The Future of Elections – Accurate & Fair – Election Reform News 26 Feb 2007

[autorank]

Election Fraud, Research & Discussion NewsNovember 26, 2006

1) Weekly Comment (also http://tinyurl.com/369pn6">Here)
2) Weekly Links Here

Featuring DU Poster rumple’s analysis of Diebold and LA County
"Diebolding" Our Elections

This strategy prevents voting-machine errors from affecting the election results.

1. Bar codes can be used on the paper receipts to make recounts faster and more reliable.

Response: Bar codes are impossible for the voter to verify, and can deviate from the human-readable data. This undermines their trustworthiness for elections..

2. Paper receipts are an effective antidote to ballot tampering.

Response: If a receipt gets "misprinted," some voters will overlook the error, others will blame themselves. Even if a machine becomes suspect, its earlier errors can't be culled.

Errors such as these can be designed to appear accidental and to leave no evidence to the contrary. Professional hackers don't leave digital "fingerprints."


3. Touch-screen systems can produce paper receipts, but cannot produce paper ballots.

Response: Touch-screen systems can be designed to produce true paper ballots.
• The touch-screen module would help the voter prepare a ballot image that is free of overvotes, undervotes, ambiguous markings, and illegible write-ins.
• When satisfied with the ballot image, the voter would instruct the machine to print a true paper ballot, which the voter then verifies and deposits in the ballot box.
• The official vote count is tallied from the paper ballots. (Tallies from the touch-screen modules are unofficial, and serve as a check on the official tallies.)

This strategy prevents voting-machine errors from affecting the election results.

[In Truth We Trust]

1. K&R Hand Counted Paper Ballots! Nothing More Nothing Less! Thanks Autorank! Great Post. I hope peopl

e take time to read it and understand it. It is imperative that we accept nothing more and nothing less than hcpb's. NO source code anywhere. NO "receipts". No "trail".

The most secure transparent ballot that also happens to be the simplest and cheapest method is hand counted paper ballots.

We need a constitutional amendment requiring hcpb's.

Thank you Michael for your good works and for your diligence. It is very much so appreciated.

Peace.

[stellanoir]

2. Honored to give the 5th rec

'cause it's totally spankable. LOL

[Me.]

3. With AG Looking Over Me

I'm giving this a K & R

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. The Troubled, Twisted, Sometimes Invisible Paper Trail

Below are the trouble reports from a touchscreen/paper trail county in
North Carolina.

The reports are for Mecklenburg County in the May primary and November General Election.

The report lists the many different problems with the touch-screens and their tempermental thermal printers, printers that often jammed or failed.

The NC Coalition for Verified Voting predicted these problems in advance and had urged all NC counties to purchase the tried and true optical scan systems and not the touch-screen machines. (See www.ncvoter.net )

Here are the details

Mecklenburg trouble report, types of problems, by category, see the link for more detail

-Paper jams, screen freezes, programming errors etc listed.
-Panel would not charge.
-Screen freeze.
-Out of calibration.
-Printer folding edge of paper.
-Flash error/CRC error
-Power shut down.
-Printer frozen/power issue
-Half of screen missing.
-"Locked up".
-CJ could not open panel
-Battery low.
-Printer door won't lock.
-Corrupted flashcard - message.
-Pct wkrs could not change paper roll.
-RTAL not found - message
-Panel beeping, screen frozen.
-Chirping, but dead.
-4 panels had printers not working
-No response on 3 machines
-Broken leg.
-Panel fell/release latch won't work.
-Panel would not accept Master PEB.
-Ballot will not display.
-Goes directly to Party Select when Master -
-ADA programmed wrong.
-Paper roll on backwards
-Can't make selections when press screen.
-ADA problem, audio tried - blank screen.
-Time setting is off by 1 hour

They had deployed slightly over a thousand touch-screen machines to the polling places.

http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/Mecklenburg_2006_Trouble_Report.pdf

[L. Coyote]

5. OPINION: Making sure votes count

Article published Thursday, February 22, 2007
Making sure votes count - http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070222/OPINION02/702220316

FOR a while on election night in 2004, it seemed as though the presidential winner might be determined by Ohio's "provisional ballots."

.....

Most people who cast them don't know this, even though they have a right to find out whether or not their ballot was counted. Yet as it now stands, people will never know unless they contact their county election board and ask.

This needs fixing, and the state legislature should step in and require election boards to contact those whose votes were not counted and tell them why.

.....

Cuyahoga and Franklin County, which includes the state capital, cast the most provisional ballots last fall, and Cuyahoga had one of the biggest rejection rates. The Secretary of State's Web site states that 17,656 provisional ballots were cast in Cuyahoga County, but that more than one in every three of these votes were thrown out.

That is in dramatic contrast to Franklin County, where nearly 87 percent of the provisional ballots were ruled legitimate.

.....

[L. Coyote]

6. OHIO to establish uniform standards for poll worker training

Study: Poll workers, not machines, build voter confidence
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Karen Farkas
Plain Dealer Reporter
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/summit/117205050744360.xml&coll=2

Akron - It's the people who work at the polls on Election Day, not the machines recording the votes, who give a voter confidence that the process will be fair, a researcher says.

"There is a consistent relationship in the rating of job performance and the confidence a vote will be counted accurately," Quin Monson, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University, told the Summit County Board of Elections on Tuesday. He headed a study that surveyed voters and poll workers in Summit and Franklin counties during and after the November 2006 election.

The state plans to establish uniform standards for poll worker training, said Patrick Gallaway, director of communications for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. .....