.
Special thanks to Mario for his ongoing insights.
Permission to reprint with an attribution to the author and a link to this article at “Scoop” Independent News.
Undervotes in 2006 Senate Contests in Ohio Diebold Counties
Excessive Undervotes in Ohio Diebold Counties, 2006 Senate Race
by Dale Tavris
Since the 2004 Presidential election, when Ohio’s electoral votes made the difference in handing George Bush a second term in the White House, subsequent investigations found numerous [20] irregularities [21]” in Ohio’s [22]election [23], and Ohio’s Presidential electoral votes were subsequently challenged in Congress [24], Ohio’s election system has been the focus of much national concern and attention.
On December 7th of this year, Richard Hayes Phillips posted an analysis of the undervote for the Ohio Senate race entitled “Unofficial Results in Seventeen Ohio Counties Cannot Be Right [25]”, using unofficial figures from Kenneth Blackwell’s website. An undervote for the purpose of that analysis was defined as a ballot that was cast, but for which there was no vote registered for Senator (or else more than one vote for Senator, which would have disqualified the ballot).
Since that time, Kenneth Blackwell has posted the official election results [26] on his website. In connection with my role as a volunteer for the data analysis group of Election Defense Alliance [27], I recently used those results to conduct an analysis of the Ohio Senate undervote, using methods similar to Richard Hayes Phillips, in which I assessed the undervote by machine type.
Findings – excessive undervote rates in six Diebold counties
The state-wide undervote rate for Ohio Senator was 3.94%. But there was a great difference in undervote rate by county by machine type, with the Diebold counties averaging a significantly higher undervote rate (p=0.015) than counties using the other machines, as follows:
Diebold DREs (47 counties) – 4.79%
Votronic DREs (10 counties) – 3.22%
Op-scan (31 counties) – 3.29%
Furthermore, there were six counties that were definite and extreme outliers (all Diebold) compared to the other counties. Those six counties (Mercer, Darke, Highland, Montgomery, Adams, Perry) had undervote rates ranging from 11.2% to 16.3%, with an average of 13.8%, while the other 82 Ohio counties had undervote rates ranging from 0.62% to 6.76%, with an average of 3.37%. The undervotes in the six outlier counties amounted to almost a quarter (24.9%) of
the undervotes in the whole state, whereas the total votes in those six counties amounted to only 7.1% of the total votes in the state. Without those six counties, the average undervote rate for the other 41 Diebold counties was quite similar (3.47%) to the average undervote rate for the other types of machines.
The vote distribution in the six high outlier counties leaned slightly towards the Democratic candidate, Sherrod Brown (50.7%), which was less than Brown’s share of the vote state-wide (56.2%).
Discussion of the meaning of this analysis
What this analysis shows is that for the 2006 Ohio Senate race, the undervote rate for counties that used Diebold machines was substantially greater than the undervote rate for counties that used other voting machines, and that almost all of the excess undervote rate in the Diebold counties was accounted for by six counties, which were characterized by an undervote rate of about four times that of the remainder of Ohio.
Why did this occur? It seems highly likely that there was something wrong with the Diebold machines, at least a good portion of them in six Ohio counties, which caused the relatively high undervote rates. That could have been due to difficulties voters had in finding the Senate candidates on those Diebold machines, or it could have been due to failure of the machines to record the votes that the voters intended. Alternatively, it could have been due to the fact that 11 to 16% of voters in six Ohio counties decided not to vote for Senator – but that seems quite unlikely.
Whether or not the problem with the Diebold machines was purposeful, whether or not the undercount rates applied to some Ohio House or other races as well, and whether or not high undercount rates may have affected some close House or other races, is not known at this time. Nor do we know whether or not individual precincts or machines in counties other than the six outlier counties may have had similar problems. I have not had access to precinct level data which could possibly provide answers to some of these questions.
Another finding of note is that Richard Hayes Phillips’ analysis of the unofficial Ohio data resulted in findings that were substantially different than my analysis of the official Ohio Senate data, which can be seen by following the link that I supplied above (though our general conclusion of high undervote rates in several Diebold counties was similar).
This means that in some respects there were major changes in the data from the time of the first unofficial postings to the time that the official results were posted. Identification of the reasons for those changes could provide clues to some of the problems.
Comparison with the 2006 House Race in Florida Congressional District 13
The findings here have many similarities to the House race in Florida Congressional District 13, the only remaining 2006 House race that is currently still being contested. In that race it was found that there was one county, Sarasota, that exhibited a very high undervote rate for the House race, 15%, compared to neighboring counties, which exhibited undervote rates of only 2.2% to 5.3%. Almost 18,000 ballots did not register a vote for Congressperson in Sarasota County, which was tentatively won by the Republican candidate by only 369 votes.
Unlike the situation in Ohio, a good deal of illuminating additional information is available for the Florida CD 13 race. First, as explained by Paul
Krugman [28], an analysis of individual ballots found that voters who failed to cast a vote
in the House race strongly favored the Democratic candidate in other races.
And secondly, an interview of
voters [29] in Sarasota County by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune identified a likely reason
for the high undervote rate: One third of voters couldn’t find the House race on their ballot, and 60% said that they did vote for a House candidate, but that their vote didn’t show up on their summary page.
As with the above noted findings in Ohio, Sarasota County used DRE machines for voting in 2006. But unlike the Ohio findings, the DRE machines used in Sarasota County were manufactured by ES & S rather than by Diebold.
Some final thoughts
The use of voting machines that produce electronic results that cannot be verified have no place in a democracy. Currently, 23 states have no requirement [30] for a voter verified paper trail that could potentially verify the results produced by electronic voting machines. Ohio does have paper trails potentially available for that purpose. But even when paper trails are available to do that, they cannot ensure accurate election results if those in charge of elections refuse to perform a recount [31] or if a recount is performed in a sloppy and illegal manner [32].
Election protection organizations such as Election Defense Alliance continue to analyze election results in order to shed as much light as possible on the myriad of problems with electronic voting. The fact that this issue has broken through into the national news media is one measure of their success. Another measure of their success is the 27 states that now require the use of voter verified paper trails to be used in conjunction with electronic voting machines (though how successful these paper trails will prove to be in actual practice has yet to be answered). With their continued work and a Democratic Congress ready to be sworn in next month I am cautiously hopeful that some real substantial progress will be made in the next couple of years towards redeeming our country’s election system.
2006 Senate Results in 17 Ohio Counties Cannot Be Right
UNOFFICIAL RESULTS IN SEVENTEEN OHIO COUNTIES CANNOT BE RIGHT
Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. December 7, 2006
R. H. Phillips grants permission to copy and distribute ONLY if reproduced exactly as printed here, in its entirety.
[To download the complete report with data tables, click here for PDF file [33] ]
In the 2006 general election, according to the official website of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, there were 4,177,498 ballots cast in the State of Ohio. Of these, only 3,831,716, or 91.72%, contained votes for Governor, and only 3,826,829, or 91.61%, contained votes for United States Senate.
These numbers create the appearance of undervote (or overvote) rates of 8.28% and 8.39%, respectively, in the two most hotly contested statewide races on the ballot.
When the unofficial election results are examined county by county, there is a strikingly abnormal distribution of undervotes and overvotes.
I have chosen the United States Senate race to examine in detail because there were only two candidates on the ballot (and one write-in candidate), which makes the mathematical analysis simpler than for the Governor's race, in which there were four candidates on the ballot (and two write-in candidates).
A similar analysis could be done, and should be done, for the Governor's race, and for all races in which the unofficial results were very close. The methodology was simple. The percentage of undervotes and overvotes for each county was derived by fifth-grade mathematics. The total number of votes counted for the candidates combined was subtracted from the number of ballots cast. The remainder is the number of uncounted ballots, or undervotes plus overvotes. This number was divided by the number of ballots cast to determine the percentage of ballots left uncounted in each county. The complete data set for all 88 counties is appended to this paper.
There are 88 counties in Ohio. Of these 88 counties, according to unofficial results posted by J. Kenneth Blackwell, 71 counties had rates of undervotes and overvotes ranging from 0.88% (in Greene County) to 6.90% (in Holmes County). In 62 of these 71 counties, the percentages were tightly clustered between 2.00% and 4.50%. The rate in these 71 counties combined was 2.99%.
