Well, shitfire, Billy Bob!

January 9th, 2008

[That's a Pea Patch'ism.]

Startled by the turnaround in New Hampshire? Some are citing the “Bradley Factor,” that people may not be up front about their projected votes, displaying their racism only when they vote behind the curtain. Others are noting that Barack performed as expected, but that Hil “surged” with older women voting her ticket [and impressed with her much-publicized tearing up and showing her soft side on Monday.]

The collective breaks down this way:

Delegate count now: Obama: 25, Clinton: 24, Edwards: 18.

The pundits have it that if Hil and Barack continue to duke it out in even numbers, John becomes the “king maker,” shifting his people to an eventual winner.

Or not.

Nothing’s in stone yet, kids … with only 1.5% of the nation indicating their choice, who knows WHAT comes next!

If you watched the primary last night [sorry, my phone connection failed; wasn't back til pretty late so I left the news to you] you had to note that the difference between Hil’s win and Obama’s second slot was just a few thousand people. Every vote counted … or did it?

Here’s another little factor we might want to look at, examined below. MoveOn has a petition up for paper ballots, with 180,000 signers already. You likely get this in your inbox, if not go to http://www.MoveOn.org

Amazing times, eh?

To cheer you, a fun bonus read, last — it’s a Mark Morford on the Best of the Ten lists, and I’ve only included the link; you’ll want to go to the article to play with the links there, they’re fascinating.

And check out this Tom Toles ‘toon — ain’t it the truth!!

Wonder what the world would look like if we all just SHUT UP!

Jude

Clinton Escapes to Fight Another Day
ADAM NAGOURNEY, NYT
January 9, 2008

ALL Diebold ALL the Time - It’s the NH Primary Elections
Michael Collins, “Scoop” Independent News via Smirking Chimp
January 8, 2008

It’s the New Hampshire Primary

Introduction. The more things stay the same, the worse they smell

Washington, D.C. - Today’s New Hampshire primary represents a major turning point in the presidential primaries. We’ve got the rising star of Obama, the stunned Clinton camp, and the populist efforts of the fast moving Democrat, John Edwards, just off a 9% increase in the national polls. At this juncture, the Republican race is less compelling unless you happen to be John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Does Obama’s highly favorable corporate media image stack up against reality? Is this the end of Hillary, or at least the beginning of the end? Can Edwards kick in the door with a strong showing and demand coverage? Will Ron Paul embarrass Giuliani by edging him out for fourth?

We’ll never know for sure.

Why? It’s been nearly eight years since the debacle of Florida and nearly six since the miracle Chambliss win against Cleland. Surely we have reliable, verifiable voting systems in place? It’s been almost four years since the nationwide disaster of the 2004 election with irregularities still emerging.

Hasn’t all this been fixed?

You’d think so. But, the answer is definitely no. Votes are still taken by voting machines produced by vendors highly sympathetic to the Republican Party. The machines are still off limits to those who want to examine how they operate and observe real vote counting. And good luck if your candidate loses and there’s fraud or voting machine problems suspected.

You’re out of luck. You can’t hire outside experts to look at the mission critical software in the optical scanners (Sec. 1.5). You’ll have a great deal of difficulty examining the paper records with voter marked choices. Don’t count on seeing any recounts either. Almost all the states have high hurdles before you can request and get one of these simple verification tools (See Appendix 2).

Even with a relatively accommodating state like New Hampshire, only candidates can request a recount, but recounts are almost unheard of in presidential primaries. Citizens are not allowed to request and get recounts in the “granite state.”

We may have ‘paper records’ with the paper forms counted by New Hampshire’s optical scan voting machines, all made by Diebold. We surely don’t have access to those forms unless there’s a recount. The presence of ‘paper records’ with optical scans means nothing if citizens can’t examine them directly; if citizens can’t request and get a recount quickly. It’s all in the hands of the candidates and parties despite the fact that the election belongs to the citizens.

Here’s voting rights activist Nancy Tobi with an incredibly succinct analysis of New Hampshire’s primaries and the 81% of votes counted by Diebold optical scanners.

NH: First in the Nation with Corporate Controlled Secret Vote Counting
Nancy Tobi, Democracy for NH Article

81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as “Premier”). The elections run on these machines are programmed by one company, LHS Associates, based in Methuen, MA. We know nothing about the people programming these machines, and we know even less about LHS Associates. We know even less about the secret vote counting software used to tabulate 81% of our ballots. People like to say “but we use paper ballots! They can always be counted by hand!”

But they’re not. They’re counted by Diebold. Only a candidate can request a hand recount, and most never do so. And a rigged election can easily become a rigged recount, as we learned in Ohio 2004, where two election officials were convicted of rigging their recount. (Is it just a funny coincidence that Diebold spokesman is named Mr. Riggall?)

