Reply #9: And the 2004 election...

[lala_rawraw]

Read this, which no one noticed at the time and how the AP/Herald reporters shut me down:

Note to mods, this is my article and I am listing it here in full, please do not delete.

By Larisa Alexandrovna | RAW STORY Staff Writer 06 December 2004

“Twenty-one touch-screen voting machines in Broward County were replaced because of technical problems, said Gisela Salas, the county’s deputy supervisor of elections. At least one of the machines had shown votes cast for the wrong candidates.”

This striking sentence in the fourteenth paragraph of a Nov. 4 AP wire story was merely the accidental starting point for RAW STORY research into voting irregularities in Broward County, Florida.

I came across Ms. Salas’ statement by sheer accident while researching another story. Twenty-one voting machines being removed and replaced on Election Day would seem to merit more than a four sentence description. I wondered as to the process by which these machines were taken and replaced. Who supervised this process?

This brief mention in the AP was all I could immediately find. Documented in an article entitled “State lauds performance of touch-screen machines; critics uncertain,” other voting irregularities were briefly mentioned with the same terse detail. These references are delivered as a matter of fact, as if most of us should know that large-scale voting glitches occur and are corrected instantaneously.

How then are we to correct these issues for future elections? I wondered.

After some thought, I contacted an Associated Press editor not involved with the Nov. 4 article, who quickly dismissed me as “paranoid,” though I neither discussed the outcome of the election or commented on anything other than the 21 machines allegedly removed in Broward County.

In fact, I only managed to ask “What precincts the machines were removed from?” before the editor hung up.

Not having mainstream media’s extensive resources, I was unable to conduct a thorough investigation on my own. As such, I contacted a Miami AP reporter who had contributed to the article directly. The reporter asked that their name be kept out of this story.

This particular AP writer was more helpful, although unable to give me additional information since I was not a “member of the Associated Press.” I was told to contact Lida Rodriguez-Tassef, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition (MDERC).

The writer did, however, suggest several different organizations that might have supervised the removal. Each of them I contacted, including the ACLU and Election Protection, did not respond. Befuddled, the AP reporter could not tell me who had supervised their removal; it appeared the reporter had simply assumed.

I was also told that the AP Miami office “was moving on to other assignments.” Incidentally, this “moving on” sentiment became the running clincher for most of my calls.

I spoke to Lida Rodriguez-Tassef briefly on Nov. 19 and explained that I had been given her name as a possible source for my research into Broward County election issues. Ms. Rodriguez-Tassef was gracious enough to listen to my questions, but said she was not aware of the 21 machines removed in Broward County on Election Day.

She was, however, concerned about “potentially bigger issues,” including the 2002 election which cost Miami-Dade eight million dollars for what Rodriguez-Tassef termed as “worthless, flawed, not secure, and generally inferior hardware and software.”

Rodriguez-Tassef also pointed out that “no one seemed to have monitored the early votes cast,” and that the “votes sat on the machines for 2 week unsupervised.”

I then left several messages for Dr. Brenda Snipes, the supervisor of elections for Broward County, requesting some information and explaining some of the questions that I had. Dr. Snipes’ office did not return my calls.

On Nov. 24 I sent an email to Dr. Snipes and to Ms. Salas requesting answers to the following questions:

If the machines were simply “fixed/recalibrated” and not replaced, then:

o What precincts were these machines in?
o What was the “technical issue(s)” which required the machines to be recalibrated? Usually a repair ticket is filed.
o What was the “technical solution” to this issue (s) and where can I locate the documentation? This is also usually part of the repair ticket.
o Why were the machines removed (if they were removed) in order to be repaired/recalibrated?
o Where were the machines moved to, assuming they were moved?
o Who monitored the process and where can I get documentation on this?
o How many votes were on each of the machines prior to their recalibration?

If the machines were actually replaced, then:

o What was the “technical issue (s)” which required the machines to be replaced? Usually a repair/replace ticket is filed.
o Did someone document the serial numbers of the machines removed
against the machines that replaced them and where can I get this
documentation?
o Who monitored the process and where can I get documentation on this?
o How many votes were on each of the machines prior to their removal?
o Who (group, etc.) oversaw this entire process?
o Have we had a third party technology specialist assess the machines’
issues prior/after the removal/repair?

Salas responded promptly and indicated that she would not be able to meet with me until “the following week,” which she did not. I called the SOE office several times and I sent these same questions, again, to Dr. Snipes on November 30th. RAW STORY has yet to receive a response from either Snipes or Salas.

Somewhat frustrated, I began to randomly call journalists at The Miami Herald, hoping to catch someone at their desk. Several of the reporters with whom I spoke only stayed on the phone with me long enough to echo the “I have moved on from this story” posture; as though this were a recent divorce and required something as rhapsodic as the process of “moving on.”

On one such phoning jaunt, I was able to engage a staff reporter, who expressed vigorously that we could speak only on the condition that we “speak off the record,” even though I had yet to put forward a single question.

This reporter stated that “Herald has already done an exhaustive investigation,” and “21 machines were not really that many considering how many machines were employed in the state of Florida.”

This was a good point, certainly – it made me wonder whether additional machines had been removed and/or recalibrated. Were these details available somewhere in some form? But afraid of having the conversation terminated, I stayed on the topic at hand.

Clearly annoyed by my questions, but still willing to continue our conversation, the reporter stated that “it was not uncommon to replace machines and/or recalibrate them for problems.”

I expressed my concern that voting machines could be wheeled in and out without supervision. Was there supervision? Apparently no one seemed to either want to answer these questions and/or had the answers to do so. I also mentioned that it alarmed me that every reporter with whom I spoke seemed to be either in the process of “moving on” or had already “moved on.”

The reporter was not amused. For several minutes, I was reproached brusquely that there was no such “directive” (I did not ask if there was) and that this was a “personal decision.”

The next several days I spent Googling everything and anything that had the number “21” and the words “Broward, voting, machines, replaced.”

Through nothing more than a gargantuan amount of coffee and very little sleep, I did manage to find one news item mentioning 21 voting machines in Broward County. A CBS 4 transcript read much the same as the initial AP article, but included an additional sentence: “The machines were taken to the county’s voter equipment center to extract the votes that had been cast.” So began, again, a flurry of unanswered emails and phone calls.

I had hoped to have more answers than questions before we ran the story, but

given the amount of time already invested and the dearth of results, I felt that to continue in this vein was futile.

Therefore, I have simply decided to run this story as it is, unfinished and unanswered, but in hopes that I will find others who feel that my questions are relevant. Perhaps others will push for answers as well if for no other reason than to ensure a better election process going forward.

I have recently forwarded my various emails with the Broward SOE staff to Representative Robert Wexler’s staff (D-FL) and am eagerly awaiting a response.