from Blackboxvoting.org:
Friday May 28, 2004
Just how desperate IS Florida? This state is removing the audit trail, piece by piece.
By Bev Harris
Scroll down for evidence that Diebold plans to eliminate the poll book, thus getting rid of the human-verified physical record that proves how many people voted, currently required by law to be compared with the number of votes counted by the machines. How nice to remove the paper record of the number of voters who sign in...and Diebold's new system was just certified in Florida.
From Miami Herald commentary:
Absentee ballot law is a joke that isn't funny
``Every vote should count.'' -- Jeb Bush, upon signing into law a measure doing away with witness signatures for absentee ballots.
..."By taking away the witness requirement, the governor and the Legislature not only made it easier for corruption to take place -- which in itself is a fairly amazing feat -- but they have also made it more difficult to catch.
...CAUSE FOR SHAME
"...The problem with doing away with the witness signature should be obvious to anyone who has lived in Miami. Absentee ballot fraud has long been a problem in South Florida, with candidates often buying ballots, or worse, stealing them from unsuspecting people in nursing homes and condominiums. A city of Miami election in 1997 was overturned after such fraud.
'''If you have the same witness sign 100 or 200 ballots, it at least makes you suspicious that there might have been coercion or fraud and it gives you a place to start investigating,'' says Rodriguez-Taseff. (...Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, an attorney with the Election Reform Coalition) 'Now without the witness signatures, there is no paper trail to follow.''
SUSPICIOUS INTENT
'''...The only logical reason to get rid of the one and only safeguard for absentee ballots is that there are politicians in this state who are interested in manipulating elections,' she charges. 'Now some people are saying it is a Republican plot to try and steal the presidential election.'
..."Rodriguez-Taseff's assessment may be scary, but I'm afraid she's right. There are politicians who every election live and die by absentee ballots. Some work the system honestly, others don't. In the past, when absentee ballot fraud has been caught, it was the witnesses who often went to jail, who in turn could point a finger at the politician. Now that link is gone.
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And now, for the removal of more paper audit trails (Thanks to Black Box Voting member RedEagle for this catch)
Full text of letter
U.S. Department of Justice
Civil Rights Division
Paul W. Craft
Division of Elections
Dear Mr. Craft:
This is in response to your recent inquiry to the Civil Rights Division concerning the ongoing design of Florida's Central Voter Registration System for compliance with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, 42 U.S.C. §§ 15301-15545 ("HAVA"). Your two questions relate to whether a "paperless" voter registration system would be consistent with the requirements of federal law.
...It is our understanding the State envisions a statewide voter registration system completely integrated with the State's driver's license system, where data validation would occur during voter contact with an office of the State Motor Vehicles Department. Approximately 63% of the State's voter registration applications come through such offices. The State's current driver's license system is a paperless design, with photographs, information and signatures captured digitally so that an applicant does not have to complete a paper application form. To fully integrate the voter registration system with this system, paperless voter registration applications would be used with signature images captured on a digital signature pad. This paperless system would be used in both driver's license offices and other NVRA-covered voter registration offices. It is our further understanding that no paper of any kind would be generated during this process.
... Deploying an entirely paperless system may jeopardize the ability to perform hand writing analyses on challenged signatures in a manner that can be used in court. You may want to review this issue with Florida law enforcement officials to confirm the particular requirements under Florida law...
Sincerely,
Hans A. von Spakovsky
Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General
Bizarre anomalies in machines
Secretary of state tries to calm voters
"Hood, addressing the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County, said she has ''great confidence'' that the state's 67 elections supervisors are ready for the November election -- and the scrutiny that will accompany it.
'''I want the attention to be on Florida, but I always want it to be in a positive way,'' she said.
"But Hood acknowledged her office is investigating a voting machine glitch in Miami-Dade County, which she said was not properly reported to the state. A spokesman for Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan noted it was the county that detected the problem and said that Kaplan had sought to balance the need to report potential problems against unnecessarily alarming the public.
"The glitch involves the auditing system of the iVotronic touch-screen machines Miami-Dade and Broward installed after the mishaps that plagued the 2000 presidential election. County officials have said the glitch does not affect voting -- only the audits performed days after the election itself. The problem, according to Kaplan, is in the flashcard that downloads the voting information.
"When the votes are downloaded, some machines scramble the serial number of the machine, making it difficult to identify where the votes came from."
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Okay, I've seen the information about that "glitch." It's worse than what they portray. A memo written a year ago and not disclosed, but discovered by the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition via a public records request, shows a technician who sounded alarm bells when the ES&S machines appear to be fudging their own data. The employee tested the machines and discovered that they were dealing with an audit procedure where the number of votes was compared with the number of voters, and when there was a discrepancy, the program seemed to be inventing a "ghost machine" and randomly assigning a number to it, and this ghost machine created the votes to balance out the audit.
Now watch this tap dance: In the same article, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, the state's chief elections officer, says she is not responsible for the state's elections:
"Hood, grilled by league members with serious reservations about the county's voting equipment, repeatedly sought to distance her office from election operations.
'''I have absolutely no authority over the running of elections in this state,'' said Hood, a former Orlando mayor who was appointed to the job by Gov. Jeb Bush. She said the department's responsibilities include certifying voting equipment, ensuring that supervisors follow state law and verifying election results." =================
And now it gets truly surreal: Remember those voters purged from the Florida voting rolls? (And Greg Palast should have received a Pulitzer for that story). Well, they STILL have not had their rights restored.
from Miami Herald, May 26, 2004
"TALLAHASSEE - With less than six months to go before the presidential election, thousands of Florida voters who may have been improperly removed from the voter rolls in 2000 have yet to have their eligibility restored. Records obtained by The Herald show that just 33 of 67 counties have responded to a request by state election officials to check whether or not nearly 20,000 voters should be reinstated as required under a legal settlement reached between the state, the NAACP and other groups nearly two years ago.
"Some of the counties that have failed to respond to the state include many of Florida's largest, including Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach. Those counties that have responded told the state that they have restored 679 voters to the rolls so far -- more than enough to have tipped the balance of the 2000 election had they voted for Al Gore. President Bush won Florida and the presidency by 537 votes.
"The fact that many counties have yet to add voters back to the rolls comes at the same time that election supervisors across Florida are being asked to look at purging more than 47,000 voters that the state has identified as possible felons who are ineligible to vote under state law.
NO DEADLINE
But state election officials say there is no deadline for when counties must reinstate voters who may have been wrongly removed four years ago. That upsets some of the groups that sued the state over its 1999 and 2000 purge lists.
''It's scandalous that the state has not simply undone the error that was done in 2000,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. ``It calls into question this and so many other issues and makes you wonder, how much has really changed four years after the 2000 election?''
But state officials say the ultimate decisions whether to restore or remove a voter are left to each county elections supervisor.
''The supervisors of elections have duties under the law to do list maintenance -- which includes the removal of felons, duplicates and those who have died -- from voter rolls,'' said Marielba Torres, assistant general counsel for the state elections division. ``We provide a tool. They need to verify it from the sources they have. They have the legal duty to do it.''
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In a nutshell: Paperless voter registration. Soon-to-be paperless poll books. Paperless votes. Removal of the witness requirement on absentee ballots. Software that diddles with its own audits. Wrongful removal of thousands of voters, and refusal to commit to a date to reinstate them.
And Wexler's lawsuit was dismissed in federal court, though it is still alive in state court and has generated some good discovery documents which might be used in future lawsuits. |
