Diebold Ballot Programming Errors and Election Corruption in Utah 2006 Elections

[philb]

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kathy_do_061122_diebold_ballot_progr.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 22, 2006

Diebold Ballot Programming Errors and Election Corruption in Utah

By Kathy Dopp

In Utah's November 2006 election, Diebold made ballot definition programming errors that may have occurred state-wide. Errors have been discovered in Weber and Utah counties thus far in both electronic and paper ballots programmed by Diebold.

Diebold seems to have caused ballot definition errors in Utah's ballots by making changes to the database of precincts, districts, and ballot types it was given by counties. These problems were caught quickly on Election Day in Utah County, and not elsewhere, due to a decision made by Utah County's election official to configure its Diebold software on its ballot encoder and voting machines in a particular way using the correct database on one system that immediately detected and caught the error.

Ballot definition errors mean that voters are given the wrong ballot - allowed to vote in races they should not be allowed to vote in, and not able to vote in races that they should be allowed to vote in. The extent of the problem in Utah is not known yet.

It seems to have been Diebold programmers, not county officials, who messed up their database copy.

To verify that voters were given the correct ballots in other counties in Utah, there would have to be an investigation to compare the voter registration records telling which ballot type each voter was supposed to be given for the districts each voter lives in, with the vote totals tapes of each DRE, or the absentee and provisional ballot stubs which allegedly show the correct number of voters on each ballot style on each DRE machine.

However, Utah election officials have taken steps to cover up Diebold ballot programming errors and stymie any investigation into the extent of ballot programming errors by:

- Keeping paper ballot summary tapes, and other election records which would enable a count of the voters given each ballot definition, a secret, in stark contrast to other states where such records are routinely publicly released.

- Lying to multiple voting activists by:

-- claiming that Utah has no written procedures for conducting elections, which has forced activists to obtain written election procedures from poll workers and political observers who were given copies of written procedures, and

-- claiming that Utah statute requires election officials to lock up the only copies of election records for 22 months and then destroy them, and thus does not make any copies of the records that would be available.

- Making unequal use of Utah statute by forcing voting activists to use Utah's Government and Records Management Act (GRAMA), wait ten days, and make payments to obtain records and written procedures that are freely and immediately given out to others.

- Refusing to allow observation of hand counts of paper absentee and provisional ballots, claiming that the numbers on the stubs on them would reveal which voters cast them. However, as soon as the election officials finish their secret counts, the ballot stubs are immediately removed to prevent any investigation of whether or not absentee and provisional ballot voters were provided with the correct ballot definitions.

- Not releasing detailed records of vote counts, even to candidates, in some counties, and requiring official GRAMA requests and waiting the full ten days to release records, thus using up the time candidates have to request recounts and contest elections.

Utah's Deseret News article talks about the Diebold programming problems but is misleading because Utah newspapers only report what Utah election officials tell them; and Utah's election officials seem determined to cover up their blunder in selecting Diebold's touchscreen voting systems.
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/print/1,1442,650208861,00.html

Utah statute requires one vote or less difference per precinct for recounts to be required. Utah election officials have used that law to reduce the number of recounts by increasing the number of voters in each precinct by combining multiple ballot definitions due to differing districts into the same precincts. This not only reduces the margin between candidates required for recounts down to, on average, less than ½ of one percent, making Utah one of the most difficult states in the U.S. to obtain recounts; it also complicates Utah's election administration and makes errors in the databases used for ballot definitions more likely.

To make matters worse, the Lt. Governor has implemented new recount procedures which merely reread electronic tallies, in direct conflict with Utah election statutes which require manual counts of the voter verifiable paper records during recounts, despite a voting system that experts agree is wide-open to tampering and error.

Utah election officials are pushing for more funds to increase the amount of Diebold touchscreens, misinforming press and the public by wrongly stating that the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires one touchscreen for each voter, rather than one device for each polling location for the disabled voters to be able to vote privately and unassisted.

Contrary to the claims of Utah election officials, Utah has the option to use less expensive, more trustworthy, auditable optical scan paper ballots or punch-card ballots for voters.

