Reply #44: My hopes for NC

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Note: the post in latin was a "spoof" -

I cut and past the text from a site that has website templates. I have no idea what the latin says. (I guess its the british in me, the dry Monty Python type sense of humor.)I apologize for the confusion.

The charts were put in there to make the post look "official" and "Legitimate".
Of course, the title was in english.

The point was, sensationalistic headlines may not always be followed by accurate information, even if they have fancy charts and graphs. Hopefully on DU we will find inaccuracies and correct them, by working together.

I never dreamed that anyone here knew latin, and my hat is off to you for
having that ability.

What are my goals?

First lets say what our organization did:

We are trying to hold our ground.
Some election officials are still fighting for ways to rid of the paper.

After working full time on this issue since Sept 2003,
we created an organization,
we put up a website
we set up a list serve (open to public)
we found experts, David Allen, Justin Moore, Chuck Herrin
we engaged activists and media,
we canvassed neighborhoods
we had panel presentations around the state
we wrote op eds and letters to editors - my first one is here
http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=3991
(At least 4 or 5 of my op/eds were published as well as several of my colleagues had op/eds published in major papers)
we did cost studies of different voting machine types
we rallied
we created a video
we got one law drafted but not introduced in March 04,
got a study commission in Nov 2004,
we lobbied members of the commission
got law introduced in Feb 2005,
fought daily until got the law passed on last day of legislative session.

after passing the law

EFF represented me in NC Superior court on numerous occassions,
-to get me legal standing so that I could go to court
-to fight to revoke Diebolds TRO that would have gutted our law - we won
-to sue the NC SBOE and IT dept to revoke certification of the 3 vendors until
proper exam done - we lost

We ran Diebold off anyway, by citizens lobbying to prevent purchase of Diebold
in their respective counties. (Diebold manufactures the touchscreens in Lexington NC).
Some republicans helped us get rid of Diebold. (shock)

We fought attempts to repeal our law:

We fought off attempts by the NC County Commissioners to repeal the law
We fought off attempts by individual counties who asked for repeal of law

We lobbied county by county for optical scan, against DRES

We lobbied each 100 counties to choose optical scan and not DREs
We fought off the attempts to turn one of our largest counties,Wake County into a touchscreen county,
(Wake's BOE has Glenn Newkirk as a consultant)
We fought off Vote Centers (they encourage DRES, disenfranchise more voters)

Citizens fighting bad BOES - David verses Goliath

Chatham county activists sued their BOE for holding meetings in private so that they
could foist DREs off on the citizens against their will.
Citizens won that case but ran up $40,000 in legal fees that aren't being
reimbursed, even though they won.

We have had two elections - since the law was passed

Post election audits:
NC has had 2 random manual post election audits comparing the paper to the digital count,

I personally have participated in both post election audits in my county.

Recounts - this November we had several recounts

Squeaker Elections Lead to Recounts Across NC

- Statewide Recount for Court of Appeals Contest
- NC 08 US Congressional Race
- State Representatives Seat
- County Commissioner - Forsyth and also Carteret
- Washington County Board of Education
http://www.triadblogs.com/NCVoter/3083/

The Kissell Election

We approached the Kissell campaign before the election, during the election
and after the election, offering to connect them to computer scientists.
We were told that the Democratic Party was providing the campaign with all
the expert advice it needed.

We had hoped to identify trouble precincts, and would need the vote data
and trouble reports given to the campaign.

Kissell conceded after gaining 2 votes from a manual recount of 5 counties,
Mecklenburg being one of the largest.

No one was interested in helping me look at the election AFTER Kissell
conceded, since there would be no further remedy.

There was no smoking gun in the recount or audit
to indicate that machines were counting wrong.

Why the 4% undervote in Mecklenburg?

There are many things that can cause undervote, and NC is full of them.

The ballot design was horrible in Mecklenburg County, yet Kissell got a huge
percent of the votes there. The majority of NC 08 is a republican district,though, and Kissell faced an incumbent multi term GOP.
Kissell has never run for office before and is a social studies teacher.
Go figure.
Also, we have the most horrid straight ticket voting law in the country,
which I KNOW confuses voters since I have seen the way they mark their
ballots (since I have audited elections).