In 16 of the other 17 counties, including 4 of the 10 most populous counties in the State of Ohio, the percentages of undervotes and overvotes were clearly anomalous, ranging from 11.91% (in Montgomery County) to 26.48% (in Cuyahoga County), with a combined rate of 19.46%, or six and one-half times the rate in the rest of the state.
Just four counties -- Cuyahoga, Lucas, Montgomery and Stark -- accounted for 219,332 undervotes and overvotes, or 62.55% of the statewide total of 350,669. Cuyahoga County alone accounted for 148,928 undervotes and overvotes, or 42.47% of the statewide total. It is difficult to believe that more than one in four voters in Cuyahoga County could not decide between Sherrod Brown and Mike DeWine.
Click here to download a map [34] showing type of voting machine used in each Ohio county for the 2006 midterm elections.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
R. H. Phillips' report was based on the unofficial election results available at the time the report was written.
Since then, Ohio has released the final, official returns for U.S. Senate in Ohio, 2006.
The official returns are posted online at [http://www.sos.state.oh.us/SOS/ElectionsVoter/results2006.aspx?Section=1846].
A PDF file of the official 2006 Ohio returns for U.S. Senate can be downloaded here [35].
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/SOS/ElectionsVoter/results2006.aspx?Section=1846 [36]
U.S. Senate
Official Results: November 7, 2006
| U.S. Senate | |||
| General Election - 11/07/2006 | |||
| COUNTY | *Sherrod Brown | Mike DeWine | Richard Duncan (WI) |
| Democratic | Republican | Non-Partisan | |
| Adams | 3,903 | 4,667 | 0 |
| Allen | 16,597 | 19,521 | 5 |
| Ashland | 8,890 | 10,299 | 9 |
| Ashtabula | 21,151 | 13,078 | 1 |
| Athens | 13,988 | 5,839 | 0 |
| Auglaize | 6,845 | 10,142 | 8 |
| Belmont | 15,490 | 8,056 | 10 |
| Brown | 6,850 | 7,247 | 7 |
| Butler | 49,443 | 65,854 | 5 |
| Carroll | 6,143 | 4,908 | 2 |
| Champaign | 6,809 | 7,598 | 2 |
| Clark | 26,400 | 23,656 | 6 |
| Clermont | 25,333 | 39,588 | 34 |
| Clinton | 5,005 | 7,687 | 1 |
| Columbiana | 21,802 | 15,025 | 2 |
| Coshocton | 7,024 | 6,340 | 2 |
| Crawford | 8,227 | 8,455 | 1 |
| Cuyahoga | 319,568 | 133,235 | 29 |
| Darke | 8,267 | 11,911 | 9 |
| Defiance | 6,624 | 6,977 | 6 |
| Delaware | 27,109 | 37,624 | 17 |
| Erie | 19,372 | 11,018 | 1 |
| Fairfield | 25,283 | 28,506 | 12 |
| Fayette | 3,793 | 4,651 | 2 |
| Franklin | 217,961 | 154,098 | 51 |
| Fulton | 7,936 | 8,079 | 6 |
| Gallia | 4,803 | 5,255 | 0 |
| Geauga | 19,903 | 19,653 | 17 |
| Greene | 24,415 | 34,797 | 76 |
| Guernsey | 7,334 | 5,905 | 0 |
| Hamilton | 142,134 | 144,167 | 96 |
| Hancock | 10,498 | 15,121 | 3 |
| Hardin | 4,779 | 4,803 | 2 |
| Harrison | 3,530 | 2,450 | 1 |
| Henry | 5,354 | 6,007 | 2 |
| Highland | 5,674 | 7,297 | 10 |
| Hocking | 5,664 | 4,062 | 3 |
| Holmes | 2,810 | 5,241 | 4 |
| Huron | 10,234 | 8,694 | 2 |
| Jackson | 5,453 | 4,833 | 2 |
| Jefferson | 15,673 | 9,988 | 0 |
| Knox | 9,641 | 11,036 | 1 |
| Lake | 50,649 | 37,988 | 15 |
| Lawrence | 10,561 | 8,916 | 0 |
| Licking | 28,599 | 30,312 | 12 |
| Logan | 6,909 | 9,297 | 4 |
| Lorain | 67,429 | 34,129 | 5 |
| Lucas | 94,630 | 47,659 | 15 |
| Madison | 6,414 | 7,110 | 5 |
| Mahoning | 69,664 | 25,151 | 0 |
| Marion | 11,078 | 10,526 | 0 |
| Medina | 36,386 | 29,186 | 11 |
| Meigs | 3,990 | 3,769 | 0 |
| Mercer | 5,413 | 10,118 | 1 |
| Miami | 15,734 | 21,299 | 6 |
| Monroe | 4,131 | 1,935 | 1 |
| Montgomery | 100,491 | 88,322 | 23 |
| Morgan | 2,955 | 2,523 | 6 |
| Morrow | 5,976 | 6,499 | 6 |
| Muskingum | 15,664 | 12,534 | 2 |
| Noble | 2,611 | 2,559 | 0 |
| Ottawa | 10,548 | 6,972 | 1 |
| Paulding | 3,556 | 3,976 | 1 |
| Perry | 6,627 | 4,555 | 7 |
| Pickaway | 8,858 | 9,059 | 0 |
| Pike | 5,845 | 3,798 | 2 |
| Portage | 34,576 | 20,075 | 34 |
| Preble | 7,221 | 8,436 | 46 |
| Putnam | 5,600 | 8,539 | 2 |
| Richland | 24,431 | 21,451 | 7 |
| Ross | 13,061 | 10,501 | 4 |
| Sandusky | 12,899 | 9,983 | 0 |
| Scioto | 15,866 | 10,308 | 0 |
| Seneca | 10,742 | 9,343 | 1 |
| Shelby | 7,122 | 10,101 | 3 |
| Stark | 79,900 | 59,353 | 11 |
| Summit | 126,776 | 72,559 | 81 |
| Trumbull | 58,586 | 21,520 | 18 |
| Tuscarawas | 17,360 | 14,024 | 1 |
| Union | 6,881 | 9,950 | 12 |
| Van Wert | 4,177 | 6,239 | 4 |
| Vinton | 2,484 | 2,001 | 0 |
| Warren | 25,102 | 43,588 | 8 |
| Washington | 11,631 | 11,140 | 0 |
| Wayne | 18,299 | 19,985 | 9 |
| Williams | 6,438 | 6,543 | 7 |
| Wood | 25,875 | 19,637 | 3 |
| Wyandot | 3,912 | 4,201 | 9 |
| Total | 2,257,369 | 1,761,037 | 830 |
| Percentage of Votes | 56.16% | 43.82% | 0.02% |
Analysis: "Ballot Design" Explanation for FL 13 Doesn't Hold Up
William Steve Lang's "Notes Regarding "Ballot Formats, Touchscreens, and Undervotes"
Notes regarding "Ballot Formats, Touchscreens, and Undervotes:
A Study of the 2006 Midterm Elections in Florida"
by Frisina, Herron, Honaker, and Lewis.
[ To download the study critiqued here, click here [37] ]
Steve Lang writes:
I put my margin notes from reading this into an email. If you're
interested in the Florida Ballot article, here's my critical review
as I read it....
Taken from my margin scribbles with quotes from the article. You
might want to get a copy of the article in front you to follow the
notes:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page 1: "reports of election-alterning ballot machine failures have
thus far been relatively few." What? In the first paragraph, the
authors make a claim too early in the process to know and
inconsistent with popular information, so there is a political agenda
to this article.....hmmm....what is it?
Page 3: "the legal definition of malfunction" does not discuss a
fraud or hack to flip or discard votes. Is a machine that is
hackable (not secure) in a reasonable way designed poorly or
malfunctioning? This seems to avoid a reasonable review of an
important issue.
Page 4: "our conclusion that the CD13 undervote problem resulted
from the ballot layout used in Sarasota County" is premature. There
are some logic and grammar problems in the article, but I'm not going
to note them all here. This one is a big leap where evidence might
indicate a ballot issue, but that is not the only possible
conclusion. The authors backtrack a little, "it remains possible
that a programming or design flaw in...touchscreen machines caused
low vote counts"...but "it is our belief that..." indicates a priori
belief that taints the conclusion. I believe in Santa Claus...
