Shallow Thoughts : : election04

Boxer to Support Conyers in Protest Over Ohio Vote

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has signed a protest launched by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) regarding irregularities in the Ohio vote, as reported this morning by the AP (via Yahoo, via ABC News).

Conyers' report can be found on the House Committee on the Judiciary's page, including the PDF report and some supplementary documents (all PDF except the video): a film by Linda Byrket called "Video the Vote", text of a fundraising letter Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, and Eyewitness Accounts of Ohio Voter Disenfranchisement. Conyers' report is described in this Fox News story.

John Kerry has not joined the protest.

This is not expected to alter the outcome of the 2004 election; both houses are expected to certify the election tomorrow. But it will force both houses to break from election certification tomorrow, and have a public discussion of up to two hours on some of the problems seen in the election. Perhaps it will pave the way for changes in future elections.

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 11:29 Jan 06, 2005    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]

Programmer alleges FL congressman commissioned vote altering code

This story has been floating around for a few days now, but I've hesitated to write about it because it sounds potentially fishy and I was hoping some of the questions would get answered.

In a nutshell: Florida programmer Clint Curtis has filed documents with the FBI claiming that while he was working for Yang Enterprises, Tom Feeny (then a FL state representative and lobbyist for Yang, now a US Congressman) asked him to develop prototype software in order to rig the vote in Florida. (story in Wired) (story on Blue Lemur)

All rather suspicious, but there are lots of questionable aspects to the story. Why did Curtis wait so long to come clean? He claims that he assumed any such software would be easily detectable through source code inspection, and it was only after recently reading that voting software was proprietary that he had the shocking realization that perhaps there wasn't much source code review going on. It's hard to believe that a programmer who had worked on such a project would have been able to miss this point for so long.

Curtis has apparently also been to the FBI complaining about Yang's ethics before, on an unrelated charge. Details are skimpy about what that charge was, or what the resolution was, but until those details are available, one has to be slightly skeptical.

On Curtis' side, the fact that Yang nor Sweeney are willing to comment on the story suggests that there may be some truth to it. If his past allegations against Yang, or other aspects of the case, cast doubt on his claims, wouldn't they be pointing to that?

That the FBI is unwilling to comment is not surprising: investigation is ongoing, and I wouldn't expect any comment from investigators at this point.

It seems unlikely that Curtis' actual code was used, in any case. He had no access to the voting machine software, and simply wrote some scripts in Visual Basic as a proof of concept. But we'll likely never know for sure, since the public hasn't had access to the voting machines for quite some time and it would be quite easy for any such evidence to have been long since wiped from memory. (Though perhaps forensic analysis of the disks might reveal something?)

Still, it's an interesting story, and it'll be fun to see how it resolves.

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 14:20 Dec 14, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]

Blackbox Voting Exposes Poll Tape Fraud

Installment one of Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting.org's Freedom of Information Request: the Stinking Poll Tapes.

Harris & company went to Volusia County, Florida to request the "poll tapes" from the election: the printed record that each machine produces at the end of the day, signed and dated by election workers.

What they were given was unsigned printouts dated November 16, the day before their arrival.

Upon investigating, they found several curious things:

1. Elections officials meeting clustered over poll tapes, who shut the door on them when they asked what was going on;
2. A garbage bag full of original, signed poll tapes, dated the day of the election;
3. Another garbage bag of original poll tapes at a different location;
4. Apparent discrepancies between the original, signed, dated poll tapes and the supposed copies which the elections officials had originally tried to give them.

This is all over the blogosphere, but doesn't appear to have hit much of the mainstream press so far, not even Wired, except for one early article in the East Volusia News-JournalOnline. But the story making the rounds claims Black Box Voting has it all on video.

Stay tuned!

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 00:12 Nov 20, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]

93,000 Extra Votes In Cuyahoga County?

Teed Rockwell, of the Philosophy Department, Sonoma State University, published a few days ago a sizzling article on ballot totals in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Using the numbers from the county's official election results web site, he shows 29 different precincts which report vote counts well in excess of the total number of registered voters, for a grand total of 93,136 more votes than registered voters. For example, Highland Hills Village, which has 760 registered voters, had 8,822 ballots cast.