We need to get the count right on election night. Right now, nobody in New Hampshire, except the programmers at LHS Associates and Diebold Election Systems, knows if we are getting it right or wrong. Our state officials and representatives know this. They learned all about it when computer security specialists Harri Hursti and Bruce Odell testified before the legislative subcommittee on e-voting in September 2007 (Hursti’s testimony is shown in this video). Scientific reports about the vulnerabilities and risks with Diebold optical scanners have been available since 2003.

We love our state. It takes courage and strength to admit where we are going wrong and to fix it. May our state officials and representatives find that courage and strength soon. Before we lose the other 19% of our votes. ++

Post-New Hampshire: Will Every Vote Count?
In all the hoopla and campaign coverage, one aspect of the primary season has been surprisingly underdiscussed–the process of voting itself.
Corinne Ramey, Drum Major Institute via Alternet
January 9, 2008

The news recently has been all voting, all the time. As candidates make epic tours of diners, churches, and city halls, papers and TV screens are chock full of pictures of politicians giving hugs and kissing babies. There’s news about Hillary’s teary eyes on the campaign trail and the difference the weather made in the New Hampshire primary. But in all the hoopla and campaign coverage, one aspect of the primary season has been surprisingly underdiscussed — that of the process of voting itself.

Until this past Sunday, that is. The New York Times Magazine featured a lengthy article on voting machines, telling the story of a system rife with problems that we still manage to use to determine hair-splittingly close elections. The Times reports,

“In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices ‘flip’ from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish.”

The voting problems in the article range from the almost-funny (In a town in Arkansas, “touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself”) to the downright frustrating. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for example, the server that tallied the results from Diebold machines crashed several times. The next day, 10 of the races had to be recounted because they were so close. But, because so many printers in the machines had jammed, Cuyahoga didn’t have paper copies of the votes that had been lost in the crash.

Unfortunately, Cuyahoga’s Diebold story is typical. About 10% of touch-screen voting machines “fail in each election,” said computer scientist Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University. According to the Times, about one third of voters will cast their votes on touch screen machines during this election. And some areas of the country were definitely worse than others — in Cuyahoga County in May 2006, an audit showed that in 72.5% of the audited machines, “the paper trail did not match the memory cards.” Even worse, sometimes those votes just disappear. In North Carolina, for example, an electronic voting machine lost 4,400 votes in 2004.

So what to do? There is one bill in the works, called the “Confidence in Voting Act of 2008,” which aims to replace paperless electronic voting systems prior to the November 2008 election. The bill provides $500 million to election jurisdictions to replace the old systems and $100 million for public audits. The bill is a step in the right direction, although it may be unrealistic to implement the new technology reliably in time for the upcoming election.

Not everyone is for adding new technology to the mix. Law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds suggests a simpler solution: returning to the paper ballot. He writes,

“To these problems (well, most of them, anyway) I have a technological solution. The technology is good. It is easy to understand. It is surprisingly resistant to fraud. And it is inexpensive… Actually, it shouldn’t be that surprising. A paper ballot encodes lots of useful information besides the obvious. Not only is the information about the vote contained in the form, but also information about the voter. Different colors of ink, different styles of handwriting, etc., make each ballot different. Erasing the original votes is likely to leave a detectable residue.”

The best option, perhaps, may be optical scanning voting machines. The Times article reads,

“Critics of touch-screen machines say that the best choice is ‘optical scan’ technology. With this system, the voter pencils in her vote on a paper ballot, filling in bubbles to indicate which candidates she prefers. The vote is immediately tangible to the voters; they see it with their own eyes, because they personally record it. The tallying is done rapidly, because the ballots are fed into a computerized scanner.”

Even optical scanning machines aren’t perfect, though. As watchdog group New Yorkers for Verified Voting points out, all complex election software does have bugs, and even optical scan machines can be embedded with malicious codes. Additionally, as the Times says, the logistics of switching to the machines is complicated, and could take about two years to train poll workers and election officials in the new technology.

The New Hampshire primary is over, and our attention has turned to the candidates’ whirlwind campaigns cavorting through the states with rapidly approaching primaries. But maybe, instead of focusing only on the theatrics of the campaigns, we need to remember how important the actual process of voting is, too. Although there’s no one obvious solution to our voting problems today, the first step may be to include electronic voting in the national conversation. ++

Can You Count on Voting Machines?
CLIVE THOMPSON, New York Times
January 6, 2008

[open link for this long article]

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county’s 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the “GEMS server,” a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.

Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold — the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga — peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working — until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn’t been solved.

Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote — generated by the Diebold machines as they worked — she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.

As the primaries start in New Hampshire this week and roll on through the next few months, the erratic behavior of voting technology will once again find itself under a microscope. In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 — even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines “fail” in each election. “In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote,” he told me. “But they’re very disturbing to the public.” … ++

Bonus Read

The top 12 ‘Top 10′ lists of 2007
Best movies? Music? Look elsewhere. Here’s the real list to help digest the year gone by
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Wednesday, January 9, 2008

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Entry Filed under: Political Waves