BradBlog: Plaintiffs Suddenly Blocked in New Mexico '04 Election Lawsuit

[Nothing Without Hope]

After they ALREADY were confirming some "impossible" voting machine "glitches," they were suddenly blocked from examining the voting machines as promised:

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002008.htm
Blogged by Brad on 11/12/2005 @ 5:19pm PT...

Plaintiffs Blocked During Discovery Phase of New Mexico '04 Election Lawsuit

Kept From Inspecting Voting Machines as Promised
Process So Far Has Revealed Votes Changed from One Candidate to Another, Disappearing All Together...

We've failed to report too terribly much on it to date, but there is a very important law suit quietly proceeding in New Mexico which is challenging the results of the 2004 Presidential Election there. The final result of that election was very close, and Election Reform advocates -- and indeed a great deal of evidence -- suggests that something was amiss there. Michael Collins wrote a good article about the suit (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00067.htm) a couple of weeks ago for New Zealand's SCOOP (http://www.scoop.co.nz).

Yesterday, VoterAction.org (http://www.voteraction.org) sent out an email about some roadblocks that the plaintiffs are suddenly facing in the discovery phase of the trial. They were supposed to have been allowed to have experts inspect -- for the first time -- the Electronic Voting Machines that were used in the '04 Election, along with the actual results that they gave.

All of a sudden, Voter Action says, the county clerks have flat-out refused to permit the inspections by the plaintiff's experts. That, after some interesting evidence has already been found by the experts during discovery, like tests where they were able to see votes for one candidate being registered for their opponent (as has been so widely reported as happening in so many elections of late!) and ballots being confirmed with NO choice for President at all, which wasn't supposed to have been possible on at least one of the machine types being looked at.

Voter Action didn't post the article from their email on their website, so we'll post it here in its entirety. Check it out...

(snip)

Brad included in this post the entire email from Voter action on this development. I recommend you read it all. Here is an excerpt:

NM Election Officials Try to Block Machine Inspections

Voter Action New Mexico Update 11/11/05

In the past week, two New Mexico election officials refused to allow the voter plaintiffs in the case of Patricia Rosas Lopategui v. Rebecca Vigil-Giron, et al. to conduct meaningful inspections of their electronic voting machines. This despite clear indications that there were serious problems in last years presidential election with these same machines, which do not produce a voter-verifiable and auditable paper record.

Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera has given no explanation for her sudden, flat refusal to permit any inspection after weeks of discussions between plaintiffs attorneys and attorneys for the county. Plaintiffs have sworn statements from Bernalillo County voters who tried to vote on the countys paperless touchscreen voting machines, manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, and whose votes were switched before their eyes from the candidate they supported to a different candidate. Plaintiffs also have evidence that the Countys widespread use of another type of paperless machine, the Shoup 1242, resulted in the erasure of votes that citizens tried to cast for presidential candidates.

(snip - please read it all in Brad's post)

Neither unreasonably broad warranty restrictions nor the intellectual property claims of private corporations should trump the publics right to know exactly how their votes are recorded and counted. Elections officials should not be able to contract away this right when they buy voting machines. They should not be able to hide behind contracts with private companies to avoid having a bright light shown on the inner workings of the paperless electronic voting machines. Unless and until everything about how these machines work is open to public scrutiny, voters are being asked to take it on faith that electronic voting is accurate, reliable and secure. With everything that is known in other fields about the prevalence of programming errors, software bugs, and hacking where computers are concerned, that is asking too much.

What comes next? The attorneys for the plaintiffs will ask the court to order the defendants to permit full inspections of the voting machines. They will also proceed to amass more evidence by taking depositions of witnesses from public elections agencies and the private voting machine companies.

Let us know what YOU think [e-mail]

Voter Action is a project of the International Humanities Center. www.voteraction.org

[Amaryllis]

1. Well, shucks...I can't imagine why they'd wanna block an investigation

that shows something was fishy with the voting machines...anyone else have any ideas?

[MelissaB]

2. No clue.

Fishy? I thought I smelled something funny.

[FreedomAngel82]

11. Exactly

If they were so positive nothing was wrong and everything went swell they would allow people to freely look. This shows that they are hiding something for sure.

[Boo Boo]

15. My beverage-addled brain can think of three reasons:

1) Malfeasance.

2) The machines are bug-riddled pieces of shit, and both the companies that built the machines and the public officials that spent shit-loads of the tax payer's money on them want to cover up the embarrassing details.

3) All of the above.

[Amaryllis]

31. I'd say that about covers it...

[Wilms]

3. Here are my favorites.

From the referenced Voter Action New Mexico Update 11/11/05

I adore electronic voting. It's so quirky.

"ballots being confirmed with NO choice for President at all, which wasn't supposed to have been possible on at least one of the machine types being looked at."

"experts were able to cast ballots that contained no votes whatsoever, something the County Clerk and her staff had told them the machines would not permit. They did this by first selecting the straight party option, which marked votes for every candidate of the selected party on the ballot. Next, they pressed the boxes for each of the partys individual candidates, which erased those votes. Finally, they pressed the Vote button, and the screen notified them that they had successfully voted."