Page 5: Consistent with most correlation/regression analyses,
there's no way to avoid that projections based on existing data give
a linear trend for missing votes that would elect Jennings and
reverse the election. I don't like the use of "disparate impact"
here as it confuses the term with discrimination (EEOC) studies that
have a legal basis and definition. I think they misuse the term to
extend to voting machinery. A minor issue.
Page 6: BIG PROBLEM, "The fact that some CD 13 ballots do not
contain a vote for a given office does not imply a failure of the
machinery..." In fact, as many as 9 types of ballots were used in
Sarasota alone. Adding or subtracting a "roll-off" is EXACTLY what
might have cause a misalignment of the touch point or page error in
the ballot or allow a hacker an entry point or cause the published
practice ballot to differ from the actual screen...etc., etc. This
is a very poor assertion to me and seems to protect the machines at
all cost. I'm getting the idea that the authors represent DRE
manufacturers...hmmm....
Page 7: The authors avoid citing that election machinery affects
valid vote rates and undervotes? Why? There are more than three
explanations for the undervote. The exclusion of programming issues
and/or fraud makes no sense and to say they are not common
conjectures is simply WRONG! They protest too much, so they may have
a conclusion that they are unwilling to produce, so the ones they
exclude are likely the ones to investigate!
Page 8: There is little or no support for a protest vote to apply
here, the citation is old and weak. Should not be the first
suggestion! Why propose this? Dumb idea to start with...Ballot
formating has ONE famous incident, the butterfly, but it's not
typical and everyone knows about it now. There are sample ballots,
voter training, etc. Also, poll workers look for this problem now,
and there is not evidence this is a problem on touchscreen machines?
What a leap of logic?!?!
Page 9: Ah, ha! The plot thickens: "It has been conjectured...:"
Politely, that's bull****! Little or no one has worried about this
and it is not part of any certification process. Most statute, if
any applies, would only require that some races or names come in a
certain order: by party or alphabetical. In California, there are
cases of several pages of candidates for a single race that didn't
"confuse" anyone. IF you can read and have ANY experience with ATM's
etc., paging and scrolling is so common that it annoys, but doesn't
confuse most people! Would a voter NOT expect to look for a name on
a list that might not be first? Dumb, dumb, dumb...."beyond the
scope of the paper", that was your opening premise! Very bad logic.
Why show placement of a ballot that is NOT the ballot that is your
issue? In figure 1 (page 10), how would two races on a page as
shown confuse someone? Machine or engineering failure is a possible,
if not likely reason for undervotes. Needs anecdotal evidence?
Page 10 / 11 (figure 2 - optical scan). This example did NOT have a
large undervote. It seems much more confusing than the screen shot
of the touchscreen. How is that consistent with your "candidate
placement" hypothesis?
Page 11: "This paper is purely a statistical exercise..."
Unnecessary and very bad statement after 10 pages of introduction
that don't even mention statistics or statistical logic or methods.
IF you can cite and discuss "ballots", then why not cite and discuss
"engineering"? Weird!
Page 12: "Thus, if there were a generic iVotronic effect in the CD
13 race, it would have affected both Charlotte and Sarasota undervote
rates." Why would it? Different programmers, roll-offs, and
election supervisors? Different ballot designers? There is NO
support for this conclusion...it is arbitrary! These authors must be
working for iVotronics!
Page 13, 14 and Figure 3, 4: Figure 3 is accurate, but poorly
labeled (y axis). Doesn't mention that the Absentee Voters are
sometimes on a different machine (optical), so why is that ballot
design and not machine error? Authors are shooting themselves in the
foot! "...and perhaps Sarasota absentee voters are simply more
attentive than Sarasota election day voters to undervotes..." DO
ABSENTEES USE DIFFERENT BALLOTS? Yes, they are sending in bubble
sheets and not using touchscreens. How does that preclude a
touchscreen error - seems to refute your hypothesis! Figure 4 is
unnessary, and badly designed. Bars are too small for the window
graph to show effects.
Page 15: Again, the authors suspect a possible issue and avoid it!
Fraud. IF there were fraud (hacking), it might show up as
differential undervote in precincts that had different proportions of
Demo/Ind/Rep voters! They know that...and blow it off as error
variance up front! What do they know? hmmm...."tend to contain
undervotes" Bull****
Page 16 and Figure 5: OK, a poorly formated graph, but the idea is
that Sarasota is different in undervotes for Election Day vs.
Absentee. Why not a SPLOM plot? Do authors have experience with
these graphics? Again, ballot design or counting process or what?
Page 17-19, Table 1-2: May not be the best model, but besides the
overkill analysis...If the conclusion is that "precincts with high
Senate undervote rates tend to have high Congressional undervote
rates" and .."we also see from this table that Democratically-leaning
precinct tend to produce disproportionately many undervotes..."
WELL, why is that consistent with BALLOT design and NOT FRAUD? If
it's not machine "failure" (presumably similar regardless of party
affiliation), and democrats are more harmed, then organized flips or
drops to throw the election might look like this regression wouldn't
it?!?! Citing yourself that democrats are dumb and can't understand
the ballot is the reference? There are too many covariates and model
choices here, and the authors don't do a good job of explaining all
the rationales for the choices. One footnote about nesting is typical.
In short, there needs to be more descriptives and simple correlations
before launching into this, so that the picture across counties,
brands of machines, and ballot types is explained. Assuming the
conclusion as given doesn't point to ballot design alone as of yet.
Page 20, Figure 6: Pretty clear that Sarasota is out of wack, but we
knew that...where are the Early Votes? The authors are doing a
little more exploration than planning here, but time is short
so...significance for Hillsboro, etc. is sample size more than
anything else. More interesting to me...why is Lee so low?
hmmm....they said earlier that they had more to say about that....not
outlined well...
Page 21-22: "If strong Democratic partisans simply dropped out of
the CD 14 race on account of its being a certain Republican victory,
then one might expect to see a negative lee County election data
effect as in Figure 6......" Pure speculation with no rational
evidence for this conclusion! Bull****.
They are correct, deliberate voters undervotes has no support...
[except from the election supervisor in the newspaper down here!].
"for reasons that transend this paper, voters are more likely to
undervote in a two-candidate race that appears immediately above or
conceivable immediately below a six-candidate race that includes a
write-in option, then we would expect to see a large Sarasota CD13
effect, precisely what we observe in Figure 6. We might also expect
to see a large Lee County CD 14 effect, which we do not see.
However, the CD 14 effect, we suspect, reflects partisanship
undervoting in a rather lopsided race." WHAT A CONVOLUTED BUNCH OF
JUNK! This is reaching a speculative (at best) prior conclusion and
rationalizing the argument to fit the predetermined conclusion in the
face of contrary evidence!
"Whether iVotroinc software is tailored for individual counties is
not something we know" YES YOU DO!! We know the ballots (roll-ons)
and local elections preclude programming for each county with
different election supervisors! How can the authors say this!!!
Bad, bad, bad. They KNOW this is a problem that is a window for
machine malfunction OR fraud and argue against it with "we don't
know" after speculating all over the place about everything else
under the sun....these authors have an agenda and it shows!
Kickbacks from iVotronics?
"or even voting machines within precincts." The authors cannot know
this because the precinct data is aggregated and not given by machine.
Page 23, Figure 7: Seems OK, but leaves out early voting (again).
Page 24-26, Table 3, Figure 8: They don't provide the analysis?!?!
Over 50 regression lines? Why not SPLOM? For that matter, this is a
mess. There may be a multivariate solution (discriminate), but his
whole thing falls into the weird category. There's NO REASON, even
if you assume that Charlotte and Lee have issues with undervote on
the Attorney General race that is not present in the other counties
that the CAUSE is Ballot Design. There is simply no reported
evidence in this paper (or anywhere that I know of) that voters
reported that they didn't see the AG race!?! Also, all these
counties had multiple variations of ballot pages with local races and
roll-ons. Most had a review screen. How do we know the review
screen in the AG race in Charlotte and Lee were not flawed resulting
in error. There are a thousand possibilities here, including fraud,
and it's a stretch to suggest ballot design and confusion -
especially with the poll workers watching for a "new machine"
confusion. The EARLY VOTING was on touchscreen. The authors leave
the touchscreen data out of this analysis all of a sudden! Is this a
manipulation? Did the touchscreen data from early voting confirm the
author's analysis, or was it left out on purpose! hmmmm.....I'd
check that!
