Saturday 4/2 Election Fraud, Reform, & Updates Thread

[MelissaB]

In order to organize and document I thought it would be a good idea to have a daily thread to place items related to reform, fraud, protests, and other items. This also make it easier to "catch up" when we are away from the computer for a while.

Please help us. If you see something that isn't here post it with a link to the thread and a thanks to the author. Thanks to everyone who is helping with this project.

Link to the thread from yesterday: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x351738

[MelissaB]

1. Prensa Latina, Cuba: Scientific Analysis Suggests 2004 US Vote Counts Alte

Scientific Analysis Suggests 2004 US Vote Counts Altered

(Regristration required and in Spanish)

http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7B7B4029A0-FDC7-4CE5-901A-5F26D19473BF%7D&language=EN

[MelissaB]

2. Former elections chief to collect $160,000

Former elections chief to collect $160,000

OFFICIAL: HEFTY DEPARTING PACKAGE SENDS WRONG MESSAGE

BY TERE FIGUERAS NEGRETE AND NOAKI SCHWARTZ

[email protected]


Former Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan, who resigned under pressure this week amid revelations that six recent elections were marred under her watch, will still draw $13,000 a month for the next year.

Though she had been with the county only 20 months, Kaplan accumulated eight months' worth of vacation, holidays, sick leave and compensatory time for working long hours, County Manager George Burgess said.

In addition, Burgess agreed to throw in four months' paid leave. The combined amount will roughly equal her annual salary of $162,240.

Burgess said he was comfortable with the terms. But not everyone at County Hall is.

More: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/11291909.htm

[MelissaB]

3. 87 valid, uncounted ballots found

87 valid, uncounted ballots found
King County says votes will not be tallied without court order

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Elections workers in King County have discovered 87 valid absentee ballots still in their envelopes that were mistakenly left out of the vote-counting in the November election, officials said yesterday.

The revelation is the latest in a series of missteps in the election committed by the King County elections department -- foul-ups that Republicans have seized on in their challenge to the outcome of the governor's race, in which Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated GOP candidate Dino Rossi by 129 votes after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots cast.

"Outrage is too weak a word: We are just appalled," said state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. "They have made mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake."

>>>snip

The newly discovered ballots have been set aside and locked up and will not be opened or counted without a court order, elections officials said.

More: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/218527_elections02.html

[MelissaB]

4. Collective Bellaciao, France:

Saturday 2nd April 2005 (01h40) :

E voting Corruption record

FLORIDA’S 2000 nightmare over punch-card ballots caused America to stampede toward purely electronic voting. But this snowballing trend raises two new concerns: vote-stealing could be easier in digitized elections, and several computer balloting firms have shady pasts.
Most of America’s e-voting is done on machines purchased from three firms: Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Pacific, and Election Systems & Software (ES&S). Two of the companies are headed by brothers. All are led by Republican campaign donors.

Here’s a look at each firm, drawn mostly from disclosures by Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, and by former BBC reporter Lynn Landes:

Diebold

Ohio-based Diebold absorbed Global Election Systems in 2002 and retained its senior vice president, Jeffrey W. Dean, as a consultant - even though Dean had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft. Diebold also gave a senior post to John Elder, a convicted cocaine trafficker, and to other felons.

Diebold Chairman Walden O’Dell is a GOP “Pioneer” who raised more than $100,000 for President Bush’s re-election. In a 2004 fund-raising letter, he wrote that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes” for Bush. Another Bush fund-raiser was Bob Urosevich, Diebold’s president (and brother of a top ES&S executive). Campaign disclosures show that Diebold chiefs have given $240,000 to politicians since 1998 - all to Republicans.

Last September, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer sued Diebold, accusing the firm of lying about the security of its machines. In December, Diebold paid a $2.6 million settlement.

Two Diebold executives became leaders of Advanced Voting Solutions, formerly Shoup Voting Solutions. In the 1970s, Shoup officers were charged with corruption in Florida and Philadelphia.