One possible explanation comes in an AP story, Kerry campaign lawyers checking Ohio vote, which says that "the numbers also include absentee votes in congressional and legislative districts that overlap those cities", which wrongly inflates the numbers, and quotes Ohio elections board chairman Michael Vu as saying "All the numbers are correct. You have to first understand what an absentee precinct is." The story doesn't go on to explain what an absentee precinct is; it looks like absentee ballots are assigned to counties other than the county of registration, or possibly absentee voters aren't included in registration numbers at all.

Meanwhile, a blog called "Political Strategy" reports on an editorial on the Zogby pollling web site, in Zogby Website Asserts 'Massive Voter Fraud'. I can't actually read the linked Zogby page (either they've pulled it, or they have some sort of bug in their server code) but in addition to calling attention to the fishy Cuyahoga results, they discuss the statistical unliklihood of some of the Florida results already showcased elsewhere.

Recount update: Cobb (Green) and Badnarik (Libertarian) are officially requesting an Ohio recount, while Nader and Camejo have requested a recount in New Hampshire. There's more recount news on ReDefeat Bush (which I found by way of their Google ad when I googled for recount news -- cool!)

A final giggle: on the subject of why the exit polls were so wrong (I still haven't seen anyone quoting numbers!), Craig Crawford of Congressional Quarterly and CBS suggested that the exit polls may have been wrong about Bush because of the "David Duke effect," an election in which he got many more votes than was reflected in what pollsters found because "people didn't want to admit to exit pollsters they'd voted for David Duke, the head of the Ku Klux Klan, because they didn't want to admit they were a racist. So perhaps a lot of voters didn't want to admit they voted for Bush."

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 22:11 Nov 15, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]

Recent roundup of post-election voting stories

I've been hearing a lot of talk about how the official results don't match the exit poll numbers: how the exit polls show a Kerry win, and that's evidence of a hacked vote. For example, Those faulty exit polls were sabotage in The Hill, or A Tour of the 2004 Exit Poll: What It Says and What It Doesn't, part one and part two on Donkey Rising.

What I haven't been able to find is anything with data to confirm this, one way or the other. CNN has an interactive page allowing checks of specific aspects of exit poll data, but that's no help for analyzing nationwide data, say, by county. And in any case, it seems that CNN changed the online data after the fact, so there's no telling what this means in terms of raw numbers.

Lawrence Lessig gives the answer, in Free the Exit Poll Data: the poll numbers are privately held, not publically available. Lessig calls for the data to be made public, so that it will be possible to find out why the numbers were so misleading compared to the final election tally. You'd think both sides would be interested in knowing what went wrong.

Terrific maps for visualizing the election

Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results gives a wonderful set of maps showing "purple states" by county, with the sizes adjusted for population.

Other stories about voting irregularities:

Outrage in Ohio: Angry residents storm State House in response to massive voter suppression and corruption (Michigan Independant Media Center): Protests on November 3 in Ohio over all the voting problems the state experienced. Includes lots of anecdotes about voters who experienced problems.

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results (US Together): a comparison of party registration data to reported election results in Florida counties using different types of voting equipment. In counties using touchscreen machines, the percentage vote for Kerry matched the party registrations fairly closely; in counties using optical scan machines, there's a huge shift over to Bush votes, completely uncorrelated with party affiliation. The article includes a data table by county.

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked (Common Dreams): a text discussion of the US Together results, their correlation with exit poll results, and some discussion of possible explanations other than foul play (and why those reasons are unlikely to be the actual explanation).

Palm Beach County Logs 88,000 More Votes Than Voters (Washington Dispatch): Palm Beach County's official election results web site showed 542,835 ballots were cast for a presidential candidate while only 454,427 voters turned out for the election. Apparently they've since updated the web site to show numbers that add up. I guess this tells us how far we can trust the "official" numbers on the web site.