The authors admit, "If Sarasota experienced a generic machine
malfunction of some type, then this same malfunction affected two
other neighboring counties but only in one particular race (and not
in the same race that the malfunction appeared in Sarasota). Of
course this could have happened: flaws in software code can interact
in ways that are hard to predict, and we can never rule out the
culprit here is i Votronic sofware or hardware that malfunctions when
races are grouped." DAMN, they said it themselves! Why argue
something when something else is easily possible. Also, why not a
hacker? It's not the data pattern that's a problem here, but the
conclusions stink to high heaven!
Page 28-29, Figure 9: The idea of a Democratic Voteshare is
OK....I'm not sure about the formula. With all the regressions in
the previous section, why not use the democratic, republican,
independent rations? Why not include a number of convariates?
Here's the early votes missing from the previous section...makes the
previous section see like a manipulation. Regardless, the point is
"Is this accident theory plausible?" I agree, assuming a linear
relationship, etc...the case that Jennings was harmed by what
happened in comparison with predictions from other precinct data is
compelling, and everyone who looks at the data would reach the same
conclusion - though maybe different predictions as to HOW much harm
or why it happened. With the election so close, you'd have to
overturn the results or revote.
"This effect seems to be more pronounced in the early voting than in
the election day voting, which is consistent with the story that some
poll workers were warned of the problematic Sarasota ballot format
problem and tried to pass on this warning to voters who voted on the
day of elections." OK, then why was there any ballot problem? [all
poll workers got the memo as reported in the paper]. This argues
AGAINST a ballot design issue. How were Lee and Charlotte poll
workers different than Sarasota? etc. etc. Why was the early data
(that followed the same pattern on the same machines) NOT included in
the above analysis on page 23-26?
Page 30-31, Figure 10: If a "constant fraction of all votes were
being randomely suppressed and converted to undervotes" and that
occurred to defeat the democratic candidate, why could that NOT have
fraud as a possibility instead of ballot design?
This indifference theory of "engaged voters" is more bull**** without
evidence or reason to think it is more plausible than anything else.
Pure speculation and not consistent with voter reports of problems of
review pages changing votes or the race not appearing even when the
voter looked for it...why would a hacker not simply drop a random
percent of independent and democratic voters? A sophisticated hack
would drop a percent of all voters, but a smaller percent of
republicans...you can imagine all kinds of possibilities. This still
is a stretch and the comparisons of regressions lines doesn't
indicate that someone who is informed they missed a vote would be
more inclined to fix the problem because they were "engaged" than
because of an accident. If you are enough motivated to vote, would
you then not care about the Senate race? We are in "la-la land"
with this theory...reminds me of stories of "reluctant responders" to
polls and other fictional characters! Can you imagine the authors
of this paper explaining the interaction effect of indifferent vs.
engaged voters and reluctant vs. non-reluctant poll responders! Wow.
Page 33: I don't believe it! I feel like Cassandra who can predict
the future! They are now speculating on interactions. "The true
process that occurred in Sarasota is undoubtedly of our accident and
indifference stories." The only thing to agree with here is that
they made up a story!
Page 34-36, Table 4: There are assumptions: "The relationship
between electoral races are the same across all precincts in CD 13."
that may not be true if a hack formula was based on registrations
within the precinct or other predictions. Regardless, the
prediction of the actual magnitude of votes to Jennings may be off,
but with this resampling model based on an "accidental" ballot design
theory is conservative and ok if WHATEVER HAPPENED is due to some
kind of random undervote issue. If the problem was not random,
Jennings may have won by more! It doesn't matter, since the election
could be fouled up and easily called for the wrong candidate, the
only solution is a revote.
I don't think the assertion of 90% that Jennings would gain > 369
votes without ballot issues is stated correctly. This result is
predicted IF ANY random error in those precincts affected were
similar to the non-affected similar precincts, then repeated revotes
from the same population would add this number of votes about 90% of
the time....if there even wasn't a random error, and if the other
local unaffected precincts were not similar, then the numbers are
off. Regardless, it makes you think that there's certainly a reason
for Jennings to be pissed off.
Page 37-40: The authors repeat my limitations above..."we assume
that, if elections were commonly administered across counties...."
and "There are no further substantial and systematic voting machine
or ballot format effects...." The authors are not idiots, but they
were on a mission to conclude something that excluded the machines
from the start so the conclusion would fit the data. We might call
this the butterfly ballot effect: if it happened in Florida, it must
be the ballot! Maybe they work for iVotronics...who knows? IF
there was a ballot design problem, it is not clear from this why
other problems were not possible.
"individual-level ballot data"? How can they get that?
Putting every race on a single page would take a LOT of pages! I
can't imagine that making it less confusing to vote! Oh, well the
authors would only put IMPORTANT races on separate pages? Maybe the
authors would give a personality test to voters to see if they were
"engaged" before voting...etc., etc...not good suggestions either.
Not really a good set of conclusion for political scientists: How
about a suggestion that the election be revoted? How about
comparison with similar undervote issues in other parts of the
country? etc., etc...
_______________________________________________
Arguments to Void Florida-13 Congress Election
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0701/S00059.htm [38]
Wednesday, 10 January 2007, 2:38 pm
Article: Michael Collins
Christine Jennings Files Contest in House of Representatives
Michael Collins [39]
“Scoop” Independent News * Washington, DC * Part 1 of 2 * (See Part 2 here) [40]
On December 20, 2006, Democratic candidate for Congress Christine Jennings filed a
Notice of Contest Regarding the Election [41] in Florida’s 13th Congressional district. Jennings trailed Republican Vern Buchanan by 369 votes at the close of voting. There was one glaring problem. The announced results showed that there
were 18,412 undervotes in Sarasota County, the heart of the district and also Jennings stronghold of support. Attorney Coffey defines an undervote as ballot lack lacks a mark for one race while others are marked.
The 18 thousand voters who showed no selection for the congressional race represent 14.9% of voters of Sarasota County voters for this election election. Florida undervoting is typically at or below
2.5%, a marked difference from election day 2006 results in Sarasota.
Even by the standards of Florida elections,this result was strange and disturbing. There were protests and excuses explanations almost immediately. Then Jennings Campaign cried foul:
“There is a real crisis in confidence among voters, not just in
Florida but throughout the country. The voters of District 13 deserve answers, but this case has much wider implications beyond Florida. This is a test case for the entire nation,” says Christine Jennings [42]
The Buchanan campaign immediately dismissed Jennings complaints. They continue to do so in vigorous terms. “Undeterred by the facts and despite some good advice from even the most strident Democrats who cautioned against challenging the election in the U.S. House, Christine Jennings has now filed a baseless notice of contest that will potentially cost taxpayers millions of dollars on top of what is already being spent on litigation.
The Buchanan Campaign, 20 Dec. 2006 [43]
The Election Contest
Federal election law provides for challenges to elections when serious questions arise concerning elections - Federal Contested Election Act (P.L.91-138, 83 Stat. 284). Election contests have declined considerably since the 1930’s but they remain part of the rules and procedures of the U. S. House of Representatives. Just two months before this election, then House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer [44] of Maryland urged the House Committee on Administration to clarify and clean up election contest. Hoyer anticipated a number of very tight races and noted problems with the law and procedures. His suggestions were dismissed by the Republican controlled committee. House procedures and precedents will be considered in Part 2 of this series.
Core Arguments Presented in the Jennings Challenge
The election contest was filed with noted Miami attorney Kendall Coffey as lead counsel. His web site notes that he specializes in high stakes and high profile cases. He represented Al Gore in the 2000 Florida recount and before that, Cuban child refugee Elian Gonzalez.
The Jennings case as presented relies on four key arguments.
(1) The evidence available from voting in the 13th district and other parts
of the state plus the known security vulnerabilities of the ES&S iVotronic touch screen voting machine show that there is “no possibility” that 14.9% of the voters in Sarasota
County intentionally withheld votes.
(2) The evidence
gathered by extensive voter testimonials demonstrates that
there were significant numbers of voters who wished to vote
for candidate Jennings but encountered problems with the
iVotronic touch screen voting machine.
(3) There is a
strong correlation between the date iVotronic touch screens
were prepared for voting and incidents of
undervoting.
