Sancho warns Florida is not ready for the Jan. 29th presidential primary.

[madfloridian]

From Pushing Rope blog, stuff we already knew but which was covered more today in the media here.

Ion Sancho Warns of Problems With Voting Databases

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho became a national hero for those whom supported reforms of voting machines. Sancho is a registered Republican that refused to use Diebold because deficiencies in the machine's memory card. Florida Sec. of State Sue Cobb threatened Sancho with legal action and created a rule requiring Election official to notify voting machine companies when their products are tested. Other state-approved voting venders refused to sell machines to Sancho.

To make matters worse, Diebold refused to sell new machines. Sancho couldn't get voting machines as Cobb was ordering to get machines. Cobb refused to listens to complaints that the Diebold machines could be hacked. Sancho believed Cobb and voting machine companies were punishing him.

Diebold donated $100,000 in soft money Republicans in 2000. Jeb Bush was extremely resistant to voting reform. Former Attorney General Charlie Crist subpoenaed voting vender was Sancho able to get new machines.

Sancho warns Florida is not ready for the Jan. 29th presidential primary.

More on that issue:

In Leon County alone, there are 16,646 people whose address is listed in the state database in Duluth, Georgia. One of those is the mother of Janet Olin, the assistant supervisor of elections for Leon County, who lives in Tallahassee and, Sancho said: "has never set a foot in Duluth, Georgia.''

Since the federal Help America Vote Act required the state to take over the voter registration database in January 2006, the state has hired 22 data entry clerks to replace hundreds of people in Florida's 67 counties who were doing the same job, Sancho said. "The more errors you put in each element of your database, you are guaranteeing you're getting bad data out.''

Sancho said preliminary data shows that at least 14,000 voters, 10 percent of all those who have attempted to register to vote in the last year, could go to the polls and find they're name's not there, he said. Their registration is "in limbo...It's going to have the effect on Election Day of mass confusion and chaos.'

He said he doesn't know what is causing it, but "it's troubling that incorrect information is being attached to voters records because we don't know what other information is being attached.''

People in Florida should know by now to listen to this man. But when you have Republicans controlling the voting mechanisms....that's what you get. FUBAR

[Egnever]

1. Not suprising

I expect florida to be a complete mess again this year.

[Cha]

6. You can take

that to the bank.

[Peace Patriot]

2. For those of you who don't know the story of "Battlestar Galactica"--

the fabulous TV series starring James Olmos: Computerization of the earthlike "12 Colonies'" defense system is the big issue as the story begins. The old, retiring captain of a starship (Galactica) opposes computer networking on his ship. As starship and captain are mothballed, and the ship turned into a museum, we see news reporters commenting on the antique phone/intercom system and Captain Adama's old-fashioned ideas. The backstory is that these humans had created a race of sophisticated robots, as slaves, the robots had developed intelligence (artificial intelligence-AI, or, supernetworking), had rebelled, there had been a war, and the robots had taken ships and gone away. The story opens just before the robots--call Cylons--return, with the object of exterminating their creators. They manage to infiltrate the 12 Colonies' computer defense network (using a human-like Cylon), and disable all of its defenses--and nuke all 12 colonies (planets). All of its defenses except the Battlestar Galactic--whose captain had refused to be hooked up to the computer network. Battlestar Galactica, and a flotilla of civilian space ships that get stranded between planets when the attack occurs, and which Battlestar Galactica gathers around it--thus becomes the "ark" carrying the last remnant of the human race away from their nuked homes and slaughtered populations, in search of a legendary place called "Earth," with the Cylons in pursuit.

It is a great show! Really top notch in every way--and it is very political, presenting riveting conundrums about civilian vs. military power, the rule of law, terrorism, torture, racism (visceral hatred of the Cylons), women's rights (vs. the need for humanity to repopulate itself), election fraud (!) (--with paper ballots), and much else.

And I have wondered if those who created this show knew about electronic voting--the perils to our republic and our lives of a few lines of programming code inserted into electronic voting systems, which can switch or 'disappear' millions of votes, in a matter of seconds, leaving no trace; and viruses that can be introduced that spread the program from voting machine to voting machine, and into the central tabulators; and easy, fast programs that can be used to purge whole categories of voters, by corrupting their registrations, etc.

Cylons are kind of like Bushites. They have remnants of human ideas rattling around in their heads--such as the notion that God created them to subdue, and supersede, the humans. They are at first ruthless, cold and conscienceless--robots--but their brains are networked, and a couple of them start having doubts, and feelings. They are insane. The human characteristics they have acquired create an acute conflict within them between the human capacity for mythmaking and human rationality. Think: Bush, on a mission from God, and ruthless, cold Rumsfeld, exterminator of Iraqis--all in one creature.

Bushites don't have the excuses that Cylons do (who didn't ask to be created). And they are human USERS of technology, rather than products of technology. Anyway, the show is a winner. I've watched the first two seasons twice, now--increasingly aware of the political issues that it is trying to address. And I'm wondering if they intended a commentary on e-voting, with the vulnerability of these democratic colonies' defenses to attack via computer networking. They may have been thinking of something else, but it sure seems relevant.

[madfloridian]

3. Didn't the Supreme Court just make a ruling on the issue?

I remember reading something about it. I remember thinking it did not sound good to me.

Yes, I remember Battlestar and Olmos. I never viewed it as political though. Are there replays anywhere? Bet I could relate to it very well.

[Peace Patriot]

4. You may be thinking of FLA Appeals Court, which just said that private

corporate profit from 'TRADE SECRET' PROPRIETARY programming code in voting machines trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes were counted, even in the case of a highly questionable election, such as FL-13 in 2006, in which ES&S voting machines 'disappeared' 18,000 votes for Congress in a Democratic area, with the Republican 'winning' by only 350 votes.

Bushites don't just cheat. They make cheating the law.

[madfloridian]

5. That might be it.

Thanks. It could have been the state court.