The mission of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is to restore public ownership and oversight of elections, and to ensure the fundamental right of every American citizen to vote and to have each vote counted as intended in a secure, transparent, impartial, and independently verified election process.
(Following is an excerpt of a report from K. Shawn Edgar in conjuntion with his visit to the Washington Co. Election office on Nov. 4, 2008. Watch the video of his visit on the right.)
Prelude
This is where my Washington County elections office entered the story. I had emailed them questions and received flat textbook answers – answers in which the responder avoided details about any possible problems. "It's all by the book, sir. It's all by the book," they assured me. After two to three links had grown in our email chain, I received a direct response from one whom I believed at that time to be the divisions number one man: Luther K. Arnold Jr., the Senior Administrative Specialist.
(After calls and emails to several other officials...) I wound up on the phone with Brenda Bayes of the state elections SOS. Ms. Bayes was cordial and answered my questions by the book – refusing to even consider my base assumption that elections have faults and the process has been manipulated in our recent past (see documents by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast).
Ms. Bayes' great contribution to this part of the story was to pass me the name Mickey Kawai (Wash. Co. Clerk). She turned out to be the manager of my Washington County elections office – the exact person I was hoping to talk with in the first place. On the phone with Mickey Kawai later that day, the background noise from her end spoke in many voices urgent and oscillating. With my eyes closed the scene through the receiver became a whaling ship at sea, and Mickey Kawai became a captain. However, her voice told me she was holding it all together – the chaotic operations of a county elections office the day before our biggest election day in recent history and the amped regular citizens eager to participate in her domain. At the same time there was an underlying threat of a Chernobyl-sized mishap hanging in the air, as much on my end as hers, congealing the entire county. Before I disconnected, she had convinced me to come in with my video camera the following day for the big event. To observe. To participate.
Early on that day, November 4, I had to work my “real” job from 8 to 1, and then bolted straight to the elections office – camera and tripod in hand. My good friend and fellow interloper, Mr. Waldow, met me on the way. We drove by the county building. Two lanes of backed up automobiles for blocks, the right lane full with voters preparing for a drive-by drop of their ballot into the solid steel box flanked by county workers under a portable tent set up in front of the main entrance.
Out front we met county press officer Philip, wearing a high-contrast yellow reflective vest and name badge. Philip gave us the lowdown on the orchestrated effort to reduce traffic and line time, the state and county police played a predominate roll. Also, a second drop site had been set up across the four-lane highway at Kmart.
Process
Inside I set up the tripod and video camera, got shots of several vote casting stations provided for those citizens who didn't receive or lost a ballot, or simply preferred to come in and cast by hand. Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, but many county elections offices have voter's booths and offer provisional ballots, as mentioned above. According to Philip, Washington County residents choose – for diverse reasons – to drop off their ballot on election day, hence the crazed scene described outside the building.
Ballots flow into the county office from every precinct, and are sorted and the outer envelope is removed by party workers. Other workers verify signatures on the back of the actual security envelope that contains the ballot by crosschecking voter registration cards via computer. And then the security envelopes are “wanded in”, meaning each one's arrival is documented by hand-held bar code scanners.
The next part of the operation is all about straightening the ballots and feeding them into the computerized counting machines made to a large extent by a company called Elections Systems & Software (ES&S). Of course, ballot length changes from election to election, and the longer the ballot, the more difficult this process becomes, often causing delays and mistakes.
In a review of voting systems, the EVEREST Report found that every component of the ES&S optical scanning machines were vulnerable at the precinct level to physical tampering that would cause the machine to reboot, adding delays and confusion, as well as the PCMCIA memory cards the scanners use to encode ballot types. At the level of the board of elections office network attacks were found to be the biggest threat.
Although Philip, our press officer, and the staff he introduced us to, were helpful and knowledgeable, they could not bring themselves to believe what they inevitably termed conspiracy theories, and refused to believe my base assumption (formed of previous experience and research like the EVEREST Report) that all ballot counting software and hardware are risky and vulnerable to tampering.
In the moment I wished I had a hard copy of the EVEREST test results to show them, to make them see the danger, but although their heart was in the right place, their eyes were shackled with tunnel vision by training and a need to protect operations – and save face.