(4) Statistical analysis shows that
incremental reductions of in undervotes would result in a
Jennings victory beginning with just 2000 fewer
undervotes
There are supporting points as well, including a discussion of the Jennings case in
Florida Court to open up ES&S computer source code for examination
The conclusion drawn from the evidence is simple: the election should be held null and void, there should be a new election, and no one should be sworn in or seated in Congress until after the new
election.
Sarasota County
undervotes were six times higher than those in other
counties in the 13th Congressional district. Sarasota
County was Democrat Jennings’ strongest base of
support.
Argument 1:
Evidence from Sarasota and other counties shows that the
undervotes in that county were from machine
malfunction.
Coffey presents his most persuasive
evidence immediately. He notes undervoting in Saratoga
County is six times higher than surrounding counties. The
surrounding counties have rates within expected ranges,
while Saratoga is well above the expected rate of around
2.5%. In a remarkable move, Coffey then shows that within
Saratoga County, there is a major difference in undervotes
based on the type of voting machine used. iVotronic touch
screen voting machines were used for early in person voting.
The rate of undervoting was 17.6%. Optical scan readers and
special paper ballots were used for early voting by mail.
The undervote rate for these 22 thousand votes was “only
2.5%, which is consistent with historical norms and
expectations.” (p. 8)
Thus, in the opening argument of
the contest, Coffey compares Sarasota undervotes with
surrounding counties and then within Sarasota County based
on voting machine type. In both cases, the Sarasota
iVotronic voting machines produce undervote totals six to
seven times those normally expected. In research terms,
both between group and within group
comparisons support the Jennings arguments. This is quite
an accomplishment given that Coffey is dealing with
after-the-fact evidence.
Within Sarasota
county, early voting results show iVotronic touch screen
machines produced far more undervotes than optical scan
ballot readers.
Anticipating a
challenge to his position, Coffee points out that
disaffection or disgust with negative campaigning, a
purported cause for undervoting, could not be the cause
since this was not reflected in other counties in the
congressional district. He also argues that the poor
ballot design argument advanced by some is not viable
either. In the famous 2000 butterfly ballot fiasco in Palm
Beach, a poorly designed ballot by popular agreement,
undervotes only totaled 1%. There is no precedent for this
level of undervoting as an election day phenomena.
The
poor ballot design argument relies on what election
defenders term as the confused voter argument. Were the 15%
of the voters confused on election day by a ballot that had
one of the hottest races in the state? Not so argues
Coffey: voters were motivated to vote, the race was an
obvious focus as they entered the polling booth, and while
not perfect, the ballot clearly showed the contestants in
the congressional race.
Of real interest, Coffey offers an
explanation for the phenomenon. He claims that poor ballot
design interacting with ES&S source code was the culprit
that caused voting machines to malfunction. The
configuration of the ballot, he asserts, probably triggered
problems with the ESS computer source code that denied the
voting rights of thousands for whom no vote was recorded.
This is consistent with an analysis from Professor Dan
Wallach [45] of Rice University who suggests that ES&S voting
machine source code problems prevent actual votes from
registering, thus producing undervotes.
Argument
2: The evidence gathered by extensive voter testimonials
demonstrates that there were significant numbers of voters
who wished to vote for candidate Jennings but encountered
problems with the iVotronic touch screen voting
machine.
The totally unexpected and unprecedented undervoting found only in Sarasota County is
further explained as a machine problem by voter testimonials presented in the election contest brief.
There was no warning or mention of any problems however, I was aware there may be a problem with the Congressional vote based on various media reports. I went through the ballot and specifically remember voting for Christine Jennings. When I arrived at the review screen,
there was no candidate selected for the Congressional vote. I called a poll worker over and explained the situation and she told me that I did not “press hard enough” when selecting the vote (p. 14)
This voter report covers a number of points that appear through out the citizen testimonials. The voter heard about voting problems with the touch screens in Sarasota County and took care to cast a ballot for Jennings. When receiving assistance, the voter was then informed about the need to press hard in order for the vote to count.
When I got to the review page, my vote for Christine Jennings was not reflected. I called out to a poll worker to alert them that my vote…had not been recorded. The poll worker who came to assist me informed me that the same thing had happened to her when she voted earlier. (p. 15)
In these and other voter reports included in the brief, the same pattern occurs again and again. Voters intended to and did vote for Jennings only to find out at the review screen
that no vote was marked.
After describing the same type of problems and the difficulties voting for Jennings, one
voter said “I am registered Republican and I believe these machines failed democracy.”
Kendall Coffey
Evidence was gathered from the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections office in the form
of incident reports and other documentation. Coffey found that county officials were aware of clear problems with the iVotronic machines well in advance of the election. Despite
the foreknowledge of problems; the county did nothing to correct the problems.
Argument 3: There is a strong correlation between the date iVotronic touch screens
were prepared for voting and incidents of undervoting.
Professor Stewart of MIT provides analysis found a possible explanation for the machine
malfunction.
The machines prepared in the final days before the deadline for completing all such preparations exhibited the highest congressional undervote rates.
Another strong correlation exists between the number of machines “cleared and tested on a given date and the undervote rate: “As the county’s staff or consultants got busier clearing and testing more machines on a singled day, the Congressional undervoting rate climbed.” The
graph (p. 23) shows that on September 19, October 2, and October 5, 2006 only one machine was cleared and tested a day. Those machines had a 7% undervote rate. On October 17, 2006, 158 machines were cleared and tested. That group produced election day undervote
rates of 21%.
Argument 4: Statistical analysis shows that incremental reductions of undervoting
would result in a Jennings victory beginning with just 2000 less undervotes
The contest brief then goes on to present remarkable evidence supporting the claim that had
the touch screen machines worked, Jennings would have been the clear winner
To support the Jennings victory hypothesis, he uses additional analysis by Professor
Stewart, a proponent of electronic voting. The MIT political scientist analyzed the race and developed a formula that demonstrates a relationship between excess undervotes (any number above 3%) and their impact on the election.
This chart developed by Charles Steward, PhD, MIT shows the relationship between
reduced undervotes due to machine error and a Jennings victory margin. With just 2000 fewer undervotes, Jennings would have won by 100 or so votes. As excess undervotes are eliminated, the Jennings victory margin increases. The final bar at the right represents the actual number of excess undervotes. Jennings would have won by 3000 votes in this scenario. Stewart’s calculations evaluated ballots based on the pattern of voter selections to determine the
likely vote – Democrat or Republican (p. 25).
The Case So Far
At this point, Jennings has two cases critical to her success. She is suing ES&S in Florida Court to force production of the computer source code for the iVotronic voting machines in Sarasota County. The court has heard but not yet ruled on her request. Success there will
bolster her case before the U.S. House of Representatives. Failure will no stop her case however. Even without a smoking gun in the form of inadequate source code, there is
more than enough evidence that the majority of undervotes were due to machine malfunction. Even the most adamant coincidence theorist would have to admit that. Since the voters intended to vote but were denied that right, it is argued, the election should be declared void and a new one held.
This case presents an interesting political question. Who will be seated for this race? Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated that she has not decided yet, which is very bad news for Buchanan who is already inviting people to his induction ceremony. A recent California ruling asserted the Speaker’s nearly an absolute right [46] to swear in whomever he or she thinks is the winner of a race.
Danaher Shouptronic and Advantage Machines to Be Put to Test
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=genera_press_re_07... [47]
March 4, 2007
Mercuri, Lopresti, and Princeton to Conduct Examination
Press Conference Monday 3/5/07, 1:30 p.m.
Coalition for Voting Integrity to Announce Purchase/Investigation of Danaher (Shouptronic) and Sequoia Advantage Full-Face Touchscreen Machines Discarded by Counties in Tennessee and North Carolina, brought to Pennsylvania and New Jersey for research purposes. Leading voting security experts Dr. Rebecca Mercuri and Dr. Dan Lopresti to be present to take questions. (Princeton University also to take part in study).
"Extraordinary opportunity" says Dr. Dan Lopresti of Lehigh University.
March 2, 2007
Doylestown, PA -
On Monday, March 5 in the Pearl S. Buck room of the Doylestown Free Library at 1:30PM, the Coalition of Voting Integrity, along with Dr. Rebecca Mercuri and Dr. Dan Lopresti, will announce the recent purchase and study plans for discarded Danaher/Shouptronic and Sequoia Advance full-face electronic voting machines from counties in Tennessee and North Carolina.
