verified voting

To our Ohio readers:

Come join Jennifer Brunner, the person who has restored fair elections in Ohio, as she is honored with the Profiles in Courage award from the JFK Library Foundation:

There is a diary at the top of the recommended list on Daily Kos citing voting problems in NYC with some accusations that Hillary's people are disenfranchising black voters. A genuine red flag was raised when it was noticed that a heavily black election district in Harlem was recorded as having zero votes for Barack Obama. This is clearly unlikely and therefore genuinely raised people's concern. And it brings up several important issues regarding voting machines. But one thing this should NOT cause is accusations of fraud on the part of Clinton's campaign. From first hand experience, I can suggest that the problem was not an intentional undercount of Obama voters, but a maintenance problem with the voting machines used in NYC.

In NYC we use very old lever machines that record the votes using mechanical counters inside the machine. It is all mechanical with each vote for a candidate tuning a counter wheel inside by one digit. As long as these machines are properly set to zero before voting begins and the votes in the end are tallied in an open manner, and as long as the machines are not re-set before the vote is properly tallied, fraud can be avoided. Of course you can see how if an election board is corrupt there is room for fraud, but with bipartisan election boards and with a chance for any campaign or local political club to see the backs of the machines at the end of voting and record their own tally, the system seems pretty fair and open.

House Party for Christine Jennings in Bradenton
Mar 13 2008 - 10:00am - Mar 13 2008 - 11:30am
Bradenton, FL

Christine Jennings arguably won her Congressional seat in 2006...but voting "irregularities" lost thousands of votes in predominantly Democratic areas, leading to her narrowly losing. She is up for a rematch and has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood, United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, SEIU and many others. You can read about my impressions of meeting her in 2006 here.

Please join Christine Jennings for a fundraising event in Bradenton.

Call our Campaign HQ at 941/366-8121 for more information.

Corruption is one of the issues I focus on the most. On Daily Gotham I focus a lot on problems within the Democratic party in Brooklyn, NY. But nationally I find than generally it is Republican corruption that is most prevalent and damaging to America.

Right now, I want to focus on a particularly vile, corrupt Republican Congressman, Tom Feeney (FL-24). This is a man closely connected with the Abramoff scandal that Republicans want you to forget but you and I know is still playing out. But Feeney is also majorly involved in voter fraud. In fact, Feeney should be the poster boy for the most un-American attack on democracy America has seen in recent years.

Feeney is a sitting Congressman, but let's start out by realizing that Tom Feeney has already been fined by the House ethics committee for his Abramoff connections. He has already been found to be corrupt by the House Ethics Committee, yet is still a "respected" member of the Republican Party and has not resigned from Congress.

But there is probably more coming...it seems that the FBI is investigating Tom Feeney further for those Abramoff connections. Gee, and the Republicans wanted us to think the Abramoff scandal had blown over.

But perhaps the worst Feeney has done is active participation in voting fraud. Yes, I say ACTIVE PARTICIPATION in voter fraud. Tom Feeney has been accused of recruiting computer programmers to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines in Florida. From the Seminole Chronicle:

Last year MoveOn.org put on one of the biggest GOTV pushes, quite possibly playing a major role in our big wins in November. They have become one of the mainstays of the progressive movement (though I did witness how they can seriously overwork their people).

Now MoveOn.org is taking on voting machines, pushing to ensure a paper trail. Here is their latest campaign:

Too many voters are still stuck with paperless electronic voting machines—machines that are vulnerable to tampering and malfunction.

A new bill in Congress would ban paperless voting. It's got enough support to pass, but time is short. This week, the Democratic leadership is deciding what Congress will take up next. If they don't put voting reform on the agenda, there simply won't be time to make the change by the 2008 presidential election.

Sign this petition to ask the Democratic leaders in Congress to ban paperless voting before it's too late: "Congress must ban paperless voting in time for the 2008 election. As voters, we support Rep. Rush Holt's paper ballots bill."

Clicking here will add your name to the petition.

This November, a Democrat in Florida lost a close House race when 18,000 votes went missing from paperless voting machines.1 Never again.
This bill is the strongest paper ballot legislation ever introduced in Congress. It's supported by Common Cause, People For the American Way, the Brennan Center for Justice, VerifiedVoting.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, VoteTrust USA, and local election integrity groups across the country.2 Newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Roll Call have all editorialized in support of the bill.3

Back in November there was a blatant case of a defective election. Without accusing anyone of wrongdoing, SOMEHOW 18,000 votes for Congress were missing (an unprecedented "undervote") the vast majority of them coming from Democratic leaning districts. This loss of 18,000 votes almost certainly altered the result of the election, depriving Democrat Christine Jennings a win. This particularly bothers me since Christine was one of the candidates I raised the most money for last year and I was very impressed with her as a candidate. But partisanship aside, the loss of 18,000 votes is just plain unacceptable. Yet the Republicans in Florida did all they could to prevent an analysis of this problem and Florida remains one of the states with the most dubious of elections. Remember, the Carter Center, which monitors elections all over the world and is one of the most respected election monitoring organization in the world, refused to monitor Florida elections because Florida did not meet their minimum requirement for fair elections.