It's a new day in America, a new era of hope. Obama's election has already transformed the energy of this place. His well organized, disciplined campaign has transcended partisan divides as the transition team searches for excellent people regardless of party. It is a breath of fresh air.
Friends have asked if I think the Michael Connell deposition on Monday deterred Rove from trying to hack another election. My answer: It was clearly Obama who won--his winning personality, his family, his clarity, his honest campaign. Nonetheless, I do believe that our work to bring Connell into the light of legal scrutiny the day before the election was critical to protect the integrity of this election at a time of consequence for the nation.
We at Velvet Revolution VR were running defense for democracy, tackling those who were coming at Obama from the shadowy sidelines: people, like Connell, who were using secret computer IT networks to manipulate the vote count at the tabulation level. It was important to expose the invisible and illegal ways of taking advantage of every weak point in the electoral system by designing computer programs to manipulate elections without leaving a trace.
Bobby Kennedy and Greg Palast were publicizing voter disenfranchisement, intimidation, caging, purging voter registration lists and all the visible ways of suppressing the Democratic vote. It was very important this came out in Rolling Stone before the election, so that many people were paying attention. Velvet Revolution was going afterthe invisible corruption--the election tabulation fraud--and so it was much more difficult to get this published in the mainstream media. In spite of hiring Fenton Communications to get out the election fraud story (they put out some good press releases), the media never picked it up.
Make no mistake, there is alarming evidence that Bush stayed in the White House for a second term by stealing the 2004 election. After four years of researching this, listening to whistleblowers and putting the invisible jig-saw puzzle together, we know WHO did it: Karl Rove, his computer IT operative, Mike Connell, Jack Abramoff, Susan Ralston and Ken Blackwell. We know HOW they did it: using computer networks like SMARTech.com, GovTechSolutions.com, gwb43.com, New Media Communications and GOP.com. We know WHEN: in the late hours of election night in 2004--at 11:13 p.m., to be precise--when Blackwell shunted the vote tally from Ohio to GOP servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they were changed just enough to give the election to Bush. We have evidence, from the Ohio Secretary of State's Office, of the election architecture that shows exactly when the vote tally was sent to SMARTech at GOP headquarters in Tennessee, and when it came back. This is how Bush got a second term--and Karl Rove was behind it. Rove will be the next (after Connell) to be subpoenaed in our Ohio lawsuit.
It has been frustrating for me to know all this and not be able to get the media to cover the story as it unfolded. I had been counting on the media and court of public opinion to expose this massive fraud and corruption of our election process. But I was wrong to wait for the media to do the story. They never did. It was a violation of the law and belonged in court.
VR found lawyers in Ohio who reviewed the evidence of these shenanigans, and went to federal court in July, 2008 to expose it. The Judge decided to lift the stay on an existing lawsuit, and then all of this information was put before him. We had the quiet support of the Ohio Secretary of State and Attorney General. To get that support, we had to provide loads of evidence. Details of the lawsuit and hearing are spelled out in many articles on http://www.rovecybergate.com. But the long and short of it is that the judge ruled in ourfavor four times: lifting the stay on the prior lawsuit; subpoenaing Connell; compellingConnell's appearance in court on Friday, Oct. 3; and then ordering him to submit to a deposition on Monday, Nov. 3--the day before Election Day.
Connell's attorneys did everything possible to keep him from testifying. But since he was compelled to appear, he did show up on Friday with three high-powered lawyers from the Bush/Cheney '04 team--and they were ready to fight. It was a contentious three-hour hearing, in which he said he was too busy for a deposition until after the election. The lawyer said this was like the bank robber saying, sorry, he couldn't show up in court because he was too busy making plans to rob the next bank. Attorney Cliff Arnebeck accused Connell in open court of rigging elections for Karl Rove. Connell turned "beet red" when the judge ruled that he would have to come back at noon on Monday to submit to a sworn deposition, exactly 18 hours before the polls were to open.
But Connell was as cool as a cucumber when he showed up in court Monday, Nov. 3 with his lawyers. He was placed under oath and grilled about election fraud, "man in the middle" computer manipulation of the vote count, Trojan horse remote control of the tabulation process, and threats from Rove if he didn't take the heat for all such crimes. He did his best to stonewall, but did indicate that, to his knowledge, there would be no tabulation manipulation of Tuesday's election.