LandShark is not gonna like this one...

"Ms. Hanhardt also refused to allow plaintiffs experts to examine or copy electronic files containing the results of the November 2004 presidential election that were stored in the machines redundant memories. The reason? The machines store the results of public elections in a secret, proprietary format that ES&S claims as its private property. According to Ms. Hanhardt, allowing plaintiffs experts to see those results in their original form would violate the countys contract with ES&S, which prohibits disclosure of proprietary information."

[Nothing Without Hope]

4. Yeah, he'll love those (and I love your Land Shark image!)

I think I'll PM him with a headsup to this thread in case he didn't see the BradBlog post yet.

[FogerRox]

7. good stuff-- kickin --keep it kicked for the Am crowd

[Land Shark]

6. LandShark's waiting for OTOH to show and tell us it's not a problem

But, this is a good opportunity to teach Constitutional law and democracy and open records laws to these "officials"

[OnTheOtherHand]

22. this is supposed to be humorous? n/t

[Amaryllis]

29. What's OTOH?

[Nothing Without Hope]

5. Related thread in the GD-P forum on this important development:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2245871
thread title (in GD-P): NM '04 Election Lawsuit discovery blocked: voting machines show vote shift

[Time for change]

8. This is great

Bernalillo County is the one county in NM where voters noticed vote switching right before their eyes, when they tried to vote for Kerry.

It sounds like they have something to hide -- they weren't able to destroy the evidence.

[Nothing Without Hope]

13. Exactly. The broken promise to allow machine examination shows that

some pay dirt. Election fraud appears to have happened at multiple levels. Examining the machines wouldn't reveal pre-election secret, illegal voter disenfranchisement, and it wouldn't demonstrate hacking of the central tabulators. But it does look like those individual machines did have "questionable" programming.

I'm betting that if electronic election fraud is not prevented next time, the criminals will streamline the process and make it harder to detect. After all, what if the machine's display, visible to the voter, recorded a vote for Kerry at the same time that it electronically recorded a vote for Bush? Or what if it proves easier to just do it all by hacking the central tabulators?

The secret purging of Dem voters from the Florida rolls that tipped the 2000 "election" to Bush (though the stopped recount would have shown it didn't tip it enough) clearly was not an isolated incident either. I hope everyone reading this thread is aware of the work you have been doing in assembling information pointing to large secret Dem voter purges in Ohio before the 2004 election. For example:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2237782
thread title (11/9): The Role of Voter Registration Purging/Fraud in Kerry's loss of Ohio

[Time for change]

17. Yeah, I think that played a very big role in Ohio

We're still working on that one. Hope to have some more substantial news on that soon.

And I think you're exactly right that if something isn't done about this stuff this time around it's only going to get worse. It's real good to see so many people working on this.

[Kralizec]

9. Yup. Didn't we all call it? n/t

[Time for change]

10. Here's one example of a Bernalillo County voting machine complaint

Taken verbatim from an Election Incident Reporting System report:

Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, New Mexico This caller used an electronic voting machine, and after selecting a democratic candidate, noticed that the republican light actually lit up. He had to select the democratic candidate again to cancel it out, and then select it again to make the correct selection. He had to do this for almost all of the people he voted for. Worried that others won't realize the problem. THIS WAS THE SECOND TIME THAT HE CALLED (but I forgot to get the first case #, so I'm not sure what the first issue was)

[Nothing Without Hope]

12. DO NOT MISS the Michael Collins article on this NM suit cited in the OP:

This article gives essential background information on the New Mexico 2004 election voting machine "glitches" and brings the story up to just before the update given by Brad and excerpted in the opening post.

Here's an excerpt from this important article, which is said to be THE FIRST IN A SERIES:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00067.htm
New Mexico Law Suit Delves Inside Voting Machines
Thursday, 3 November 2005, 12:30 pm
Article: Michael Collins

Election Errors Threaten Future Voting Rights in New Mexico

Major Law Suit Under Way to Open Up “Secret” Workings of Voting Machines
Special Report for “Scoop” Independent Media
First in a Series
By Michael Collins
Nov. 2, 2005

(snip)

If you were a Hispanic American or Native American voting in New Mexico on November 4, 2004, you may have experienced some of the following:

The most likely problem was simply to find out that your vote for president or other offices was not counted. Ballots with missing votes are called “under votes.” In New Mexico there were around 23,000 under votes out of a total of about 750 thousand votes cast. That is a rate of 3.0% for the state, or six times the expected rate of under votes in a presidential election. In Hispanic and Native American precincts under votes range from 6% to as high as 49%. One poll worker described watching 141 voters come to the precinct, enter the polling booth where a voting machine awaited, stay for a short period, and leave. At the end of the day, there was only one vote counted for president. That’s a 99% plus rate of under votes for that precinct.

In another scenario, called election machine “vote switching,” one voter describes a scene that occurred throughout the state. The voter was choosing between Republican Heather Wilson and Democrat Richard Romero in the 1st Congressional District, near Albuquerque, NM. She recounts the frustrating story as follows:

I voted for Richard Romero. The check did not appear in the box. I tried three more times to vote for Richard Romero, making sure that I was not touching the screen in any other place. The vote never registered. The fourth time that I tried to vote for Richard Romero, a check appeared in the box by Heather Wilson's name.