Sequoia

In 1999, two Sequoia executives, Pasquale Ricci and Phil Foster, were charged with paying an $8 million bribe to Louisiana Elections Commissioner Jerry Fowler to induce him to buy their machines. Altogether, 22 people were indicted, and nine pleaded guilty.

Sequoia reportedly manufactures slot machines for gambling casinos as well as voting machines for elections.

In the past, Sequoia’s founder, Lloyd Dixon Jr., went to prison for bribing election officials in Buffalo, N.Y., and Sequoia finance chief Louis Wolfson went to prison for bribing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas.

ES&S

In the 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich launched this Omaha firm, using money from the wealthy Ahmanson family, which bankrolls Religious Right causes and crusades against the teaching of evolution. Some Ahmansons supported the Chalcedon Institute, which advocates executing gays.

ES&S absorbed another firm, Business Records Corp. In 2002, Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to taking bribes from the latter.

Nebraska banker Chuck Hagel was an executive with ES&S - until he ran for U.S. Senate as a Republican and won a stunning upset victory, with ballots counted on ES&S machines.

More: http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5649

[MelissaB]

5. Mathaba.Net, Africa: Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption

Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption

Posted: 04/02
From: The Akron Beacon Journal

There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday.

Exit polls in the November election showed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., winning by 3 percent, but President George W. Bush won the vote count by 2.5 percent.

The explanation for the discrepancy that was offered by the exit polling firm -- that Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polling -- is an "implausible theory," according to the report issued Thursday by US Count Votes, a group that claims it's made up of about two dozen statisticians.

Twelve -- including a Case Western Reserve University mathematics instructor -- signed the report.

Instead, the data support the idea that "corruption of the vote count occurred more freely in districts that were overwhelmingly Bush strongholds."

More: http://mathaba.net/x.htm?http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=175076

[MelissaB]

6. The Olympian, WA: Election package approved

In the Legislature

Election package approved

Few lawmakers pleased after deadline barely met

BRAD SHANNON

THE OLYMPIAN

Tempers flew and voices cracked Friday as House Democrats narrowly beat a deadline for pushing out of a key committee a package of bills that would change election procedures.

Five bills were approved by the time the headlong rush was over, including measures to standardize voter registration record-keeping and voting procedures. But Republicans were fuming and Democrats were stammering, and nobody was happy after a series of party-line votes in the State Government Operations and Accountability Committee.

A requirement for poll-site voters to show photo identification was stripped from one bill that had passed the Senate -- even though it had backing from Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire and a task force she created on elections after the furor over her 129-vote victory last fall.

Another killed bill provision required Secretary of State Sam Reed's office to work with federal immigration authorities to weed out noncitizens from a statewide voter database being assembled by Reed's office.

"We came into this process thinking we really were going to do something," complained Rep. Lynn Schindler, R-Spokane Valley, who got up from her committee chair and left in anger before all the bills were voted on. "I'm terribly disappointed in this, and I'm very upset."

More: http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20050402/southsound/117561.shtml

[MelissaB]

7. Carter not the guy to study elections

Carter not the guy to study elections

By Boston Herald editorial staff
Saturday, April 2, 2005 - Updated: 12:49 AM EST

Among the back-page news items of March (if it made the papers at all) was a report that American University in Washington, D.C., has organized a bipartisan commission to make recommendations for improving elections in the United States. It is to be headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker.

Carter is objectionable. As president and after, Carter never seems to have met a dictator he didn't want to please, and he's shown he's willing to overlook even a rigged election in his efforts to do so.

Remember the kiss on the cheek of Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev? The soft-soaping of former Nicaraguan boss Daniel Ortega? The efforts to prevent the first Persian Gulf War?

The Carter Center, the Atlanta-based think-tank the former president heads, has sent observers to 54 elections abroad, most recently to the Palestinian voting earlier this year. Carter himself went, and made sure to pay his respects at the tomb of the murderer Yasser Arafat.