So what happened over the weekend after being under the eye of an attentive Federal Judge? Two weeks ago, Rove was confidently saying that McCain could win ten battleground states to become President. McCain was confidently telling everyone that he would win with a surge in the wee hours of election night (when the numbers could be manipulated). On Thursday, Oct. 30, Rove had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, telling voters to ignore the polls, and that McCain could win. But something changed over the weekend. By Monday after the deposition, Rove wrote on his blog that Obama would win by "a electoral landslide," even in those states he had previously predicted McCain would win. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/04/rove-predicts-obama-landslide/
As Mark Crispin Miller said: "And there was Karl Rove's abrupt decision not to try to rig the outcome, a reversal he signaled Monday evening when he suddenly foretold an electoral landslide for Obama, just hours after Mike Connell, his longtime IT fixer, had been forced to answer questions, under oath, in an Ohio courtroom."
Personally, I believe that a miracle happened. I had given up hope of anything coming of this lawsuit before the election because I was told that newspapers don't do stories until after a judge rules on a case and that these things take forever. But my colleagues at VR persevered, intent on helping to save this election. I was totally surprised last week (just a week ago) to learn that the Judge had ruled against Connell attempt to quash the subpoena and compelled him to show up in court Friday, Oct.31, just days before the election. And then he ordered Connell to come back on Monday to testify under oath, giving him all weekend to ponder his situation. Connell certainly discussed this with his lawyers, and probably with Rove and others. Rove knew he was the next to be subpoenaed by this Judge. They knew that we were onto them, and had evidence of what had happened. They may have decided it just wasn't worth the risk to manipulate another election. So I think the lawsuit and deposition on Monday may have deterred them in a small way from attempting to impede Obama's victory.
The history of America's stolen 2004 election is coming to light, as it must. "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice!" Winning big with a transformational leader like Obama means we can go on the offense in addressing the great issues of our time from global warming to election reform. Guided by our values of open, honest government, we can begin the work of reforming America's flawed election system. There is much to be done to protect the voting rights of every citizen and to ensure that all the votes are fairly counted. Our work is not over.
Despite a record number of registered voters this year, intense interest in the presidential election and the historic outcome, Ohio's voter turnout was lower Tuesday than in 2004, unofficial statistics show. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is reporting 67 percent turnout, compared with 72 percent in 2004. She had been predicting 80 percent turnout this time. The percentage could increase as provisional ballots, overseas ballots and other outstanding votes are included during the official canvass in the coming weeks. But overall turnout still is expected to be lower than in 2004, leaving experts at a loss to explain it -- especially because the number of registered voters increased by 319,000 from four years ago. "That's rather puzzling, given the activity level," said Paul Beck, a political-science professor at Ohio State University. The total number of votes cast Tuesday declined in 69 of Ohio's 88 counties when compared with official totals from 2004. In Franklin County, for example, about 10,000 fewer votes were cast this year.
This is a message from Lynn Landes of CounttheBallots.org
I've been contacting these campaigns trying to talk them into doing audits. We know that recounts are notoriously unreliable due to the actions of unscrupulous election officials. Please contact the candidates and urge them to audit as well as ask for a recount. That means their volunteers should collect voter affidavits in select 'suspect' precincts. It's the only thing that will tell the candidate how the voters really voted. Clint Curtis found that his audit results in the 2006 congressional race varied from the 'official' count by 12-24%!!! I have information on both of my websites regarding audits.
Yesterday, Attorneys in Ohio filed papers in federal court to compel the immediate testimony of Michael Connell, the GOP's top IT expert. In short, they argued that Connell, once a willing witness, has hunkered down after threats from Karl Rove and his minions. See Memo here. They allege that Connell is a witness to a crime to steal prior elections, and his knowledge will be helpful to ensure that next week's election is not stolen.
Attached to the motion is a powerful affidavit from Stephen Spoonamore, a cyber-security expert advising the attorneys. Spoonamore states that the 2004 election in Ohio was attacked by a Man in the Middle King Pin computer manipulation that changed the results from Kerry to Bush. See Spoonamore Declaration here. This is a must read for everyone to see how this was, and can be, done.
Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003...
Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least 1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19 of its models dating back a decade... Independent tests for the states of California, New York, Ohio, Florida and Connecticut found performance defects and security gaps in both systems that will serve most voters this fall: touch-screens and optical scanners.
Two voters in Palo Pinto Co Texas have now reported that their straight party vote was flipped to another party. These are ES&S iVotronic machines. The same machines used to flip votes in West Virginia and South Carolina. Every voter needs to skip straight-party voting if they have that option and every voter needs to review their ballot on the touch-screen before touching that final "Vote" button.
Every day there seems to be one or two articles, mostly in the tech magazines and blogs, about the New Jersey/Princeton/Sequoia report. While Sequoia is probably not happy seeing these articles out there, I'm sure they are breathing a sigh of relief that the report only spent a very small time talking about the real reason the report was done in the first place; their voting machines failed to accurately count the votes in 9 counties on 38 different voting machines. This should NOT be a security issue. This IS an accuracy/reliability issue.
Major candidates for office, the media, and election officials of Oregon will soon receive this letter. Please copy and send it to your local election official and ask them to watch "Stealing America."
We are writing to alert you to the increasing electoral crisis in our country. Even Oregon is not immune, despite what would seem to be our excellent Vote by Mail and paper ballot systems. Our chief vulnerability is the use of proprietary trade secret software used to count our votes. The only certification of the software is done by “independent” laboratories funded by the election system vendors. Because it’s proprietary, even our top election officials are prohibited from reviewing the software for coding errors or outright manipulation. Such secret vote counting is completely inimical to democracy.
Nevertheless, over 80% of the votes in the U.S. will be counted with trade secret software created by three corporations with strong partisan ties. In Oregon, electronic election systems manufactured by ES&S and Sequoia will be responsible for determining, in secret, the outcomes of our elections on November 4th. Local testing procedures for this software, such as the standard “logic and accuracy” test, are woefully inadequate and the results unreliable. Regrettably, there will be no mandatory verification of the machine-tallied results.
As you may recall, in 2007, Oregon Voter Rights Coalition supported a mandatory, statistically valid hand-counted ballot sampling procedure that would have effectively verified machine counts in statewide elections or identified a need for further investigation. Unfortunately, the final version of the bill, HB 3270, that passed mandates an audit procedure that’s not rigorous enough to give confidence in the machine counts. Rather, it has only a meager probability of uncovering anomalies in election results. We hope to work on future refinements for a verification procedure that will restore the integrity of the system and the confidence of the voters.
In the meantime, citizens are feeling a profound lack of confidence in the legitimacy of our government. We urge you to become informed about the dangers of privatizing our elections. For further insight into this critical and complex issue, we enclose the documentary, Stealing America Vote By Vote. The film is directed by Academy Award nominated Dorothy Fadiman and presents the views of several sophisticated, well-credentialed election officials, attorneys, pollsters, journalists, political analysts, statisticians, and computer experts. As one critic observes, “This tersely sobering documentary . . . mounts its case with hardheaded numerical logic” (Entertainment Weekly). Another describes it as “a devastating indictment of the current electoral system and a loud wake-up call to voters across the country. With the November elections around the corner, Stealing America must be seen -- and answered” (60 Second Preview). The film’s website includes a 30-page press kit and many other resources (www.stealingamericathemovie.org/).
We hope you’ll take a strong stand to protect our democracy by protecting every citizen’s right to vote.
Respectfully yours,
Beth E. Peterson
Executive Director, Oregon Voter Rights Coalition
VR has an exclusive interview with former Diebold contractor Chris Hood which talks about many disturbing actions by Diebold during prior elections, including illegal, uncertified and unreported patches, and improper feeding of tabulation results by Diebold Chief Bob Urosevitch. This interview was prepared for a major news program special that was supposed to air two weeks before the 2006 midterm election. At the last moment, however, the special was killed by the corporate media. Check out this important ten minute interview.
Oregon votes are counted by Sequoia Voting Systems machines in some counties. Although we vote on paper ballots, the ballots are counted by machines, and those machines operate with software. The software is "proprietary" meaning we, the people, can not see it. As a result we have a system in which we just have to "trust" that the machines and the software are counting accurately. In the recent case reported below at the BradBlog, we see that Sequoia Voting Systems machines simply failed. What if no one had caught the problem?