The Danaher/Shouptronic and Sequoia full-face voting machines were purchased for $25 each from counties in Tennessee and North Carolina, which had discarded the machines. The machines were picked up by members of CVI and delivered to leading electronic voting security expert, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, Dr. Dan Lopresti of LehighUniversity and the Princeton research laboratory, which recently garnered national attention when it repeatedly demonstrated the vulnerability and hackability of electronic voting machines including the Diebold AccuVote-TS machine and Sequoia'sAVC. The Danaher/Shouptonic and Sequoia machines will be examined by all three researchers for various operational issues including why full-face voting machines have consistently demonstrated the highest amount of lost votes (undervotes) in the nation.
"Electronic voting is still a controversial issue," said Dr. Dan Lopresti. "Given its fundamental importance to our democracy, there are far too many unanswered questions. That's why we're so excited at Lehigh to now have examples of three such machines used in real elections around the country, including a Danaher / Shouptronic Model 1242 like the kind used in BucksCounty. We plan to take a close look at these machines to try to figure out why certain problems, including reports of chronic undervoting in the Danaher system, continue to persist." He continued, "This opportunity to study e-voting hardware and software is extraordinary since local elections officials have generally forbidden independent evaluations of their equipment."
Legal counsel will also be present to address questions concerning pending legal actions and the significance of the planned research into full-face voting machines.
Excellent photo opportunity: At the press conference, CVI will introduce its own Danaher/Shouptronic machine, "Shoupy," which will be covered in band-aids to send the message that all touchscreen machines are flawed stopgap devices that do nothing to address the country's voting crisis and indeed make it worse. Shoupy will also sport a sign reading "So Easy and So Wrong."
The Danaher/Shouptronic machines are used in six counties inPennsylvania, including Bucks, Philadelphia, Delaware and Berks. The Sequoia Advantage electronic machine is used in Montgomery County among others. The Danaher/Shouptronic machine alone represents the second largest block ofPennsylvania voters. Together, the Danaher/Shouptronic and Sequoia systems control enough Pennsylvania votes to have a significant impact on the outcome of any state and national election.
The press conference will also feature a live debut of her great new song, "If You Want To Be A Voter (The Ballad of Sarasota)" by Buckingham musician Lori Rosolowsky. The song incorporates historic American battleground references as it chronicles the Sarasota County 13th Congressional District election in November 2006, in which 18,000 (15%) of votes casts were not counted. The election was decided by 369 votes. The legal and social implications for that election in BucksCounty and nationally will also be discussed. Free downloads of the song and lyrics are available at http://www.voiceofthevoters.org [48]
CVI co-founders Mary Ann Gould and Ruth Matheny will:
· Announce a major new policy position regarding electronic voting machines and pending legislation.
· Call for a county, state and nationwide ban of touchscreen voting machines.
· Call on the Commissioners of Bucks and other counties to move away from a defense of the purchase ofDRE's, since data is available every week to prove that they do not work, and to instead work together to replace the DREs for both financial and security reasons.
**********************************
WHAT: Press conference to announce CVI's purchase of Danaher/Shouptronic and Sequoia Advantage full-face voting machines.
WHEN: Monday, March 5, 1:30PM
WHERE: Pearl S. Buck Room, Doylestown Free Library 150 S. Pine Street Doylestown, PA 18901-4932
Background:
Read about the Coalition for Voting Integrity at www.SaveOurVote.com [49]
Listen to CVI's nationally known radio show, Voice of the Voters: the Power and Responsibility of Democracy via our archives at: http://mysite.verizon.net/resq4lzq/cvi/id267.html [50]
Listen to leaders from the voting issues community to the halls of Congress, who have been interviewed on Voice of the Voters, the Power and Responsibility of Democracy, including Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12), Rep. Ron Paul (TX-14), voting rights activist and academic, Dr. Avi Rubin, civil rights attorney Joann Bonifaz, Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Dr. Gordon Wood and University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Steve Freeman.
Three relevant reports from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU:
The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World at http://www.brennancenter.org/stack_detail.asp?key=97&subkey=36343&proj_k... [51]
Most broadly, the report found:
· All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections.
· The most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied if proper countermeasures are implemented at the state and local level.
· Few jurisdictions have implemented any of the key countermeasures that could make the least difficult attacks against voting systems much more difficult to execute successfully.
The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Usability at http://www.brennancenter.org/stack_detail.asp?key=97&subkey=36941 [52]
The Brennan Center report concluded that two of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems today are better at recording voter intentions than older systems like the punchcard system used in Florida in 2000. At the same time, the report faulted one electronic voting system under consideration in New Yorkand in use in parts of New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Arkansas,Indiana,Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. This system, the "full faceDRE," continues to unduly hamper voters' ability to easily and accurately cast a ballot for their preferred candidate without undue burden, confusion and delay.
Among the report's key findings:
Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) and Scrolling Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems are more accurate at recording voter intention than older voting systems. In 2004, residual vote rates were less than 1% for both technologies.
Full-face DRE systems continue to be plagued with an unacceptably high residual vote rate. In 2000, 2002 and 2004, it exceeded that of either PCOS or scrolling DRE systems.
Residual vote rates among voters earning less then $25,000 are higher on full-face DREs (2.8%), than on either PCOS (1.4%) or Scrolling DREs (1.3%).
The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Security, Accessibility, Usability, and Cost at http://www.brennancenter.org/stack_detail.asp?key=97&subkey=38150 [53]
The report is the final product of the first comprehensive, empirical analysis of electronic voting systems in the United States. It comes after nearly two years of study with many of the nation's leading academics, election officials, economists, and security, usability and accessibility experts.
Up until this point, there has been surprisingly little empirical study of voting systems in the areas of security, accessibility, usability, and cost. The result is that jurisdictions make purchasing decisions and adopt laws and procedures that have little to do with their overall goals.
New Mexico also chose to discard their Danaher/Shouptronic machines due to undervotes ranging from 6 to 16 times the national average and in comparison to optical scan machines during the 2004 election.
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri's bio:
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, globally recognized as a leading authority on computer security and electronic vote tabulation and a member of the committee that advises the government on standards for electronic voting machines. She is president/CTO of Notable Software, Inc., www.notablesoftware.com [54].
A technology specialist, with degrees in computer science and engineering, Rebecca Mercuri happened to defend her doctoral dissertation "Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks & Balances" at the University of Pennsylvania, just eleven days before the 2000 U.S.Presidential election.
Subsequently, her testimony and opinions were sought in Bush v. Gore, and by the House Science Committee, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Federal Election Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, the U.K. Cabinet, and numerous U.S.state legislatures. Many of Rebecca's views on electronic voting appear on her website, and she also authors the "Security Watch" column for the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.
She has been frequently quoted in the New York Times, on National Public Radio, by the Associated Press, in the Congressional Record, and various other venues, including TV appearances on Fox News, NBC Nightline, and a debate on Lou Dobbs.
Having spent the last two years as a fellow at Harvard University, Dr. Mercuri returned this fall to New Jersey's Notable Software, Inc., the consulting company she founded, to continue her work as a forensic computing expert on a wide range of civil, municipal, and criminal cases.
Dr. Dan Lopresti's bio:
After completing his doctorate, Dr. Lopresti joined the Computer Science Department at BrownUniversity. He went on to help found the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory in Princeton, and later also served on the research staff at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. In 2003, he joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh University where he conducts research examining basic algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, bioinformatics, and computer security.
At Lehigh, Dr. Lopresti holds the Class of 1961 Chair and is co-director of the Pattern Recognition Research Lab. He has authored over 80 publications in journals and refereed conference proceedings on a wide range of topics and holds 21 U.S. Patents. He has served on dozens of conference program committees and as editor for six international conference proceedings, and is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition.
Coalition for Voting Integrity
Contact information:
Mary Ann Gould
email: [email protected] [55]
(c) 215.588.8518
(h) 215.357.5206
Coalition for Voting Integrity
email: bucks.voter.verified.paper.ballots[at]gmail.com [56]
web: http://coalitionforvotingintegrity.org [57]
ES&S i-Votronic Promotes Wrong Candidates to Congress
Wrong Winner Chosen Twice by Same Voting Machine
Examining Florida 13th and North Carolina 8th Congressional Districts Leaves Little Doubt
![[]](../../../../../stories/images/0701/e2c91ed494ce58dd1c04.jpg)
The undervotes in the Mecklenburg portion of the 8th were more than nine times the victory margin for the entire district and they occurred in a voting area that went 68% to 32% for the Democratic Party candidate, Larry Kissell.
