Election Reform, Fraud & News Wed 4/11/07-Whipping Up The Fear Of Voter Fraud

[kpete]

Election Reform, Fraud & News Wed 4/11/07-Whipping Up The Fear Of Voter Fraud

Fear clouds our judgement. Our fear radars tune in to things that have a slim-to-none chance of ever happening. In fact, what we fear is often quite different than what’s actually threatening us.

From: Paul Lehto <[e-mail]>
Date: Apr 11, 2007 9:35 AM



What this is all about is

(A) The front page of today's new York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/washington/11voters.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin which says "Panel said to alter finding on voter fraud, echoing complaints made by Republican politicians of widespread voter fraud." The "panel" is the EAC!

(b) The statement on EAC contracting below is preemptive CYA because many will try to throw the EAC's own report, later called just a "draft" report, which they sat on for months before finally being forced to release it by congress, that basically says voter fraud is rare.

(C) Combine this with the relatively recent US SUPREME COURT opinion in Purcell v Arizona, which (without briefing or argument) reversed the 9th Circuit and held that the fear of voters as to possibe dilution of THEIR votes via illegal voting, could, WITHOUT ANY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OR SUPPORT, be "balanced" against the proven and actual disfranchisement that Voter ID laws cause. Scholars with emerging law reviews are stating with incredulity that a mere FEAR of disfranchisement could be balances against ACTUAL disfranchisement, and have the FEAR win.

It's also about protecting republican butt on the US Attorneys scandal in order to protect a lot of republicans who put US attorneys under a lot of pressure they will have to push REALLY hard to raise the specter of voter fraud as being "real."

TO REALLY UNDERSTAND THE STAKES, ONE REALLY NEEDS TO KNOW THE PURCELL V ARIZONA CASE. THEY WILL NOW WHIP UP THE FEAR OF VOTER FRAUD, SO WE SHOULD RESPOND TO THAT BY SAYING OF COURSE THERE'S HUGE PRESSURE IN ELECTIONS, BUT THE REAL THREAT IS INSIDERS.

See how I flipped an issue from voter fraud to election fraud via a "counter challenge" to Supervisor Stone who wants to frame the Riverside voting system "hack challenge" as being for polling place conditions only (15 minutes, only what's in one's pockets, and no reaching around the back of the machine or disassembling) http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_paul_r___070330_elections_hack_test_3a.htm

Paul Lehto

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[kpete]

1. Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud

April 11, 2007
Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud
By IAN URBINA

WASHINGTON, April 10 — A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.

Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats.

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/washington/11voters.html?_r=3&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1176311752-5PdPZ1ik8uD5J+AKByhvFw

[kpete]

2. USA Scandal: Statistical SMOKING GUN

USA Scandal: Statistical SMOKING GUN
by drational
Wed Apr 11, 2007 at 07:07:34 AM PDT

One year ago, on April 7, 2006, Karl Rove gave a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association that focused in part on the issue of “voter fraud”.

We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today. We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it's a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you're doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot -- the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it's important to our democracy….
In this speech, he identified several states as being “in play” swing states:


...............

OK, so now we know what Rove thinks are critical states in the electoral picture. Lets compare this to where US Attorneys were fired or replaced in the year following Rove’s speech:



There are 93 USAs, 24 of which are in Rove-identified states. The odds that a fired attorney would randomly be on Rove’s list of 13 identified states is 24/93~ 1/4. Nothing to see here…?

............

The chances this association are random is less than one in 10,000

I just wanted to make the point that the Rove List ended up being non-randomly similar to the list of fired or replaced attorneys. Whatever the reasons, it is hard to argue that "performance issues" coincidentally occurred in states identified by Rove as politically important. One possible non-random explanation is a DELIBERATE and CALCULATED removal of attorneys. The reasons are not spelled out in the math, but I think other evidence suggests political reasons.


more at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/11/9422/52227

[kpete]

3. MD: A Return to Maryland: the Lessons of Success

A Return to Maryland: the Lessons of Success

by Mary Howe Kiraly

http://www.opednews.com



A Return to Maryland: the Lessons of Success
Mary Howe Kiraly

Annapolis: On Monday, April 9, the 2007, at the stroke of midnight, the Maryland General Assembly performed a miracle that had been unattainable for 4 years. It turned our lemon of a voting system into a potential jewel. Legislators passed bills that will transform our paperless touchscreen voting machines into paper ballots/optical scan technology in 2010. This transition will have consequences for the nation.



