Black Box Voting: Goodbye to Fair Elections in Wisconsin -- and elsewhere?

This long email is a shocker, and so well worth reading to the end.

MCM [Mark Crispin Miller]

From http://blackboxvoting.org/:

Wisconsin is set to ratify a '5-year plan' which will advocate looking into forced mail-in voting, Etch-a-Sketch-style electronic voter registration tablets which eliminate the physical signature, and Internet voting. The combination of mail-in voting and physical signature removal pulls the wheels right off of mail-in voting checks and balances -- and safeguards for mail-in voting are already inadequate.
By the way, the primary architect of current mail-in vote authentication software is Jeffrey Dean, perhaps the most colorful character ever to hit the election scene; at one point he worked for the man who headed the White House Plumbers unit from the Watergate scandal. Jeff Dean has been to prison twice in the last 15 years, once on multiple counts of computer fraud used for embezzlement.

Wisconsin's new 5-year plan echoes new proposals and changes in many states (New York-failed this time, will be brought up again; Florida, part-way there; Indiana, part-way there, California, most of the way there, Arizona, most of the way there, Colorado, most of the way there...).

Wisconsin's plan, touted by Kevin Kennedy, director of the Government Accountability Board, would cost $17 million to make all the changes. Claims that mail-in voting increases participation, or is less expensive, are now being questioned by many researchers. Some data indicates that mail-in voting actually produces LOWER participation, and the high costs associated with authentication software hint that it may actually be more expensive than polling place voting.

The runaway vote-by-mail train requires that I bring this up, whether it's politically correct or not:

If you're concerned about bogus voters being entered onto the voter registration rolls by groups like ACORN, take a deep breath. With mail-in voting, an even bigger concern is dumping REAL voters who are UNLIKELY TO VOTE onto the rolls.

Black Box Voting research into the software used to authenticate votes indicates that people unlikely to vote can be targeted to have an insider vote for them. Traditionally non-mainstream populations like prisoners, the homeless, and low income may participate in elections at lower than average rates -- there is not enough data yet to know. We really don't have any adequate authentication mechanisms to determine whether the mail-in ballots submitted are real, from real voters, or counterfeit, cast en masse by insiders for specific target groups deemed less likely to vote. If insiders counterfeit votes for real people who didn't vote, it will be almost impossible to detect.

VOTE-BY-MAIL SOFTWARE APPEARS TO BE SET UP FOR JUST SUCH A SCENARIO

Black Box Voting has obtained this court testimony, by programmer Brian Clubb, pertaining to a software programming revision ordered by Jeffrey Dean:

"...if this voter showed up in the subsequent upload, then I need to find where he appeared in the first upload, tell them what envelope number, what ballot number he was assigned so they can pull it back out. "

One implication of the above programming change: It allows an insider cast votes for a selection of voters deemed unlikely to vote. If a voter actually does vote, it enables you to pull the bogus vote back out of the system. (see pp. 1-20 for more background on above quote; full transcript: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/1-10-06-04kim-v-dean.pdf - 1,007 KB)

By eliminating physical signatures, maximizing mail-in votes, and pushing real people who are less likely to vote onto the rolls, you set the stage for wholesale inside "VoteR" fraud which will be very difficult to detect.

INTERNET AND MAIL-IN VOTING = CONCEALING KEY COMPONENTS OF THE ELECTION

Internet and mail-in voting conceal the counting of the vote, conceal who showed up to vote (and Internet voting eliminates the physical record for who voted). Both systems open the gate for removal of political privacy. Internet voting removes the hard copy evidence of the vote, just as the new Internet voter registration systems remove physical evidence of the signature. Both Internet and mail-in voting remove neighborhood polling places, a key battleground for restoring public right to know and public controls over elections. Once removed, it's difficult to restore them.