Election Board Finds Sequoia Voting Systems 'Too Quick to Exonerate Self,' As Evidence Indicates Hardware and Software Problems to Blame...
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6497
After failing to count votes accurately in a number of recent elections in FL, NJ, and D.C., a report has now been released by the D.C. Board of Elections noting that, as it turns out, Michelle Shafer, official mouthpiece for both Sequoia Voting Systems and the election industry's PR outfit, Election Technology Council (ETC), has once again, been misleading the public about Sequoia's bad voting equipment --- both touch-screen and paper ballot systems --- and the fact that they dont work.
The D.C. Board released its report on its investigation into an incident from last month's primary where some 1,500 phantom votes were recorded on Sequoias tabulator after being uploaded from a paper ballot system. There should have been just over 300 votes, instead of thousands, from Precinct 141.
Shafer had originally claimed (as usual) human error and static electricity were to blame. When the incident was first discovered in September, Shafer told the Washington Post: "There's absolutely no problem with the machines in the polling places. No. No."
Turns out, Shafer lied. Again. As the D.C. report notes Sequoia was "too quick to exonerate itself and the equipment used in the tabulation process" and that "the evidence appears to indicate that there was a problem both in equipment (the server) and in the software"...
Hear Oregon VRC on the Continuing US Election Crisis
How We Have Privatized Vote Counting
See a clip from Stealing America
Free For All! One Dude's Quest to Save Democracy
VIDEO: “Protecting Your Vote”
Mark Crispin Miller on Bill Moyers Click here
Transcript of Mark Crispin’s interview with Bill Moyers. Click here
Stay informed on Election Integrity News! Visit The Brad Blog
How your votes are counted in Oregon
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Donate. Help us fight secret vote counting. Somebody's got to.
Including essays by David W. Moore, Lance DeHaven Smith, Robert Kennedy, Jr., James Gundlach, Larisa Alexandrovna, Michael Collins, Dave Griscom, Michael Richardson, Brad Friedman, Jonathan Simon, Bruce O'Dell, Jean Kaczmarek, Bob Fitrakis, Paul Lehto, Nancy Tobi and Steve Rosenfeld. With a preface by MCM, and his "12 Steps to Save US Democracy."
California SOS calls for open source voting software
MIT computer science professor Ron Rivest, who has studied the security and privacy of voting systems, says that these systems should be designed to work even if the software underneath is somehow flawed. "Do you have to trust the software in order to trust the election results?" he asks. The ideal situation, Rivest says, is one where the presence of bugs or malware cannot affect the outcome of an election.
A column by Oregon VRC member Virginia Ross recently appeared in the Oregon State Bar Bulletin. The column explains the failure of the HB 3270 effort under the hand of Director of Elections John Lindback and appeals to the incoming Secretary of State to take strong, remedial measures to insure verification of our machine tallied election results.
The new law requires an inadequate "placebo" audit, which does not verify election results and is no better than a paper seatbelt in ensuring that the secret software in our optical scanners has tallied the ballots correctly. The new legislature and the new Oregon SOS must take strong steps to remedy this problem. Oregon VRC will be monitoring the SOS race carefully and reporting back to our supporters concerning this vital matter.
Please check back for continued Election Reform news and new Action Items and updates concerning the SOS race.
Election PowerPoint
Click to view
Looking for a dynamic presentation for your upcoming meeting? Consider Oregon VRC's PowerPoint: The Illusion of Democracy: An Urgent Call to Action for National Election Reform.
For more information on how to bring this compelling program to your group or to order the CD click here.
10/29/08: Attorneys File To Compel Testimony Of Mike Connell:
Nevertheless, over 80% of the votes in the U.S. will be counted with trade secret software created by three corporations with strong partisan ties. In Oregon, electronic election systems manufactured by ES&S and Sequoia will be responsible for determining, in secret, the outcomes of our elections on November 4th. Local testing procedures for this software, such as the standard “logic and accuracy” test, are woefully inadequate and the results unreliable. Regrettably, there will be no mandatory verification of the machine-tallied results.
VIDEO: “Protecting Your Vote”