More: http://news.bostonherald.com/opinion/view.bg?articleid=76213

[Wilms]

9. Discussion

Carter not the guy to study elections

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x352035

[MelissaB]

8. New Bern Sun Journal, NC: Elections directors will meet in Carteret

Elections directors will meet in Carteret

April 02,2005
Sue Book
Sun Journal
With the assortment of vote-counting irregularities reported in North Carolina's 2004 General Election and lawmakers' consideration of election reform to avoid recurrences, the 240 state elections directors meeting in Carteret County this month have a clear conference agenda.

"Equipment is going to be the big topic there," said Tiffiney Miller, elections director in Craven County, where the touch screens on direct record electronic voting machines malfunctioned and an early election night vote tally included some duplicated votes.

Craven's problems resulted in an early and unofficial incorrect call on the winner of a county commission race. The problems in other counties were more serious and permanent and left undecided two state races - for agriculture secretary and superintendent of public instruction.

>>>snip

"We will almost certainly have to replace our voting equipment," Miller said of Craven's Electronic Systems and Software iVotronic machines. But she could not include an estimate of the county's cost in the equation because there are no official standards.

More:

[Wilms]

11. Link for: Elections directors will meet in Carteret

http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=20748&Section=Local

[Wilms]

10. ConyersBlog: Voting Rights At Peril in Georgia, Indiana, other States

Voting Rights At Peril in Georgia, Indiana, other States

New ID Proposals Would Deprive Many Minority, Poor and Seniors of Voting Rights

Modern Day Jim Crow and Poll Taxes on the March in GOP Georgia and Indiana

Blogged by JC

04.01.05 @ 11:18 PM

I was shocked and chagrinned to read in today's New York Times, that the Georgia Legislature had approved a new voter ID law, described as "the strictest measure in the country." The entire article is worth reading, but I would draw to your attention the following highlights (or should I say "lowlights"):

-- Georgia would be the first state not to permit an alternative to a photo ID, such as a signed affidavit.

-- another provision of the bill, supposedly designed to prevent voter fraud, would totally eliminate the requirement that a voter seeking an absentee ballot state a reason for wanting it, even though there is far greater concern about the use of absentee ballots for fraudulent purposes. If measures like this pass, it becomes all the more imperative to enact voting reform legislation that I and others have introduced to protect voting rights.

-- "Neither Geogia's secretary of state nor the secretary of state of Indiana, where a voter identification measure has been under consideration, could point to an allegation of voter identification fraud."

-- The AARP has observed that more than a third of Georgians over 75 lack a valid driver's license.

-- The bill would have a disproportionate impact on rural voters, given that Georgia's 159 counties have only 53 driver's license offices, and ten of them are in metropolitan Atlanta.

Sadly, this is not an April Fool's Day joke.


-snip/more/comment-

http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000045.htm


Discussion:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x352092

[Wilms]

12. Another GOP Front Group Fancies Itself a News Source

As uncovered by BradBlog, the ACVR is a GOP Front group.

Here's their fraudulent 'News' page.




http://www.ac4vr.com/news/index.html

[Helga Scow Stern]

13. Report from Activism on California Vote re Secretary of State Confirmation

Written by JunkYardDogg:

McPherson: Politics of Capitulation & Appeasement

THE POLITICS OF CAPITULATION and APPEASEMENT
Or Quid Pro Quid-Less Bipartisanship
Election Protection Activists’ Fight against McPherson’s ”Transition Team”