Advocates in Maryland have learned a few things that may be applicable to the national effort. Some of what was learned did not come easily and some of it may be less than welcome news because it challenges basic concepts about grassroots activism.

Most of us come to advocacy on election reform out of anger about national election outcomes that cannot be verified, about exit polls that are skewed and cannot be confirmed, about local candidates that lose elections under suspicious circumstances, or about the takeover of the election process by corporations. What we are angry about is pervasive secrecy. Secrecy surrounds the election process and does everything to protect the process and nothing to protect the votes that went in or the results that come out. So we decide that this is really important for American democracy and we make a commitment to reform the way we cast and count votes.

more at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mary_how_070411_a_return_to_maryland.htm

[kpete]

4. U.S. Attorney Purge: And Now the GOP's Milwaukee 'Voter Fraud' Connection...

U.S. Attorney Purge: And Now the GOP's Milwaukee 'Voter Fraud' Connection...
Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is doing some good digging into the Milwaukee connection to the phony "voter fraud" claims used to help push U.S. Attorneys out of their job in the Bush Administration's political purge/disassembly of the now-ironically named Department of Justice.

As well, a recent, and unusual, overturned case in Wisconsin's Seventh Court of Appeals is similarly adding fresh fuel to the insidious GOP "voter fraud" scam at the heart of the outrageous abuse of power by the current Executive Branch. And today, Senators on the hill are asking new questions about it to Alberto Gonzalez.

more at:
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkpg=http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4386&linkid=33366

[kpete]

5. FL: Ballot reforms too little, critics say

Ballot reforms too little, critics say
By Deana Poole

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

TALLAHASSEE — Proposed legislation to change Florida's election law won't protect all voters and will keep the state as the "butt of late-night talk show" jokes, election reform advocates claimed Monday.

While praising Gov. Charlie Crist's plan to create a paper trail for most ballots by 2008, the co-founder of the Florida Voters Coalition said the plan falls short.


"It leaves disabled voters behind, left to cast electronic ballots, on direct electronic machines," said Dan McCrea, who also is the state director of the group, Voter Action. "They have failed time and time again. We want to see the governor and the legislature go all the way to secure Florida elections."

McCrea, joined by representatives of various nonprofit voter organizations, announced the start of the Florida Voters Coalition's "Go All The Way Florida." The statewide effort is intended to press the governor and the legislature to ensure that all voters can cast "secure, independent and private ballots."

The group suggests a slew of changes to election laws: from getting rid of touch-screen voting machines completely to allowing more time for election results to be certified.

more at:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/state/epaper/2007/04/10/a8a_xgr_voter_0410.html

[kpete]

6. Electric Boogaloo

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12625

Electric Boogaloo
It's good guys vs. good guys in the complicated legislative fight over regulating voting machines.
By Art Levine
Web Exclusive: 04.09.07

.......................

But the most visible challenger to the "cult of Holt" (as some skeptics call it) has doubtless been Brad Friedman, the independent journalist who runs the popular Brad Blog that serves as the central news resource for the anti-DRE election integrity movement. "They are dead wrong on the issue of whether we should allow dangerous, disenfranchising DREs for use in our election systems," Friedman says of Ralph Neas, PFAW, and other prominent advocacy groups. "We don't want to institutionalize DRE machines for years to come," he contends. "They're antithetical to democracy." He argues that any bill that keeps them in place will only "set back the possibilities of real reform for so many years that the current status quo would be far preferable to the Holt bill as it's written."