![[]](../../../../../stories/images/0701/ffabe74eaab3c2dd9fd5.jpg)
Examining Florida 13th and North Carolina 8th Congressional Districts Leaves Little Doubt
By Michael Collins [58]
Part 2 of a Series -- (See Part 1 here [59])
The Election Contest [60] filed by Democrat Christine Jennings and her attorney Kendall Coffey creates complications that could blow the electronic voting world to pieces. In the simplest terms, the Jennings Florida 13th Congressional district case requires a review of the Kissell loss in North Carolina's 8th Congressional district. And that spells disaster for e-voting.
Why? Because both the Florida and North Carolina districts used ES&S iVotronic touchscreen voting machines. These voting machines produced very similar levels of counting errors. The errors cost both Democrats thousands of votes. Ultimately, both Democratic candidates were denied a victory by less than 400 votes.
While Jennings makes a very strong case for a voided election and new vote in Florida, the case becomes virtually unassailable when reviewing results from North Carolina. At the same time, the North Carolina 8th results, reviewed in the context of the election contest analysis of Florida's 13th, makes it abundantly clear that the loser, Kissell, should have won in almost any scenario other than voting machine malfunction.
In both districts, the iVotronic touchscreen voting machines produced undervote rates at or above 15%. What this means is that supposedly one in seven voters cast ballots but left out a choice for the most important election (an unmarked race on an otherwise marked ballot is called an undervote). The only culprit in both the Florida 13th and North Carolina 8th elections is voting machine malfunction. The facts supporting the case for losers winning don't allow for much debate in these Florida and North Carolina races. They're simple and a review leads to conclusions that devastate any trust in electronic voting.
The Florida election contest brief filed in Congress looks at data within the 13th Congressional district and data from other Florida districts. Coffey notes that the undervote rate in Sarasota County is six times the undervote rate in surrounding counties in the same district. How did that happen? These are contiguous counties and part of the same congressional district.
Coffey performs a rhetorical slam dunk by looking at undervotes for the two types of early voting in Sarasota County. Early voting by mail required voters to mark their choices on optical scan paper ballots then mail the ballots to the elections board where they were totaled using optical scan readers. Mail-in early voting undervotes were at 2.6%. In- person early voters came to central locations and voted on iVotronic touchscreens like those used in the general election. Undervotes by that method ran 17.6%. There is no reason for a difference of 15 points other than the one provided by Coffey in the Jennings case: voting machine malfunction by the iVotronics. As a result, 14,000 Sarasota County voters lost their constitutional rights. The election should be voided and a new one held.
Mecklenburg County, NC and the End of Electronic Voting
One might argue that this is an exaggerated claim but review the facts and decide yourself.
Any serious evaluation of the Jennings election contest by Congress leads right to North Carolina's Mecklenburg County, where iVotronic touch screens were used in the Jennings race and three Congressional races in Mecklenburg. That county holds the answers to both the Jennings contest and a resolution of another 2006 travesty, the loss of Democrat Larry Kissell in North Carolina's 8th Congressional District.
As a result of voting problems in 2004, North Carolina requires a paper trail for touchscreen voting machines [61]. Right now there are paper receipts for each vote cast in these three districts. The test is simple. Total the votes for Congress on paper trail receipts in each Congressional district and compare those totals to the vote totals from the iVotronic touchscreens. If paper receipts show more votes for Congress than reported by the touch screens, the variance points clearly to an iVotronic machine error. If Jennings could provide such data, this would add a compelling new level of
evidence added to her case.
If the paper trail receipts are available and examined, they represent a smoking gun that validates the Florida case. Even without the paper receipts, there is strong support to argue that the same class of touch screens used in Florida, iVotronics, produced exceptional--no, unbelievable--rates of undervotes in North Carolina, not evident in high-visibility races.
iVotronic voting machines were used in Mecklenburg County in 2006. The county contains part of three Congressional Districts. The graph on the left shows very high undervotes in the 8th and 12th. In the 8th, Democrat Kissell lost by 329 votes with an undervote rate close to that in the Jennings race.
A preliminary look at 2006 and 2004 undervote rates shows that the 2006 undervote rate in Mecklenburg County, NC indicates that the iVotronic machines throw away votes. Using the county as a whole, in 2006 the average Congressional undervote rate (for all three races) was 11%. In 2006, the Congressional race was the lead or one of the lead races. In 2004, with vote totals for President as the baseline, the undervote rate in Mecklenburg was 2.6%. Thus, undervotes increased by a factor of four from 2004 to 2006.
By investigating Jennings' claims through the use of the highly pertinent and available data from North Carolina, it becomes abundantly clear that Democrat Kissell lost that contest due to machine malfunction – by the very same type of machines used in the Jennings race. Since the undervote rates in these distant and disparate counties were almost the same, the data on Kissell supports Jennings claims.
Below you see the electronic nightmare created by analysis of the North Carolina race. The graph on the left shows 3,199 undervotes (16.6%) in Democrat Kissell's stronghold in Mecklenburg. On the right, the victory margin district-wide for Republican Hayes is shown next to the undervotes for just Mecklenburg where Democrat Kissell won by a two to one margin. The North Carolina 9th and 12th races were blowouts. The 8th was not. In the very area where Kissell was strongest, he lost 3,199 voters, many of whom would have voted for him.
Let's assume a typical rate of undervotes at a generous 3%, or 579 votes, and Kissell's Mecklenburg share of 68% of the votes couted. The math is easy. Kissell wins. Presume that Kissell's undervote rate of 16.6% is the final proof (with or without recounting the paper trail voting receipts) of voting machine malfunction in Jennings' Florida district. It's easy, Jennings wins. These numbers won't go away.
We now have two members of Congress seated as a result of elections decided by less than 400 votes. A simple analysis of current and historical data for expected undervotes shows that the double digit undervote rates in each candidate's stronghold resulted in lost votes; votes that would have lead to a victory by either of the now designated losing candidates. The first shall be last, once again.
Stay tuned.
Data Sources:
Mecklenburg County Board of Elections 8th District 11/30/06 [65]
Mecklenburg County Board of Elections 9th District 11/30/06 [66]
Mecklenburg County Board of Elections 12th District 11/30/06 [67]
Screen Shots of Districts 8, 9, 12
Mecklenburg [68]
Have a 2006 Election Investigation Item to Post?
Please go to http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/?q=unfiledposts [69]
and use that area to file new posts, following the simple instructions you will find there to
take you through the steps for creating and uploading new content.
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House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: Election Investigations
Investigations [80]
Elections and Voting
Chronology
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Ensuring Fairness and Accuracy in Elections Involving Electronic Voting Systems [81]
On
Wednesday, April 18, the Information Policy, Census, and National
Archives Subcommittee held a hearing on ensuring fairness in elections
involving electronic voting machines.
Friday, October 21, 2005
GAO: Continued Federal Efforts Needed to Improve Electronic Voting [82]
A
new GAO report released by Rep. Waxman, Chairman Davis, and eleven
other members of Congress finds security and reliability flaws in the
electronic voting process.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
GAO Asked to Investigate Election Day Lines [83]
Rep.
Waxman and Rep. Conyers ask GAO to investigate the long lines and
excessive waiting times experienced by voters in the 2004 election.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Call for GAO Investigation into Overseas Voting Problems [84]
Reps.
Waxman and Maloney ask GAO to investigate whether the Defense
Department is fulfilling its obligation to ensure that Americans living
abroad, both military and civilian, can vote.
Thursday, October 14, 2004
DOJ Unprepared to Handle Allegations of Voting Irregularities [85]
A
new GAO report released by Reps. Waxman and Conyers finds that the
Justice Department is not prepared to respond to reports of voter
intimidation and disenfranchisement in next month’s elections.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
DOD Blocking Access to Overseas Voting Assistance Website [86]
Reps.
Waxman, Maloney, and Clay write DOD regarding recent reports that the
Department is blocking access to the Federal Voting Assistance Program
website for many Americans overseas.
