WILL THEY STEAL THIS ONE, TOO? (An EMERGENCY FORUM in NYC on MONDAY!)

News From Underground
Mark Crispin Miller

“WILL THE 2012 ELECTION BE STOLEN?” An Emergency Forum ~ Mark Crispin Miller (Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform) Jill Simpson Attorney/Investigator Lori Grace Election Protection Activist Jim March BlackBoxVoting Bob Fitrakis Attorney/Author Election Reform Activist Harvey Wasserman Author/Environmentalist Election Reform Activist ~ Free & Open to the Public  Monday, Oct. 22 Noon to 2:00 p.m. Open Center  22 E. 30th St. (b/t Madison & Fifth) Excerpt from Upcoming article: MOVEing In The Wrong Direction – Jill Simpson and Jim March …ES&S is partnered with Scytl on MOVE Act compliance software. At this point we need to start looking at the interconnections between these companies, in part by tracking the people involved. What is now Election Systems and Software was founded in 1979 by, among others, Bob and Todd Urosevich. Todd is still with ES&S today and has been employed with them continuously at the VP level. Bob Urosevich is the more interesting brother. He left ES&S in 1997 to found a smaller outfit that was quickly swallowed by Global Election Systems based in Canada (Vancouver BC) – originally started by three convicted felons. A year later Global bought Spectrum Print and Mail of WA state, owned and founded by convicted felon Jeffrey Dean with a convicted coke dealer he found in the WA state prison system as second in command. In other words, the evidence that Global was corrupt is overwhelming just based on staffing issues – and there is much, much more evidence beyond that. Bob U. stayed with Global through the Diebold buyout and transition to Diebold Election Systems Inc. (“DESI” still based in Vancouver BC) and served as president during the early to mid DESI years. In late 2006 he jumped ship to lead the “Scytl USA” pseudo-corporation. That didn't last long, and he jumped back to the “Global/Diebold crew” just around the time that Diebold corporate in Canton OH was getting sick of them and spat them out as “Premier”, first as a different brand name under the Diebold umbrella but then rapidly sold to ES&S in 2009. Bob U. goes to a Premier office in Dallas TX just before (or during?) that buyout process, but then in 2010 the US-DOJ decides the buyout (and merging the two largest voting system vendors) was a bad idea and forces ES&S to sell most of the Diebold/Premier assets. Dominion in Canada turns out to be the buyer however ES&S takes over the Dallas support facility that Bob U. is last tracked to after Scytl, and then Bob goes back to ES&S HQ in Omaha where his brother has been this whole time. (Meanwhile Dominion also swallows Sequoia, the 3rd largest voting system vendor in addition to much (most?) of DESI/Global.) OK. What does all this mean? Well via Bob Urosevich's travels, we see that most of the US voting system vendors are interconnected. We see a cooperative effort underway right now between ES&S and Scytl. We see continuing joint support efforts between ES&S and Global/Diebold/Premier/Dominion/? to support the joint customer base. For that matter, ES&S and Sequoia each bought pieces of a Texas-based outfit called Business Records Corporation (BRC) and still share similarities in their hardware product lines. We also see ties strong enough to support the possibility of joint political efforts... especially since all of these companies have strong ties to the Republican Party or right-wing politics in general. Former GOP operative who worked under Karl Rove recalls several occasions where Rove interacted………………

Maricopa County Elections Sued Over Alleged Voting Violations

New Times

A group of diverse individuals including Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Barry Hess, former Republican state Senator Karen Johnson, and voting activist John Brakey are suing Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell, alleging that Maricopa County Elections is involved in various voting shenanigans.

Their claim, which you can read in its entirety, here, was filed this Monday in Maricopa County Superior Court, and asks for injunctive relief and court costs. Judge John Hannah has been assigned the case, but so far no hearing dates have been scheduled.

The petition for an injunction makes several specific allegations against Maricopa County Elections. It alleges that the county has not ordered pollworkers to sign the results tapes, the printouts of the electronic tally captured by the optical scanners the county uses to count ballots.The claim also states that observers are not allowed into the ballot tabulating center's computer room.

Plaintiffs further allege that county elections officials are communicating voting results over the Internet, that observers are not allowed to inspect and photograph the physical results tapes (another name for "poll tapes") after the polls close, that the poll tapes are not being placed into secure envelopes, that elections officials are not segregating the vote count by category, and that only one person is transporting ballot material after the polls close, instead of two, as is required.

Colleen Connor, assistant general counsel with the county's litigation office, said that the claims in the complaint were inaccurate, and based on information gleaned from the 2006 and 2008 elections.

"I don't know if [the claims] were true then," she told me. "But they certainly are not true now."

Connor went point by point over the allegations. She said the county does segregate vote totals in its final canvass of the results, which is then sent to the Board of Supervisors. She sent me a sample of the canvass from 2006 showing this. The information is available through a public records request, but the county does not post the entire canvass online.

Pollworkers are being instructed to sign the poll tapes, Connor said. And ballot material will be transported by at least two individuals. She stated that the poll tapes are placed in secure, sealed envelopes, and that observers are allowed to look at and photograph these results tapes, but they would only be allowed to do so one hour after the polls close, to comply with state law regarding the release of election results.

Access to the ballot tabulating center's small computer room is restricted, but observers can watch through the room's window along the wall, she said. (You can see a live feed from the ballot tabulating center, here.)

As for the most troubling allegation concerning the transmission of electronic results through the Internet, Connor described how memory packs from the Sequoia-manufactured voting machines are taken to one of 22 receiving sites and read by a laptop. She said the information is then sent over an analog phone line using Sequoia's software, and that the information is password encrypted.

(Note: Sequoia was recently acquired by Dominion Voting Systems, which has offices in Denver, New York and Toronto.)

Black Box Voting's Jim March, one of the plaintiffs' investigators, contested this, saying that a temp staffer from the 2008 election told him that the county had software for a cellular modem on at least one of the county's 2008 laptops.

Referring to access to the computer room, March complained that he cannot properly observe what's going on in the room through its window. He said that he was once yelled at for attempting to use a pair of binoculars to watch what was going on inside.

(Connor told me March would be allowed to use binoculars this time around. Score one for the Libertarians.)

Asked why they waited until just days before the primary to file their suit, plaintiff John Brakey said he and March were only recently asked to be observers for the Libertarian Party in the upcoming elections, and then began their digging.

"We went through our old notes," he said, "and talked to others who had recent contact with [Maricopa County Elections] as either observers or staff. We then asked an important question...basically, `We know this stuff is stupid, but is it also illegal?'"

He continued: "What we found was that it was systematically illegal top to bottom."

One intersting aside concerns the Sequoia touch voting screens. There's one at each polling place, and they are used mainly by folks with impaired vision.

Apparently, these machines can be hacked. In fact, a couple of university professors went so far as to demonstrate that they could even play Pac-Man on the machine. They do admit it took them a couple of afternoons to make this happen.

However, March says the machines could be hacked within a matter of minutes.

Connor countered that there are bar code seals on the touch voting machines to prevent tampering.

In the 2006 general election, there were 303 touch screen votes recorded out of a total of about 900,000 votes cast. In the 2008 general election, 165 voters used the touch screen devices, out of more than a million votes cast.

Brakey said their concerns about the touch screens were not in the lawsuit because the issue involves such a small percentage of total votes cast.

Considering the fact that the primary is this Tuesday, August 24, it seems unlikely that Brakey, March and the others will get their day in court before that. But if they do, I'll let you know what happens.

(You can find more information about the issues involved through the blog AuditAZ, and through blackboxvoting.org.)