That may sound radical, but the political landscape surrounding DREs has shifted dramatically in the last two years, making the call for banning them more respectable. Before the 2006 election, the conventional reform position was to prefer optical-scan machines but to pragmatically accept DREs with voter-verified paper "audit trails," as reflected in legislation passed in over half the states. Those favoring total bans on electronic machines were dismissed as paranoid kooks. Now, many mainstream experts, such as Johns Hopkins computer scientist Avi Rubin, have declared that DREs -- even with voter-verified paper records -- "cannot be properly audited." Academic experts like those at New York University's Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security have also confirmed empirically just how easily both DREs and optical-scanners can be hacked.

But the real shock to the conventional wisdom came with the open-seat congressional election in Florida's 13th district last year, in which Republican Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat Christine Jennings by a 369-vote margin, while 18,000 votes on paperless electronic machines in Sarasota disappeared. Those missing votes cost Jennings the election, which is now being challenged in court and faces a review by a special congressional panel. The breakdown was revelatory. Even if those Sarasota machines had a paper trail, many reformers realized, voting security couldn't be protected. "We used to feel that verified audit trails were going to be good enough," says John Gideon, the executive director of VotersUnite.org, a research and advocacy group and a former supporter of earlier versions of the Holt bill. "Now we will not support a Holt bill that does not ban DREs." As John Bonifaz, a voting rights attorney with the Demos advocacy group, points out, "Adding a paper trail to a DRE won't provide the kind of security our elections deserve," noting that you can't divine voter intent from a print-out from a machine that could be flawed.

much more at:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12625

[kpete]

7. Election woes lead to board upheaval in Cuyahoga

Election woes lead to board upheaval in Cuyahoga

CLEVELAND (AP) - Ohio's elections chief decided she'd seen enough when two elections workers were sentenced to prison for rigging a 2004 presidential election recount to avoid extra work.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat on the job for less than three months, told all four elections board members in the state's most populous county to resign. Three stepped down. The chairman, who also leads the state GOP, refuses to quit, the latest in long line of election headlines in the county, from delayed voting results to polls opening late.

At stake is the accuracy of vote counting in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County in the state that won President Bush a second term in a close race in 2004.

Digging in his heels, elections board Chairman Robert Bennett accuses Brunner of trying to help the Democrats in next year's presidential election.

"This is not about what Brunner said is good government," he said. "She is acting on a political agenda."

more at:
http://www.coshoctontribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070411/NEWS01/704110321/1002

[kpete]

8. Mississippi: Electronic voting machines dumped

Posted on Tue, Apr. 10, 2007
Electronic voting machines dumped
By RYAN LaFONTAINE
[e-mail]

HARRISON COUNTY --The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Monday to revert back to the old paper ballot voting methods here, dumping the new electronic voting machines after just a few elections.

"We've had a lot of problems with the machines... the costs, I was real concerned about the problems we had last time and it was going to cost us a lot," said Harrison County Circuit Clerk Gayle Parker, who recommended scrapping the high-tech machines after problems during the November elections.

Dozens of Mississippi counties reported problems with the new machines. Poll workers had trouble getting the machines to work. Some complained of problems with batteries and others had difficulty loading print canisters.

Parker said the county would need about 100 new electronic machines for next year's elections, at a cost of about $400,000.

The county has 44 old scanners that would need to be upgraded, but the cost should be far less than the cost of buying 100 new electronic machines, Parker said. The county plans to include one electronic machine at each voting precinct for disabled voters.

more at:
http://www.sunherald.com/201/story/27649.html

[Kurovski]

9. This could use one more vote.

Thanks kpete.:thumbsup:

[kster]

10. Done...nt

[Land Shark]

11. more links to same MS story

http://mississippipolitics.com/index.php/mp/post/3792/

even freeps
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1815447/posts

[Kurovski]

12. Say, look what a freeper wrote...

"You are right! Thank you. Paper ballots aren’t perfect, but they’re more reliable and more securable."

Okay now, I wanna know: who's been trolling?

[TEDIUM]

13. Fear

I suppose perhaps the greatest Democratic President ever stated it best with "You have nothing to fear but Fear itself."