While well intended, many local officials are buying into a sales plan cooked up by think tanks and vendors. The evidence does not support the sales pitch that these tactics increase voter turnout or that it saves money. Here is the progression we are seeing nationwide:

THE THINK TANK PLAN

1. Implement "no-excuse" absentee voting
2. Authorize Internet voter registration and "voter registration modernization" (have voters sign Etch-a-Sketch style electronic tablets instead of physical signatures on registration cards).
3. Authorize opt-in "permanent absentee voting" (further increases percentage of mailed-in votes)
4. Send press releases about the high percentage of mail-in voting, citing this as justification for moving to all-mail-in voting (forced mail-in).
5. Convert to forced mail-in voting for small elections; then convert state to mail-in voting.
6. Experiment with Internet voting.

Note that each step involves removal of physical evidence and concealment of more election processes from the public. These steps are being pushed all over the United States in cookie-cutter legislation. Local officials believe they are implementing just one step, but a review of national actions shows that once one step is achieved the next one is proposed. The steps are almost identical from state to state.

Signature matching is one of the key "checks and balances" cited to tell us mail-in voting is secure. Really? A dog's paw-print made it through signature checks in Washington State for two elections in a row. Yes, a dog named Duncan was registered to vote, using his pawprint for a signature. Most people do not realize that the physical signatures are not examined -- only the scanned computer image.

Using computers, one scanned signature can be stretched and colors changed. Scanned images can be imported and exported from the incoming absentee envelopes into the database containing scans of the voter registration signatures. Note that with Internet voter registration and electronic tablet registration, there is no physical copy of the signature on the voter card.

WHO IS JEFFREY DEAN?

Well, you just can't make this stuff up. He developed VoteRemote, one of the most widely used signature authentication software programs. Jeffrey Dean's prison documents are posted on the Black Box Voting Web site - Here's the link: http://www.bbvdocs.org/dean/dean-criminal-docs.pdf

Jeff Dean was sentenced to four years in prison on 23 counts of embezzlement, achieved by modifying a computer accounting program. He returned to prison in 2004 for contempt of court, and has been back in court since on civil litigation. Black Box Voting has examined over 900 pages of testimony from his various courtroom adventures, and we have learned that he personally ordered several modifications in the mail-in voting software which disable some of the checks and balances. His court transcripts are posted on our Web site.

You really can't make this up: Before his prison stint, Jeffrey Dean worked for the law firm where Egil "Bud" Krogh was a partner. Egil Krogh went to jail after being in charge of Nixon's White House "Plumber's" unit, the source of the Watergate scandal which led to the downfall of Nixon's presidency.

While still in prison, on work release, Jeffrey Dean was given a contract working for King County, Washington (together with his brother, Neil Dean), to develop mail-in voting software. Public records obtained by Black Box Voting show that Jeffrey Dean was given a key to, and 24-hour access to, the King County voter registration database, mail-in ballot program, ballot printing system and vote tabulation software. Jeff Dean sold his "Vote Remote" mail-in software to Diebold Election Systems (Now called Premier); his brother Neil Dean sold his company to Pitney Bowes. The other large mail-in software system is now made by Pitney Bowes.

Mail-in voting software is unregulated and uncertified, and under control of the handful of insiders who run the databases. Black Box Voting is one of the only voting rights groups investigating this.

CASTING MULTIPLE VOTES WITH INTERNET VOTING

If you like the idea of a neighbor rounding up access codes of the disinterested to multi-vote himself, you'll love Internet voting. The Internet voting mechanism used in Hawaii -- voting at home with a four-digit pin code mailed to voters -- was an open invitation to vote selling, coercion, and contamination by insiders. Some people voted more than once.

TERRIBLE PARTICIPATION

Only 6.3 percent of Hawaii's eligible voters cast votes on the new Internet system (as compared with 28 percent in a previous similar election), a record low. Vendor's response: "Our systems aren't really about turnout. They're more about accessibility to participation." Huh? The election commission leaped off the democracy boat altogether with this: "The technology side, it works."

Your self-cleaning oven probably works too, but it's not a democracy. For democratic elections to work, you need public controls, you can't have concealment of key processes, and you need participation.

Important steps -- I know, it's swimming against the current if you are a Democrat. But mail-in voting is just as concealed and undemocratic as paperless touch-screen voting.

Block mail-in and Internet voting efforts: Internet and mail-in voting systems violate your inalienable rights because they transfer control to insiders and conceal essential election processes. Help to kill these proposals.


This message was sent by: Black Box Voting, Inc., 330 SW 43rd St Suite K - PMB 547, Renton, WA 98057
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Black Box Voting is one of the ONLY voting rights organizations doing tough-minded research into the new vote-by-mail craze. If you believe our work is important, please consider support with a donation: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or mail to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St Suite K - PMB 547
Renton WA 98057
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr, etc.: Is Your Vote Safe

RFK Jr., Mike Papantonio: "Is Your Vote Safe?"

Monday 22 September 2008


by: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ring of Fire

Transcript from Ring of Fire on Air America Radio

Bobby: "There are about 30 scams the Republicans are deliberately using, particularly in the swing states to get Democratic voters off the rolls. These scams originate in the so-called Help America Vote Act which was passed after the Florida debacle in the year 2000. It was originally suggested by Democrats and Republicans but it was passed by a Republican congress with a Republican senate and a Republican president. And instead of reforming what happened in Florida it basically institutionalized all the problems that happened in Florida. And institutionalized a series of impediments that make it very difficult for Democrats to register, for Democrats to vote and then for Democrats to have their vote counted.

"One of these requirements under HAVA is called "the perfect match" and what that does is little known but it is devastating. A quarter of the voters in Colorado have just been removed from the rolls because of this - just this one scam. And what it does is they use a computer system to compare your registration application to all other government records of you in the state. So they'll look at your social security records, your motor vehicle records and any time you've had any interaction with the government and if there is any information on your voter registration that is different than the information on another government record that they find they remove you from the voting rolls.


"For example, if I registered as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and yet my motor vehicle license said Robert Frances Kennedy Jr. I'd be removed from the rolls. If your initial is different, if you leave an initial out, if you leave a "Jr." out, if you leave a hyphen out in your name. And what they've done is a study in New York that said 80% of the errors are errors that were done by state clerks who are taking down this information. And particularly immigrant communities that people tend to vote Democratic, people have names … spell Muhammad with an "o" instead of a "u" (crosstalk)

Pap: "Are the Democrats Suing to Stop This?"

Bobby: "No, the Democrats are doing nothing to stop it. In New Jersey, which is a swing state, 300,000 voters in New Jersey were just sent letters saying that they are now ineligible to vote. New jersey is nice enough to actually notify them - most states will not even notify them. And New Jersey intends to send out 870,000 letters so that is three quarters of a million people off the voting rolls in a state that could decide this vote by 50,000 votes. And these are Democrats that are being pushed off the rolls.


Bobby: "Let me tell you about one other of these scams people should know about. If you're a newly registered voter - and of course the Democrats have done these gigantic registration drives - 12 million people on registration - if you're a new voter you MUST include your license or some other state I.D. when you come to vote. What that means is that if you're a college kid (and college kids now - they're sending in absentee ballots - they're not going to the voting place, they do everything online or they do everything remotely - they don't dream of going to the precinct house voting on election day and waiting in a long line) so if they send in the absentee ballot and they don't include a color copy of their license their vote is going to be thrown into a trash can. And none of these people know this because you have had to read the law in order to know it. So there is no notification for when you fill out your registration form, so all of those 12 million people that the Democrats have registered: those ballots are going to be just thrown out.

Pap: "And if Democrats won't talk about this how the hell's anybody gonna know about it? I'm involved with this kind of thing every day - I didn't know that until you just told me. The media is not talking about it. How in the hell is somebody gonna find this out? It's just incredible.

Bobby: "Hopefully - Obama is getting 66 million dollars a month - hopefully somebody in the Democratic organization is going to pay some attention to this before election day.

Fiction?!: Cassandra, Chanting: An Election Insider's Nightmare by Anonymous

Editorial Reviews from Amazon dot com.