To ALL of you, who took the time and made the effort to phone, fax and E-Mail the Elected Officials of California to express your disapproval of the outrageous composition of the members of McPherson’s “Transition Team”,
we thank you from the bottoms of our hearts for your help.
On Tuesday, March 29, there were about 20 of us at the Capital to protest and express our position. There were 3 of us from So. Calif., myself, Marci from PDLA, and Sarah from Citizens Act, there were a number of Progressive Election Protection Activists from DFA San Marin, DFA Santa Rosa, DFA Sonoma and other DFA groups. The Tuesday hearing was postponed until Wednesday.
So we did something which has never been done by Progressives and Election Protection activists in California.
We broke off into 3 person teams and went to individual Assembly Persons’ offices and we lobbied our position
and expressed our outrage and concerns for this “Transition Team.” The very first thing which we learned was that McPherson was the absolute perfect Mr. Clean Good Guy untouchable that Schwarzenegger could ever have chosen. The second was, that no matter how vile and despicable was the composition of the “Team”, McPherson’s image completely overshadowed and precluded any questions about the Integrity and influence of this “Team”.
The third thing which we immediately became aware of, was, that all your E-Mails, Faxes, and Phone calls really
upset the planned Slam Dunk Confirmation. If it were not for all of your efforts, the issue of the unacceptable conflict of issue composition of the “Team” would NEVER have been addressed. Then we showed up. From the minute we walked into the first Assembly Member’s office, we became keenly aware of one thing-We really upset the Fung Shei of the California State Assembly. No doubt. There were a few offices we walked into where we were not wanted. But there were a number of Assembly Offices, even though they voted for McPherson, they let us know that they didn’t want to. The Deal was done. With absolutely no Quid Pro Quid return to the Democrats. All in the name of Bipartisanship. Some Assembly Offices told us that they did not even know about the Transition Team until our campaign started. A number of Staff told us that if there wasn’t such a push from the top for the confirmation, they would have fought the “Team”. Every office we walked into understood exactly what we were doing. We made a lot of people have to deal with and think about the situation and Election Protection Issues.
Some offices didn’t have the heart to tell us that it was a slam dunk, they wanted us to keep fighting.
On Wednesday morning we meet with Nunez’s Director. He explained the situation somewhat, but encouraged us to keep fighting. They had done the backgrounds on the “Team” a couple of weeks ago, but they did not make an issue out of it. Because of McPherson’s popularity, any resistance would have “tarnished” them. Nunez’s Director advised us to keep up an aggressive Progressive Organizing campaign and bring in more groups. He said if we had started sooner, they might have been able to put up more resistance, but the deal had been done. He understood perfectly what we were doing. They know what we can do and say and act on, there are things which they cannot initiate, but with a large enough population group behind us, they can then justify taking a more confrontational stance. It’s Good Cop/Bad Cop” for sure.
We were referred to Assembly Member Tom Umberg, on the Assembly Elections & Redistricting Committee, and his office sent us to talk to his Elections Consultant, Ethan Jones, who knows and understands ALL the Election Protection Issues and SoS Regs. He’s a good guy to meet.
On Wednesday, the Rules Committee held the confirmation hearing. Seven of us testified against McPherson. A number of Registrar of Voters testified in behalf of McPherson. The last person to testify in McPherson’s favor was Jim March. Not a word from his mouth about the Unacceptable composition of the “Team.” Mervyn Dymally
directed a series of pointed questions to McPherson about the lack of diversity on the “Team.”. He was the only person to vote against McPherson. When it came time for the whole Assembly to vote, 4 members stayed in their offices, which was their way of voting no. These four people were ( all are top quality people):
Mervyn Dymally
Lori Saldana (San Diego)
Jackie Goldberg
Paul Koretz ( who turned out to be a real good guy, he told us that he didn’t even know about the team until he got the E-Mails and Faxes)

A couple of days after the confirmation, Assemblyman Coto’s office contacted Marci and asked if we could provide them with a list of qualified Minority Candidates for the SoS “Team”.
That’s a start.
I believe that quite possibly one of the biggest Election Integrity Threats on the “Team” is Bradley Clark, the Alameda County RoV who used uncertified Software in 2 elections, and his answer to this was that it wasn’t important and it was just shuffling paper. The problem with this guy, vs. Merksamer, et. al., is that Clark is going to be working in the SoS office on a daily basis. I saw this guy for 2 days, and he’s scary.
We didn’t win, but we made them uncomfortable.
We made them think
We made them deal with us
We let them know that the Progressives are for real
We let them know that there are Election Protection Activists in California

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x352115

Must See--Our Own DU Activists Fight for California
http://www.calchannel.com/MEDIA/0330D.asx

Please, Everybody, thank the Honorable Mervyn Dymally of California
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x351096#top

[Wilms]

14. .