Friday, May 14, 2004
Members Submit Bipartisan Request for GAO Investigation of Electronic Voting [87]
Chairman
Davis, Rep. Waxman, and eleven other Members of Congress ask GAO to
study of the security and reliability of electronic voting systems.
Monday, October 01, 2001
GAO Report: 2000 Presidential Election Undercount [88]
At
the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the General Accounting Office
investigated the impact of voting equipment and the demographic
characteristics of voters on the undercount in the 2000 presidential
election. The report found that voters using punch-card machines had
the highest percentage of uncounted ballots and that switching from
punch-card machines to optical scan machines that allow voters to
correct errors could prevent hundreds of thousands of uncounted ballots.
Monday, July 09, 2001
National Voting Study: Poor and Minority Voters Are More Likely to Have Their Votes Discarded [89]
Millions
of ballots were not counted during the 2000 presidential election.
While some voters choose not to vote for any candidate or intentionally
voted for two candidates, the more common reason for votes not being
counted was faulty voting machines. Rep. Waxman was concerned that
votes of poor and minority voters might be disproportionately
discarded. Along with 20 other members of Congress, he asked the
Special Investigations Division to investigate whether voters in
low-income, high-minority districts were more likely to have their
votes discarded than voters in affluent, low-minority districts. He
also asked the Special Investigations Division to investigate the
impact of technology on the undercount. The report examined 40
congressional districts in 20 states. Twenty of these districts had
high poverty rates and a high minority population. Twenty of the
districts were relatively affluent and had a low minority population.
The report found that voters in low-income, high-minority districts
were over three times more likely to have their votes discarded as
voters in affluent, low-minority districts. But the report also found
that improved voting technology can reduce the number of uncounted
ballots cast by voters in districts with high poverty rates and high
minority population by up to 85%, significantly reducing the disparity
between the two groups.
Thursday, April 05, 2001
Investigation Finds Detroit Election Reforms Worked [90]
At
the request of Rep. Waxman, the Special Investigations Division
conducted a case study of efforts to reduce uncounted ballots in
Detroit, the nation's poorest city. The investigation found that
Detroit's reforms worked. By replacing punch-card machines and
conducting voter education, Detroit reduced the percent of uncounted
votes for president by two-thirds between 1996 and 2000. The report was
released during a “Special Investigations Briefing” on April 5, 2001.
Displaying Items 1 to 10 of 10:
To see earlier reports, go to the original source at :http://oversight.house.gov/investigations.asp?ID=117 [91]
FACT SHEETS AND REPORTS
Summaries of State Election Procedures [92]
This
2002 report details election procedures in the 50 states and the
District of Columbia and includes information on voting technologies
and recount procedures.
Missing Votes in Ohio 2006 Call Races into Question
or
http://tinyurl.com/yjnu47 [108]
(Also see related article [109] by Richard Hayes Phillips)
"An analysis by the Free Press documents massive discrepancies between the unofficial turnout reported by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell immediately following the election and the official general election turnout numbers reported in December 2006."
by Bob Fitrakis
January 2, 2007
While Democratic Party supporters celebrate their success in Ohio, where their statewide candidates won four out of five executive offices and they now control both the U.S. House and Senate, they are ignoring massive and verifiable irregularities in the 2006 election. Similar irregularities – including missing votes, undervotes and overvotes – may come back to haunt the Democrats in the 2008 general election.
The only statewide partisan loss for the Democrats was also the closest contest. Republican Mary Taylor defeated Democrat Barbara Sykes for State Auditor by an official vote of 50.64% to 49.36%. Taylor prevailed by 48,826 votes. The Columbus Dispatch’s final poll, usually the most accurate in the state for candidate races, predicted Sykes would win by 10%.
An analysis by the Free Press documents massive discrepancies between the unofficial turnout reported by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell immediately following the election and the official general election turnout numbers reported in December 2006. These discrepancies may help explain Sykes’ unexpected loss.
In Cuyahoga County which contains the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, immediately following the election 562,498 votes were reported cast with 30,791 listed as absentee or provisional ballots. The official results show 468,056 counted in Cuyahoga. This means that 94,442 ballots cast in the unofficial total disappeared in the official tallies. This represents a shocking 16.8% of all the votes cast in Cuyahoga.
Sykes won 62% of the vote in Cuyahoga County.
Cuyahoga County uses the controversial Diebold touchscreen voting machines. These machines suffered a notorious meltdown in the 2006 primary where many machines malfunctioned and an Election Science Institute (ESI) report documented significant differences between votes
actually cast on the machines as opposed to counted.
Similarly in Lucas County, another Democratic stronghold, 17,351 votes disappeared (10.6% of the total vote) between the unofficial and official turnout numbers. An analysis by Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips indicates that Taylor, a first-time statewide office seeker, ran significantly ahead of Republican incumbent candidates Mike Dewine and Betty Montgomery, in the Senate and Attorney General races respectively.
Other counties with significant and unexplained loss of votes include: Auglaize (15.7%), Coshocton (14.1%), Jackson (11.3%), Licking (14.1%), Morrow (17.4%), and Tuscarawas (11.7%). In these less populated counties, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland won in five out of six and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod won in four out of the six.
Normally, the official total vote tally increases as provisional ballots are added to the unfficial total. For example, Franklin County had 342,958 votes unofficially with 46,458 provisionals and a few late overseas absentee ballots. The official Franklin County result was
385,863 votes cast, a pickup of 42,905 ballots once the provisionals were counted. Eleven of Ohio’s 88 counties reported this anomaly of fewer votes in the official total than the unofficial total.
Other election anomalies that bear further investigation are six counties with improbable undervote percentages in the U.S. Senate race. On average in Ohio, 3.9% of the ballots contained an “undervote,” meaning no vote was cast in the Senate race. But, in the Senate race
there were significant undervote totals: Adams County had 14.1%; Darke County had 13.5%; Highland had 13.8%; Mercer had 11.2%; Montgomery had 13.8%; and Perry had 16.3%. The city of Dayton is in Montgomery County where more than 30,000 ballots recorded no vote for Senate. Brown won 53% of the vote in Montgomery County.
In comparison with the undervote in the well-known District 13 race in Sarasota, Florida, the undervote was 18,382.
In the Sykes race, the undervote for Auditor in Cuyahoga County was 10.7%. Undervotes were 8.3% of the total vote in Lucas County. Skyes’ undervote total in these Democratic havens should have been examined along with the bizarre unofficial vs. official vote totals in these counties.
The state auditor’s office in Ohio has enormous power to investigate and root out official corruption involving public funds. Many critics of Republican Party scandals in Ohio have pointed to the GOP’s control of the state auditor’s office as the key to delaying and minimizing public scrutiny.
Franklin County and the Squire Challenge
Although the election numbers are stranger in Cuyahoga and Lucas counties for the Democrats, an election contest complaint filed in the Franklin County Court of Appeals by Judge Carol Squire documents in great detail the problem with electronic voting machines based on the
results of her 2006 race. Incumbent Squire filed the action on December 22 after losing by 13,064 votes to Chris Geer for a seat on the County Court of Common Pleas.
The action seeks to “declare invalid and set aside” Squire’s loss. The complaint requests a full evidentiary hearing.
Squire hired Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, President and Chief Technical Officer of Notable Software, Inc. as an expert witness and investigator. The former Bryn Mawr computer science professor holds a Ph.D. in computer and informational science from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Mercuri’s sworn affidavit contains detailed criticisms of the Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) and its conduct of the 2006 election. Her sworn statements include the following:
- 35 precincts were unable to close “due to problems with printers, machine malfunctions, infrared readers, PEBs [personal electronic ballots] . . . .” Squire paid for a recount of these 35 precincts but the BOE used the real time audit log (RTAL) paper tapes to recount only
2 of the 35 precincts. The RTALs are the only way to accurately assess how people really voted on the Election Day. - In the BOE warehouse “hundreds of RTAL paper rolls were sitting out on various tables . . . It had been my understanding that sealed containers holding the rolls would be open only in the presence of observers, but this apparently had already been done, and the rolls extracted, prior to the observers’ arrival.”
- “Many of the rolls” lacked “tamper-proof” tape, which seals the RTALs at the end of Election Day in case of a recount. Instead, they had stickers which could be easily tampered with.
- “Some of the [RTAL] rolls did not have a sticker” leaving them open for tampering or accidental destruction.
- “. . . Others [RTALs] had a sticker with han