Tons of other links on the Op Ed News: Votergate 2004 page.

Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, Ralph Nader and others have teamed up for Help America Recount, a project to buy recounts in Ohio and other states. They're soliciting donations. I'd love to see recounts, but what they don't explain is where the money is going. What's involved in getting a recount, and does it cost money, or is this to pay salaries and expenses of the (volunteer?) people doing the counting, or what? The effort sounds like it might be a little disorganized at the moment.

Kerry Won. . . (Tom Paine.common Sense): Editorial about irregularities in various states. No new data, though.

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 12:31 Nov 12, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]

Update: some recent stories on election irregularities

An older style touchscreen machine made by Danaher Controls gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus.

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. UniLect, the manufacturer of the touchscreen machines used, told officials that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes. The missing votes are gone forever; there is no way to retrieve them.

In Broward County, FL (remember the missing absentee ballots?) it was discovered that a bug in an ES&S machine changed the outcome on at least one proposition. Seems that the software (for counting votes on absentee ballots) doesn't expect more than 32,000 votes in a precinct; so when the tally crosses that number, the machine starts counting backward!

Meanwhile, the ACLU is suing over the lost Broward County absentee ballots.

A national voting rights group has reported hundreds of voting irregularities in the south affecting poor and minority voters.

Latest word (from Equal Vote) is that Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has said that Ohio's provisional votes will not be counted for 11 days (if at all).

Black Box Voting has filed a massive Freedom of Information Act request for computer logs (including internal audit logs, transmission logs, and others), voting results slips, any email or other communication relating to problems with voting systems, and other information relating to the operation of electronic voting machines.

Voters Unite has an excellent listing of stories on many other voting problems found so far.

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 11:05 Nov 06, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]

WIMPS!

I knew the Demo-wimps were going to fold, just like they did in 2000 -- but I didn't think they'd do it before the first vote count was even finished!

I can't believe Kerry conceded already. What about all the promises the Democrats have been making us for the past several months about pushing lawsuits on voting technology and voter eligibility? What about all the lawsuits already filed?

I guess nobody cares any more that there's no way to verify anyone's vote, that the voting technology of the country is entirely in the hands of one party. A show of democracy is all that's required; the actual votes, from actual citizens, are far less important than the pretense of voting.

The morning's quick summary of voting machine glitches reported yesterday, at Wired: Watchdogs Spot E-Vote Glitches. The stories include ballots already pre-filled in Palm Beach County, FL, reports of misvoting (touching the box for one candidate and seeing an "X" appear by a different candidate) in FL, TX, and other states, machines in Texas instructed to vote straight party tickets actually casting votes for candidates outside that party, and voters in six Pennsylvania precints prevented from voting due to voting machine failures,

I should mention that Wired has had the best and most comprehensive coverage all along of the e-voting fiasco, beginning many months before any of the other mainstream media would mention the subject. Follow the links from that story, or just search for keywords like voting machines or Diebold. Or check out the original anti voting machine activist site: BlackBoxVoting.com and its sister site BlackBoxVoting.org.

Also, two excellent Cringley columns on the subject:
A Year Into the E-voting Crisis, Shouldn't We Have Noticed the Printer That's Already Built into Each Diebold Voting Machine?,
and Why the Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at All

But Kerry and the DNC aren't fighting against any of that. They signed on until November 2, and now that's past and they can go back to having garden parties or whatever they do for three and a half years between conceding elections.

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 11:00 Nov 03, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]

Blocked voter registrations

As long as I'm collecting links to news stories, here are some about attempts to block voter registration or otherwise intimidate or discourage voters. States involved: Nevada, Florida, Oregon, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa.

• Las Vegas Review Journal
• Ann Arbor News
• The Columbus Dispatch
• Des Moines Register
• Tallahassee Democrat
• Century Foundation on Ohio challenges
• Century Foundation on Missouri
• Century Foundation on Michigan
• Brennan Center on Michigan

Tags: politics, election04, elections, voting
[ 23:07 Nov 02, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry | ]