Tennessee Primary Election Integrity Estimate = Zero

[K Gardner]

Tennessee Presidential Primary Vote - February 5, 2008, Super Tuesday
A preliminary review was all that was needed :-)

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Tennessee has 95 counties. Hamilton and Pickett Counties use optical scan systems (one by Diebold, one by ES&S). Seventeen counties use touch screen DRE systems by Diebold and ES&S. The rest, or vast majority, use pushbutton DRE systems by Hart and MicroVote. IOW, no paper trail in 93 out of 95 counties in the state.

List of Machines Used in Each County:
http://www.state.tn.us/sos/election/voting_systems/VotingSystems.20080109.pdf

There is no audit required in any county in Tennessee. The TN Secretary of State
has stated he doubts any reform can be in place by the November 2008 Elections.

Tennessee has had widespread voting issues since the Presidential Election of 2000
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=62&Itemid=142


Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) has issued a lengthy report with recommendations on improving electronic voting.
http://www.tennviews.com/node/328
Election administrator survey results:

• Only 21% of counties report voting machine complaints. 85% have a formal complaint procedure.

• 98% have procedures to match the number of votes cast to the number of voters.

• 44% report "rare" eligibility problems at polls, 24% report "some", and 29% report "frequent". Only 3% reported "none".

• 91% would choose the same voting system again.

• The most frequent challenge reported was finding qualified poll workers, followed by voter education, followed by "fail safe" voters (provisional ballots for people who thought they had registered or who moved within the jurisdiction and failed to update their voter registration address), and staff/office budget. Several also noted voter apathy and convincing candidates that they lost.


Update by me: A legislative vote scheduled for Jan 10 to vote on amendments SB 1363/HB 1256 to the Voter Confidence Act of 2007 was postponed to Jan 17, after session, at which time they will try to "round things up on where we stand". No vote has been scheduled at this time - per my phone call to Senator Joe Haynes office today, 1/14/08.

http://www.votesafetn.org /

By Deborah Narrigan
December 21, 2007

<snip>

Senate Sponsor Joe Haynes had sought to have the bill reported out at this week’s meeting, but agreed to wait –- but only a short time -- to allow other legislators to write additional amendments to SB1363. This is the bill that Gathering to Save Our Democracy/Common Cause TN has supported and worked for over the past 2 years. If passed it would mandate voter verifiable paper ballots, routine post-election audits, and tighten security and testing for all electronic voting systems. While this procedural step may seem insignificant, it marks forward motion for the bill.

The meeting focused first on the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) study report recommendations on improving electronic voting. This report had been accepted at the 12/12 meeting of TACIR; the recommendations could help significantly to shape legislation that we support. A major unexpected disappointment were the comments by Dr. Harry Green, the TACIR Executive Director. He has been (personally) very strongly in favor of voter-verified paper ballots (vvpb), as is the TACIR report. But today he shifted gears, saying it is too late to change our voting equipment by Nov, 2008, but many other problems such as insufficient poll workers should be dealt with now.

A second focus, also heavily debated at the TACIR meeting, was how the state is addressing the uses of a balance of approximately $35 million of remaining HAVA (Help America Vote Act) funds held by the state. Secretary of State Riley Darnell and State Election Coordinator Brook Thompson fielded a flurry of questions, and informed the committee that they will seek guidance from the Election Assistance Commission regarding allowable uses of this money that is set aside, earning interest.

Additional questions to these officials dealt with whether optical scan voting could be put into place by the Nov 08 election. They re-iterated their message that " a change to optical scan voting systems cannot be done by Nov 08"; and that the state will try to lease machines for the counties that need more DREs --using an estimated $1-2 million of HAVA money. In a startling comment by Sec Darnell, he claimed that the problem in FL in the 2000 election was “not a problem of machines...it was a ballot design problem, a problem of personnel...also 06 in Sarasota...it was the same thing...this is the only problem: ballot design. We have never had a problem in TN, but we need to satisfy some peoples' concerns.." . None of the legislators challenged this claim that flies in the face of copious documentation of complex voting technology related problems in those elections.

The meeting also included testimony from two election integrity advocates. Lynn Willams, former Davidson County Council member, represented the League of Women Voters of TN; and Vonda McDaniels spoke for the United Steel Workers Union and “on behalf of families and working people of Tennessee ”. They both made strong (though brief) statements and the committee members were very attentive during their presentations.

Overall, the legislative study committee seemed attentive and more engaged than in the past. They asked many questions, including how post-election audits are done in TN and in other states (an important question) and how a vvpb-based voting system would work. Questions of implementation timing arose repeatedly but no one asked for evidence from the SoS to support why he thinks tine is too short.

[Kokonoe]

1. It worked when they got elected

[K Gardner]

2. Bernie Ellis: "What Part of 'Trust but Verify' Do You Not Understand?

Presentation to the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR)
By Bernie Ellis
September 27, 2007

I want to thank the TACIR commission members and staff for this chance to address you today. It has been an interesting morning, hearing from voting machine vendors who continue to try to sell us on the virtues of their wares; and from Dr. Wallach, who has pointed out the many serious flaws with surrendering our election processes to private companies using secret software on insecure and poorly functioning equipment. Now you get ten minutes from me, representing two grassroots election organizations, Gathering To Save Our Democracy and Common Cause. It is fitting that my presentation comes at the end, because the organizations I am here to represent are composed of thousands of concerned Tennessee voters of all political parties and persuasions; and in Tennessee, as in all functioning democracies, the voters always have the last word.

Being allowed only ten minutes to address you this morning seemed like insufficient time to cover all the important reasons why Tennessee needs to act now to correct the serious mistakes we have made in changing our voting systems. After all, Tennessee used to be known as a leader in the voting rights movement, the state that insured that women’s suffrage became a reality, that helped break Jim Crow laws and practices before the Voting Rights Act passed and that insured that each voter’s ballot had equal weight through the landmark Supreme Court decision, Baker v. Carr.

Today, we are known as one of the eight most insecure states for election integrity, one of the states that made the worst decisions with our HAVA funds and that would most benefit from pending federal legislation to correct those errors. Ten minutes didn’t seem like enough time, until I remembered that it takes only 7-10 seconds to break into these new voting machines to tamper with the vote-counting hardware and only 30 seconds to infect a single voting machine with a virus that is sufficient to change the vote totals in an entire county. From that perspective, ten minutes is an eternity.

We cannot afford voting systems that allow either wholesale election theft, or a smaller scale improper and
illegal siphoning of votes from one candidate to another, to occur without detection or remedy. Tennessee
should not wait to be forced by federal legislation to correct our recent mistakes. Tennessee has been the
much-praised national model for supporting, expanding and protecting the franchise for the past century. We
need to take action ourselves, today and over the next year, to insure that our 2008 elections (and those that
follow) are as free, fair and verifiable as possible.

<snip> Entire Text: http://www.votesafetn.org/docs/TACIR092707.pdf