Product Description
At the center of Cassandra, Chanting is a plot to steal the next American presidential election. Written by an election world insider who must remain anonymous, the novel exposes in authentic and chilling detail just how vulnerable our electoral system is today. It also reveals how warnings by experts are going unheeded and leaving Americans dangerously exposed, just as warnings by the mythological Cassandra went unheeded, resulting in the destruction of ancient Troy. As the novel opens, plotters travel to America and seduce and recruit government officials in order to gain access and then manipulate in undetectable ways the computer programs that control voting systems. The subversive group targets weak leaders and government bureaucrats whose thirst for power or other gain makes them susceptible. They find many eager takers. Meanwhile, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in D.C. has assembled a team led by former Navy SEAL Carl Martello to work on federal election oversight. He is joined by Angela Elanthos, brilliant at computers and decoding, and soon they become suspicious of one of the largest voting companies controlling millions of voting machines, certain they have rigged their programs. Despite government inertia and very different backgrounds, Carl and Angela race against the clock to uncover the high-tech complexities of a plot to fix the outcome of the election. As the novel so alarmingly reveals, the means by which the democratic institutions can be sabotaged within the voting process are all too real, as is the public's continuing indifference to what could happen. Cassandra, Chanting is a gripping tale telling us why we must be ever diligent in protecting our institutions against those who exercise no restraint attempting to destroy those institutions and us. "Embedded in this spell-binder of a novel is a startling and convincing message -- the vulnerability of the very voting system the US is now adopting. The author clearly understands the new system and what makes it tick and shows how it could be 'fixed' to produce a winner different from the popular vote. In the process, the very legitimacy of our political system would be subverted. November 2008 is not so far away. We must heed this warning." Marvin Zonis is a Professor in the Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago. He also heads Marvin Zonis + Associates, Inc., political risk consultants. www.cassandrachanting.com

Larry Beinhart: New York Times: Gore Lost, Gore Won in 2000

Larry Beinhart
Corrections: In Which the New York Times Perpetuates the Myth It Created -- That Bush Won Florida in 2000
Posted May 27, 2008 | 11:23 AM (EST)
"In 2001 painstaking postmortems of the Florida count, one by The New York Times and another by a consortium of newspapers, concluded that Mr. Bush would have come out slightly ahead, even if all the votes counted throughout the state had been retallied." Alessandra Stanley, New York Times, May 23, 2008 in a review of the HBO television movie, Recount
That's not true. The New York Times did not do its own recount. It did participate in a consortium. Here's what they actually said: "If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin." Ford Fessenden And John M. Broder New York Times, November 12, 2001
Why did Ms. Stanley make such an important and fundamental error?
It is not a trivial matter. It is a common piece of misinformation. Many, many people believe it. Now a few more do, as a result of Ms. Stanley's review. It is not a trivial matter. Because that misinformation was created by one of the most bizarre, and still completely unexplained, journalistic events in modern times. Here's what happened. George Bush appeared to have won Florida, and therefore the presidency. The law in Florida was actually quite simple and direct:
Ÿ(4) If the returns for any office reflect that a candidate was defeated or eliminated by one-half of a percent or less of the votes cast for such office, ... the board responsible for certifying the results of the vote on such race or measure shall order a recount of the votes cast with respect to such office or measure.
That is one of the simplest and most clearly written bits of legislation I've ever seen anywhere. The Florida court thought so too and ordered a recount. Then the United States Supreme Court stepped in and shut the recounts down. Bush was left as the victor and became the president. But, presumably, the whole world wanted to know who actually did get the most votes. It would make a great and important story. But getting the truth was too time consuming and expensive for any single news organization, so a consortium was formed. It consisted of The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. It took almost a year and cost over a million dollars. All the news organizations had the same information: Al Gore got more legal, countable votes than George Bush. Here are the headlines:
The New York Times: "STUDY OF DISPUTED FLORIDA BALLOTS FINDS JUSTICES DID NOT CAST THE DECIDING VOTE."
The Wall Street Journal: "IN ELECTION REVIEW, BUSH WINS WITHOUT SUPREME COURT HELP,"
Los Angeles Times: "BUSH STILL HAD VOTES TO WIN IN A RECOUNT, STUDY FINDS."
The Washington Post: "FLORIDA RECOUNTS WOULD HAVE FAVORED BUSH" CNN.com: "FLORIDA RECOUNT STUDY: BUSH STILL WINS."
The St. Petersburg Times: "RECOUNT: BUSH."
If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read the stories, it didn't get much better. I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph, until I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back and read all the stories. The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection. They spent the first three paragraphs supporting the headline and they explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount. Finally, in the fourth paragraph -- if you got that far -- was the statement quoted above:

"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin."
There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush. It is also very well buried. It had arcania about chads on both sides of it. Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Times dismissed what the Consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: "While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes." Even though that would seem to be a fairly obvious interpretation of the law and it is what was found when someone actually did sit down and count the votes.
The rest of the story, another four paragraphs, detailed a variety of other possible recounts, all partial recounts -- these counties, but not those counties - that the Gore lawyers or the Bush lawyers asked for at various times. Bush would have won all of those variations, he just didn't get the most votes in Florida. Not that the all variations mattered much. The Florida court had ordered a state wide hand recount.
The news story spinners hung their hat on a technicality.
Florida law, as affirmed by the courts, says a vote most be counted if there is "a clear indication of the intent of the voter."When the questions and lawsuits started, they were about undervotes. An undervote is when a voter has tried to vote but for some reason the counting machines fail to accept it. The most common cause, in Florida, which used a punch system, was that the punching device did not make a clear hole in the voting card. The piece of paper that was supposed to be knocked out, a chad, was hanging, or only broken on two corners, or merely dented. While the machines couldn't discern the "intent of the voter," the human eye often could. So we had the spectacle, and the jokes, about "hanging chads," as the recounts began. If only the undervotes were counted, by some standards of judging them, then Bush would have won.
But the consortium recount came across something else -- overvotes. An overvote is when someone punches in the name of the candidate, and then, just to make sure, writes their name on the ballot. The machines could only read that the ballots had been marked in two places and threw them out.
But a human being, who saw that the place to vote for Gore had been punched and then, that Gore's name had been written in, could easily determine the intent of the voter. So the reporters for the consortium kept track of those too, and found out that Gore actually won.
Had the people inspecting the votes in the actual recount also noticed overvotes, and would they have done something about them? The answer appears to be yes.
Newsweek has uncovered hastily scribbled faxed notes written by Terry Lewis, the plain-speaking, mystery-novel writing state judge in charge of the Florida recount, .... -- just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its order -- Lewis was actively considering directing the counties to also count an even larger category of disputed ballots, the so-called "overvotes," which were rejected by the machines because they purportedly recorded more than one vote for president. ....
Judge, if you would, segregate 'overvotes' as you describe and indicate in your final report how many where you determined the clear intent of the voter," Lewis wrote in a note to Judge W. Wayne Woodard, chairman of the Charlotte County Canvassing Board on the afternoon of December 9, 2000. "I will rule on the issue for all counties, Thanks, Terry Lewis.
Newsweek, The Final Word? Michael Isikoff, 11/19/01
That leaves us with a big question. The largest, most prestigious news organizations in the United States - pretty much in the world - discovered a great and exciting story -- the wrong guy was president of the United States. Also, that the Supreme Court of the United States had interfered in an election to frustrate the actual will of the voters. (Justice Scalia wants us to get over it.) Why did they so distort the story with misleading headlines, by burying the lead, by blowing so much fog and confusion around it, that almost everybody who read or heard the story, walked away with the false impression that they had deliberately created? Created so successfully that the NY Times TV show reviewer is repeating it as fact seven years later.

There is no hard, on the record answer to that. None of the editors or publishers have come forward and said, "This is why we spun the story the way we did, even if it meant pissing away the million dollars we spent to get it." Nobody has, and nobody can, sue them for gratuitous misinformation and malfeasance, and put them in the witness box under oath to get to the bottom of it. There is only speculation. The story is dated November 12, 2001, just two months after September 11, 2001. We can imagine that they universally felt it was not the time to announce a pretender was on the throne and that the system was rotten, right to the top. But I sure would love to know how they all got on the same page about it. That would make a terrific story. Not as great as the one they threw away, but good enough.
I wrote to the Times and suggested a correction. At the time that I've submitted this, none has appeared. However, a correction has already appeared because an article about Sex and the City got the number of its television seasons was wrong. You have to know when accuracy is important.
Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian, and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. All available at nationbooks.org His new novel: SALVATION BOULEVARD will be published in September, 2008, by Nation Books Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net

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