Christine Jennings is fighting back. As I said, I was impressed with her. She is one of only a handful of women who successfully founded her own bank (she gives credit to the Clinton economy for her success!). She reminded both my wife and myself of Ann Richards in a way. So she clearly is not the type to give up easily.

Here is a message from Christine Jennings about her fight to make elections in Florida more reliable:

For years we have had a do-nothing, rubber stamp Congress, with Republicans blindly following Bush and Democrats largely excluded from the process by Republican strong arm tactics...and excessive cowardice by Democrats when they WERE allowed a part in the process.

Well, November 2006 changed all that. We now have possibly the hardest working Congress of my life time. The result is a rush of excellent bills in Congress. I want to mention a few of them and urge you to write your Congress Critters and the media to express your opinion on any of these bills you have an opinion on.

First, there is the revived, somewhat improved Rush Holt (D-NJ) bill to ensure a paper trail for elections, introduced last year but prevented from coming to a vote by the Republican Congress. This year Holt is back with HR 811. (NOTE: It is only Feb. and they are already up to 811? Busy people!!) This bill doesn't cover everything, but it does a lot to ensure our elections are at least verifiable. Simply put, it would prevent the situation we had in FL-13 in November where there was a highly suspicious undercount of Democratic votes for Congress but no legal way to do a recount. HR 811 would help fix that.

The fight against the worst of the electronic voting machines may be nearing a turning point. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) seems poised to recommend decertification of the direct record electronic (DRE)voting machines. NIST is a non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Commerce Department's Technology Administration that "promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life." This probably means that their recommendation is non-binding, but would go a long way to convincing people like my city councilman, David Yassky, who has yet to sign on to City Council resolution 131, that they had better oppose DRE machines if they want to ensure a fair vote.

From Internetnews.com:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is recommending that the 2007 version of the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) decertify direct record electronic (DRE) machines.

DREs are currently used by more than 30 percent of jurisdictions across the U.S. and are the exclusive voting technology in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina.

It's an article of faith among many Progressive activists that electronic voting machines are a thing of evil, that these machines are somehow programmed to steal votes from Democrats, and that any and all Democratic election losses are directly attributable to this electronic menace. And who knows, this contention may very well be accurate.

The problem with this perception is the same as that afflicting the arguments of so-called "Intelligent Design" advocates, namely that faith-based assumptions rest on thin evidentiary reeds. Despite what is alleged to be a massive, nationwide and ongoing fraud that would constitute a federal crime, no successful court case has yet been brought, let alone litigated successfully, that would support the assertions of the Dieboldistas. Now, this may be because everyone is in on the conspiracy; but the more natural conclusion, and one more in line with Occam's Razor, is that this vast conspiracy does not exist. The test may very well be the litigation underway over the contested results in Fl-13. But as things stand today, the verified-voting crowd is setting up an argument which is essentially not falsifiable – "votes are being stolen in ways we can't see or verify", and that should, in my mind, offend the reality-based community.

My personal argument with the Dieboldistas is this: there is, as noted, a bit of a disparity between the fervor with which they advance their claims, and the underlying evidentiary record; and more importantly, by engaging in a small-bore faith-based conspiracy theory, they're discrediting and hindering a realization that should be manifest to everyone, namely that our system of elections is deeply and perhaps irredeemably flawed. I'd go further and say that the Diebold crowd, by positing fraud as the proximate cause of every problem with the electoral process, weakens the case that must be made for fixing the system itself. Ironically, they argue for fraud in exactly the same way that, as noted, advocates of "Intelligent Design" argue for their designer, as the root default cause that explains everything. Tin foil hats are fashionable across the political spectrum, it seems.

This email was sent to users with the following roles: member

Just a quick heads up.

Thanks to Mary Hunt and everybody else who let me know about the design problems in Internet Explorer and it's satanic-spawn, the AOL browser. I've switched back to the old design. If you are a Firefox user and want to switch back to the new-yet-undebugged version, rea this post. It also has information on how to contribute to our site by switching to Firefox.

The second request is a bit more involved. I urge you to watch Hacking Democracy on our site and invite others to do so as well. Use the send button at the bottom of the post, to spread the word about Diebold's voting machines.

People need to be ready to fight for their vote not after but BEFORE they go to the polls.

That's it, at least for now