References:

What do the experts say?
http://utahcountvotes.org/docs/WhatdotheExpertsSay.pdf

The problems with Utah's new written audit and recount policies:
http://utahcountvotes.org/ltgov/Response2LtGov-Audit-Recount.pdf

Proposal for election integrity audits for Utah:
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudit-UT.pdf

How to ensure electronic election outcome integrity with manual audits:
http://vote.nist.gov/ElectionIntegrityAudit.pdf

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
http://www.fec.gov/hava/law_ext.txt

[Peace Patriot]

1. We are blessed, indeed, to have folks with the mathematical, statistical and

logical thinking abilities, and passionate patriotism, to sort out the many ways that our elections are stolen, and to pinpoint the corruption, secretiveness and deviousness that the corporate rulers have infused into our election system from their own ethical pigpen.

It is appalling.

I've realized for some time that the main obstacle to election reform is the bipartisan corruption of election officials and legislators wrought by the HAVA billions. If you let Tom Delay and Bob Ney engineer something--abetted by corporatist 'Democrats' like Christopher Dodd--what else can we expect but the smell of a thousand skunks?

And, as Kathy Dopp points out above, the corruption then breeds more secrecy and deception, as the election officials who purchased this crapass, insider hackable machinery, try to defend their expenditures of taxpayers' money, their jobs, and "their territory" (OUR elections).

"...Utah election officials have taken steps to cover up Diebold ballot programming errors and stymie any investigation into the extent of ballot programming errors...".

It's as if our election officials are in the EMPLOY of these electronic voting corporations. They are acting exactly like corporate P.R. flaks.

To me, the crucial question (the puzzlement that seems like a stray thread in a tapestry, that if you just pull it...) has all along been the mind-boggling silence of our Democratic leadership as Bushite corporations took over our election system with TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code. As always, Democrats are more complicated than Republicans. Republicans have always been greedy bastards who will do anything for monetary gain for themselves and their rich friends. And, under Bushism, this ugly characteristic has been given free reign. What do Republicans do with unfettered power? They steal with both hands. They take billions and billions, and plunge the nation into $10 TRILLION debt--even as they CONTINUE to mouth "conservative" platitudes about fiscal responsibility and "small government." Talk about mind-boggling. Republicans take the prize for mind-boggling hypocrisy. But our own leaders are more puzzling and, in a way, more disturbing. What can explain their silence as this Diebold/ES&S disaster spread out across the nation, infecting almost all states? Every one of our Democratic Senators (except two*) voted FOR this vile legislation (HAVA) in the Anthrax Congress. I ascribe some of it to fear and arm-twisting. If you oppose any Bush Junta measures, you might just get deadly powder in the mail, or your small plane may fall out of the sky, no matter how many topnotch pilots you have on board, nor how many top-of-the-line de-icers you have on the wings of your top-of-the-line aircraft. It was a time of fear, and a time of death (including the 100,000 innocent Iraqis who were about to be slaughtered). And, further, you had Democrats like Christopher Dodd (the Bilderberg Group candidate?) twisting your arm in various ways and telling you that electronic voting is perfectly safe. Then, on top of all this, you had $3.9 billion in HAVA funds to distribute to the people who oversee how you gain power--state election officials. And then there is the "military-industrial complex"--the beast that needs feeding with major bloodshed every twenty years or so. Last time around, the Democrats (LBJ) cooked it up, and the Republicans (Nixon) finished the war profiteer slaughter. This time it looks the mirror image: The Republicans (Bush) cooks it up, and the Democrats (?? fill in the blank ___??) finish the slaughter and the looting. There is something to the theory that we have only one political party: the War Party. And how do you manufacture yet another unjust war and mass slaughter, in a democracy, where people have "learned the lesson of Vietnam," and where 56% of them oppose the next unnecessary, unjust "quagmire," right off the bat, even before the invasion? You have to fix the elections. Because the people will vote that war down, as they tried to in 2004.