For the next 45 minutes, the voter sought help from an election official. None one was available. When help finally arrived, “The monitor came and cleared the machine and stood watching me as I voted again.” It finally seemed to take her vote for Democrat Romero. Describing the one hour ordeal to cast just one vote in one race, the voter said, “I have no idea if my vote was processed correctly.”

(snip)

Here we see the familiar story acted out who knows how many thousands upon thousands of times in swing states in the 2004 Presidential elections. The fact that the experts have now suddenly been denied further access to the voting machines after they already were able to demonstrate that these "glitches" really were occurring, shows that THE PAYDIRT IS THERE. The GOPs and their operatives are throwing up what roadblocks they can. We cannot allow them to get away with it - THIS IS NOT A TIME FOR SILENCE.

Note that this Nov 2 story was published in a NEW ZEALAND media venue. Let's media blast and shame the US media into breaking the silence on electronic election fraud in the 2004 Presidential election. This fraud case and its most recent development should be NATIONAL NEWS.

[A-Possum]

14. Santa Fe

I have always thought it was downright weird that the downtown precinct of Santa Fe, which has the highest percentage of registered Dems in the county (maybe even the state, I forget the specifics) went for Bush.

Santa Fe HATES Bush. I could not believe that he really won that district. There was even an article about it in the paper. There was no suggestion of fraud at the time, but a chill went down my spine.

It just made no sense. None.

[puebloknot]

19. Santa Fe for Bush? Come on!

I couldn't and didn't believe it, either. If Santa Fe went for Bush, you're all invited to my party to see Kokopelli riding a white buffalo.

Well, why not? It's as good a story as the one that says Bush won Santa Fe.

I'm watching the evolution of this lawsuit with hope -- not a lot, but enough to get out of bed in the morning.

[texpatriot2004]

16. So they found problems with the machines and have now shut

down the investigation? Is that right?

[Nothing Without Hope]

20. Guess they thought they'd covered their tracks enough. After all,

examination of the machines wouldn't reveal other fraud and voter suppression mechanisms like secret voter roll purges and central tabulator hacking (to name just two possibilities). But as soon as the examiners were able to demonstrate some of the same "glitches" reported in Nov 2004 by voters, suddenly they were forbidden to look any further.

[texpatriot2004]

24. Surely the attny's can get the courts to allow the inspections now

right?

[mgr]

35. Better tact is undo the issue with the hardware by having the contractor's

personnel present to assure that no physical tampering has occurred to void the warranties; and obtain from observers written assurances that trade secrets are not divulged.

Mike

[texpatriot2004]

18. Helpful snipets from this thread on NM refusal to allow inspection

Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera has given no explanation for her sudden, flat refusal to permit any inspection after weeks of discussions between plaintiffs attorneys and attorneys for the county.

<snip>

Neither unreasonably broad warranty restrictions nor the intellectual property claims of private corporations should trump the publics right to know exactly how their votes are recorded and counted. Elections officials should not be able to contract away this right when they buy voting machines. They should not be able to hide behind contracts with private companies to avoid having a bright light shown on the inner workings of the paperless electronic voting machines. Unless and until everything about how these machines work is open to public scrutiny, voters are being asked to take it on faith that electronic voting is accurate, reliable and secure. With everything that is known in other fields about the prevalence of programming errors, software bugs, and hacking where computers are concerned, that is asking too much.

[e-mail] http://www.voteraction.org/

[texpatriot2004]

26. Bernilillo County = County where Albuquerque is. n.t

[philb]

37. EIRS info on Bernilillo County

http://www.flcv.com/bernalil.html

[texpatriot2004]

38. Thanks for this link n.t

[kster]

21. To our Goverment, Please remain silent let them block us

we can take it, we will get them,with or without your help.

Don't get up. We will get it done!

[bettyellen]

23. kicked + nominated

[bleever]

25. What are they hiding?

Hmm?


NGU.

[New Earth]

33. i dunno but

they've been trying really hard to hide it, and for a long time now.

i wonder what it could be? :shrug:

[bleever]

34. Ya know, since they've been trying so hard to hide it, for so long,

I wonder what it is?

:shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

27. So what exactly are they hiding? Perchance the GEMS database?

interesting

[Amaryllis]

30. no point in hiding THAT...we already know what that looks like! Don't

they know we know?

[Spiffarino]

28. K&R

Keep it on top.

:kick:

[Nothing Without Hope]

32. kick - off the Greatest Page now, will be harder to keep visible n/t

[philb]

36. It appears Kerry won New Mexico

http://www.flcv.com/newmex.html

So why have the Dem leaders tried to block the investigation and the evidence along with the Repubs?

[McCamy Taylor]

39. They bought "Schroedinger's Service Contract" from Sequoia

that means they cant check the machines for errors or the contract is void. And the dead cat inside the machine is why it keeps messing up!

http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/051116.htm

[Land Shark]

40. FYI you probably know this but DATA is ALWAYS the customer's property

even in trade secret programs.