Southern Dem and her colleagues were involved in Mecklenburg closely,
and they would have heard if voters had seen vote flipping or problems
in voting for Kissell.

Kissell had lawyers, observers, the NAACP, and friends. The state party chair
is an attorney and he did everything but eat dirt to help candidates across the state.
IN fact, he helped get the first democratic county commissioner in Carteret county elected
in years, by fighting to get provisional ballots counted, and by pushing for a manual
recount (optical scan) The candidates were about 1 vote apart. The election was ultimately
won by a hand ful of ballots.

UNLIKE SOME WELL KNOWN ORGANIZATIONS THAT TAKE IN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF $
AND EVEN MILLIONS OF $$, WE DID ALL OF THIS WITHOUT ANY FUNDING.

ALL OUT OF POCKET. We even turned down donations.

I have worn out two computers with this crap, and I had to switch to internet telephone service to get rid of the gigantic long distance phone bills.

I have been attacked for not doing more, by people who have done not a damn thing.
I have been accussed of being a f'ing shill for vendors, yet I ran Diebold out of a
state where they make the touchscreens.

I was called a sellout for not pushing hand counted paper ballots, yet I made sure the law included them as a legitimate voting system for any county choosing them.

We got rid of paperless voting in a state that has used paperless touchscreen voting since
the 80's.
Half of our state used paperless voting machines for decades, it had not a dam- thing
to do with HAVA here.
Besides our paperless DREs, some counties had lever machines and or punch cards.
Now we have 77 counties with optical scan, only 23 with DRES (used to be 40 paperless DRE counties)

WHAT IS OUR NEXT STEP/GOAL?

1. To keep our law from being amended or repealed. That is number one.
The opponents of VVPB continue to work for new ways to spread use of DRES,
which are bad for paper, we know that. These folks work as hard against paper
as we work for it.

2. Spread our network into counties we haven't had many activists in.
To make us stronger, and to protect our efforts.
There are 100 counties to cover.
Southern Dem will be a new contact for us, a very valuable one to help us
with Mecklenburg County. SD will help me with FOIAs, and hopefully help
get more citizens involved there. Meck has been a black hole for us
for 3 years.
We need more advocates to participate in the post election audits.

3. Get rid of touchscreens or stop their spread before 2008.
We probably need NR 550 to pass in order to do this.
The forces for DRES are powerful and have huge influence in NC,
or we would have gotten them banned already.

4. Study our Voter Registration Database -
Justin Levitt of the Brennan Justice Center stated that he believed NC's database
would unfairly prevent voters from registering and also throw people out
that should be allowed to vote. This is because our database recently
merged with the DMV and the Social Security database. Voters names must
match, often a woman who remarries will not have match.
We are in contact with the Brennan Center to seek advice.

5. Study the issuing and discard rate of provisional ballots
We want to find out -
the different reasons people are getting provisional ballots
how to increase percent of regular ballots issued
how to decrease the number of provisional ballots being discarded

31% of provisional ballots, (459 of nearly 1,500) were thrown out in the NC
08 race.
November 17, 2006 459 Ballots Denied Out of Nearly 1,500. Charlotte Observer
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/16033947.htm

45% of the provisionals were thrown out in 2004
(page 11) - State law was amended after 2004 to specifically allow out of
precinct ballots to be counted.
http://electionline.org/Portals/1/Publications/ERIP10Apr05.pdf

This work has been like pushing a boulder up a hill, and we now have to
keep it from rolling back down.

As time goes on, we will likely adjust our goals.

Again, we have done all of this work without any funding, without
any donations.

Wish list - Our greatest need is people with ability to download gigantic
lumps of vote data from the NC SBOE database so that we can look
at the undervotes by precinct across the state.

This like eating an elephant, it takes a thousand bites, and a
very long time.

This work and its results belong to the citizens of North Carolina