Reply #24: Jeb behind FL law illegal-izing any manual recounting of paper ballots read by e-vote machines [View All]

[tiptoe]

during Florida elections.

What is the significance of someone, like Jeb Bush, wanting to legislate a ban on the use of paper ballots for verifying the count-accuracy of the electronic vote machines (DREs and Optical Scanners) that read those paper ballots?
Answer: Recounts of the paper ballots are the only way to detect and correct "errors" (and fraud!) in counting! "Successful attacks can only be detected by examining the paper ballots." See these excerpts of findings from "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter" (02/14/06)

Keith Olbermann's 9/24 question to George Bush needs also be posed to apparently anti-Democracy brother, Florida Gov. John Ellis Bush: "Are your's the actions of a true American?"

Anyone really believe any oath Jeb Bush, as President, might take to defend the Constitution?
Anyone really believe Neocons/PNAC-ers give a damn about Democracy, except as appearance?

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source1: 04/03/06 audio interview of Ion Sancho, Leon County, FL elections supervisor commenting on Gov. Jeb Bush' influence on Florida legislation in early 2005.

source2: Transcript excerpt from a Mar 16, 2006 Audio Interview of Ion Sancho (Leon County, FLORIDA Election Supervisor) with Brad Friedman (From: The KPFT-FM, Houston Archive - The Progrssive Forum, Thurs, March 16, 2006 7:00 pm ) (audio was removed after 60 days; transcript emphasis mine)

:12:00 Brad Friedman: Let me point out a piece of this puzzle that Ion actually explained to me some time ago when we spoke.. What's really horrifying about all of this -- and I heard you intoduce this segment as saying 'potential' security problems..and I'd say they're beyond "potential" at this point -- with Ion's test down there, I want to be clear -- this was on a Diebold Optical Scan system: In other words, there are the ballots. And I know they use a similar system throughout Texas, where there IS actually a paper ballot -- Now in the case of the hack test Ion performed down there... they ended up with ballots that had someone counted those ballots by hand, they would have seen the correct results of the election -- in this case a small test; it should have been 6 "No" 2 "Yes" -- but the optical scan printed out results that were completely opposite that. Now, what was troubling (that Ion had explained to me) is that in Florida the way the election laws are there: Once those ballots are counted by machine, you're not allowed -- by law -- you can't go back and actually count those paper ballots by hand, you can't go back and audit those paper ballots by hand. And so, even though you've got paper ballots, even though they are accurate (if anyone bothers to count them), in this case -- at least in Florida (and I'm not sure what the Texas laws are)-- you couldn't go back to those ballots to get the correct election results...

:13:39 Ion Sancho: That's absolutely correct.

:13:42 Pokey Anderson:Yeah, I think Florida is leading the country in obscurity on that account.

:13:45 Ion Sancho: Well, yes, and you can compliment Governor Jeb Bush because THIS WAS HIS ADMINSITRATION'S CHANGE TO FLORIDA'S ELECTION LAW...because here in Florida the Division of Elections is a partisan appointee of Governor Jeb Bush. And he came to the Florida Association of Supervisors of Elections last February <2005> and suggested a wholesale series of changes for Florida Elections, and this one that makes it ILLEGAL for an elections administrator to check a machine-read ballot to see if a machine read it accurately...It was one of those provisions that was slipped into a huge election bill that his staff pushed through the Florida legislature last year.

:14:27 Brad Friedman: So, would it be fair to say, Ion, that was not an oversight when they wrote that law, but that specifically was what they were trying to accomplish?

:14:35 Ion Sancho: This particular law changed over a half-century of Florida law relative to how you count ballots in a recount. So,.this was NOT an oversight. This was a DELIBERATE CHANGE IN THE POLICY OF FLORIDA'S ELECTION PROCEDURES to ensure that IF A BALLOT WAS READ BY A MACHINE, AN ELECTIONS ADMINISTRATOR, LIKE MYSELF, COULD NOT CHECK IT to confirm the acccuracy of the machine itself.

From above, "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter" (02/14/06):

NB #2: Memory card attacks are a real threat: We determined that anyone who has access to a memory card of the AV-OS, and can tamper it (i.e. modify its contents), and can have the modified cards used in a voting machine during election, can indeed modify the election results from that machine in a number of ways. The fact that the results are incorrect cannot be detected except by a recount of the original paper ballots