The mystery of our Democratic Party leadership's silence about SECRET CORPORATE CONTROL over our elections (and rightwing Bushite corporations at that) is a mixed picture of fear, corruption, corporatism, perceived economic necessity (feeding the beast of WW II that never got demobilized), and a whole lot of "wagging the dog" (the war profiteers are really in charge now). Fear of death; fear of blackmail and ruination (pervasive domestic spying by the Bush Junta). War and election system corruption. Corporatism (lavish lobbying, campaign contribution filth, revolving door employment, NAFTA et al). And the "military-industrial complex" that Ike warned us about--the poisonous octopus that rules the corporate welfare state.

I have an intelligent, well-informed friend who, after I explained the facts about our election to her, said: "But the Democrats wouldn't let that happen, would they?" But the issue is not what the Democrats WOULD do--or what people THINK they would do--but rather what they DID do. They "let that happen." Without a whisper of objection.

And now we're stuck with it. And it is the lethal tail of the dragon. (You think you've nailed the beast, then its tail whacks you upside the head.) That's what's going to get us in '08, when we're given a choice of Social Security and war, or no Social Security and war (coming out of the primaries), and the rightwing billionaires who control these election theft machines choose the latter--unless we, the people, do something about it NOW.

And it IS going to be up to us, I think--in a difficult, multi-front struggle at the state/local level. I don't think the highly crafted Democratic Congress, with Diane ("You too can learn to love the Corporate Rulers") Feinstein heading the Senate committee on elections, is going this problem. Most of the people--both Dem and Repub--who created the problem are still in power. (In fact, one the chief architects of HAVA--Christopher Dodd--thinks he going to benefit from the $4 billion gift he gave Diebold and ES&S by being (s)elected president in '08.)

THE ELECTION REFORM MOVEMENT NEEDS A STRATEGY IN CASE OF CONGRESS' FAILURE TO ADEQUATELY REFORM THE ELECTION SYSTEM:

Here's my proposal.

The election reform movement has been awesome at raising consciousness about these rigged machines, but has failed to come up with a STRATEGY to achieve transparent vote counting--especially in the LIKELY event that the Democratic Congress will fail to do so.

I think the voters have given us the strategy. There was a huge increase in Absentee Ballot voting in these recent elections--people BOYCOTTING the machines, and trying to get around the rigged electronics. FIFTY PERCENT of the voters in California chose to vote by Absentee Ballot--a huge increase--and it was big all over the country. This is the natural constituency for election reform. We need to provide some focus and leadership to this currently unfocused boycott, and organize and mobilize the Absentee Ballot voters to pressure LOCAL officials to, a) HAND COUNT the Absentee Ballot votes, and b) POST the results BEFORE any electronics are involved. These two simple, common sense demands from AB voting groups are doable. They are clearly what the AB voters WANT. We thus begin to create a paper ballot system BY DEFAULT, and avoid a head-on collision with the vast corruption and corporate power that is obstructing reform. They can keep their shiny new machines, and multi-million dollar contracts, for the time-being. Just COUNT the Absentee Ballot votes PROPERLY, as those voters wish. And I think it will snowball, and eventually make the machines obsolete. Or they can keep the machines and use them merely for re-checking the hand count, and storing/reporting data.

The trouble with HR 550--if it even passes, in tact--is that it ENDORSES electronic voting and further centralizes control in the federal government, and, indeed, in the executive branch. This can EASILY lead to even worse tyranny than we have now--for instance, the President-controlled EAC outlawing Absentee Ballot voting and forcing everyone to vote on the machines with a worthless "paper trail" (poor auditing, difficulty of getting a recount). We have to act BEFORE the NEXT dictator gets hold of that power--whether by HR 550 or other means. HR 550 proposes the corporate fallback position that the optiscans are okay. They are not okay. Both the optiscans and the central tabulators contain TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, that can change election outcomes without detection. For jurisdictions with all paperless voting, and/or no audit at all, HR 550 provides a bandaid (paper trail, 2% audit)--IF these provisions make it through Feinstein's committee. But the "poison pill" of executive branch control of election systems and rules may override those benefits. We simply cannot count on those who created this problem to fix it. They created it for a REASON. And the reason was the WAR.

We need a local strategy. And we need A strategy. We don't really have one now. I think this Absentee Ballot strategy is the answer.

[kster]

2. ......

:thumbsup: