I don't know if anyone has watched this Movie Called "Recount" but its defiantly a must see!
This Story shows what went wrong with the 2000 Election. Its sad that this movie never made it to Theaters. If a movie like "Bobby" and "JFK" can make it to Theaters then this movie should have too! The acting is Awesome as well are the actors.
In this movie, The Bush Campaign mentions several times that "each time they recounted the votes, that the Bush Campaign came in ahead each time." Well...Its obvious as to why they did after watching this Movie.
Like most Movies...its hard to put a lot of focus on all the issues of that Election..and we all know there were many, but i think its a good starting point for people to go and research from.
Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVd1LuadnDk
TO WATCH VIDEO:
http://www.hbo.com/films/recount/
Full Version: "recount"
Finishing the Count Following George W. Bush's inauguration in 2001, a group of the U.S.'s largest media outlets -- including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press and CNN among others -- formed a consortium to count Florida's votes from the disputed 2000 presidential election. The National Opinion Research Center examined 175,010 votes that had been rejected by machine counters, including those in which no vote was recorded (undervotes) and those in which more than one candidate was recorded (overvotes).
The results, according to the Washington Post, showed that "if the two limited recounts had not been short-circuited -- the first by Florida county and state election officials and the second by the U.S. Supreme Court -- Bush would have held his lead over Gore, with margins ranging from 225 to 493 votes, depending on the standard. But the study also found that whether dimples are counted or amore restrictive standard is used, a statewide tally favored Gore by 60 to 171 votes."
Additionally, the news media reported, the investigation found statistical support for the claim that misleading ballot design, such as instructions to "Vote Every Page" even though presidential candidates were spread across two pages, cost Al Gore the White House. Of the more than 113,000 ballots that were marked for more than one candidate, 75,000 indicated Gore and a minor candidate; 29,000 were for Bush and a minor candidate.
The consortium released the results of its analysis in November of 2001, but much of its impact was lost in the media coverage following the terrorist attacks of September 11.
Both political parties claimed vindication.
Purging the Rolls
In the months after the 2000 election, media reports reported thousands of errors in the Florida Central Voter File, the list created by the Florida state government to purge ineligible voters from the rolls. In 2004, as Governor Jeb Bush and the state government planned to institute a new and "improved" purge list, several media sources, including CNN, sued to view it. Among the findings: of the 48,000 people listed as felons, 22,000 identified themselves as African American and 61 as Hispanic. African Americans have historically skewed toward Democratic candidates in Florida, while Hispanic voters in the state tend toward Republicans.
The state eventually abandoned efforts to use the list, and it was supplanted by aspects of the Federal Help America Vote Act in 2006.
Carter-Baker Commission
Former Secretary of State James Baker, who helped secure the White House for George W. Bush, joined with former President Jimmy Carter in 2005 to form a commission on election reform at American University (PDF).
The 21 member commission, which included former members of Congress, scholars, and non-partisan leaders, spent 6 months studying electoral problems in the U.S., and ultimately presented 87 reforms to the president and to Congress. The proposals included recommendations for voter identification cards and auditable trails for voting machines. The effort received extensive news coverage.
More recently, the commission has reported that there has been "significant" or "some" progress towards implementing or debating many of the reforms that the Carter-Baker Commission proposed, but that "the future trajectory of reform remains uncertain" as the 2008 election approaches.
http://www.hbo.com/films/recount/epilogue/index.html
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (CNN) -- Voters confused by Palm Beach County's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore the presidency, The Palm Beach Post concluded Sunday.
The newspaper's review of discarded ballots found Gore lost 6,607 votes when voters marked more than one name on the county's "butterfly ballot." A leading Republican called the finding "speculation."
Voters who marked Gore's name and that of another candidate totaled more than 10 times the winning margin Bush received to claim Florida's 25 electoral votes and the White House, the Post concluded. The newspaper said the result was "an indictment of the butterfly ballot, political experts and partisan observers agree."
The newspaper's review of the overvotes found 5,330 Palm Beach County residents invalidated their ballots by punching chads for Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. The hole voters punched for Buchanan was located just above Gore's on the two-page ballot.
The ballots showed another 2,908 voters punched Gore and Socialist David McReynolds, whose hole appeared just below Gore's. Buchanan's and McReynolds' names appeared on the right page of the ballot, while Gore's was on the left.
The confusion hurt Bush, too: 1,631 people punched Bush and Buchanan, whose hole was below his on the ballot. But Gore was the bigger loser: the two Gore combinations, minus the Bush-Buchanan votes, totaled 6,607 lost votes for Gore, the Post found.
Palm Beach at heart of recount
The paper reviewed more than 19,000 punch cards in the county, which was at the center of what turned into a 37-day standoff in the courts. Bush won Florida by a 537-vote margin in official results, giving him a 271-267 majority in the Electoral College.
"What it shows is what we've been saying all along -- there is no question that the majority of people on Election Day believed they left the booth voting for Al Gore," Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff and his lead legal strategist in Florida, told the newspaper.
But former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, a Republican who advised Bush's recount effort in Florida, dismissed the Post's findings.
"You're trying too hard to find a correlation here," Racicot said. "You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation."
Almost half of the Gore-Buchanan over-votes were from precincts where most of the voters were 65 or older and Democrats. Even if 1 percent of the 6,607 votes were intended for Buchanan or McReynolds -- more than their combined portion of Palm Beach County's total vote -- Gore would still have gained 6,541 votes, the newspaper concluded.
"Are these stupid voters? Or is it a stupid voting system? There's certainly evidence here that these were not stupid voters," University of California-Berkeley Professor Henry Brady said.
Ballot designed to help elderly
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa Lepore said she put the presidential candidates on two pages to keep the print size big enough for the county's many elderly voters. She has acknowledged it was a mistake.
Many of the voters said they had expected Gore and Bush to be the first two choices, as Florida law requires. Instead, they found Buchanan, on the opposite page, between them.
"The butterfly ballot discombobulated them," Brady said.
Three-fourths of the over-votes were punches for two candidates, most of which experts attributed to the ballot design, the paper said. The rest were for three or more candidates, which experts called voter error, not a design problem.
The review of over-votes was conducted between January 17 and January 29. Last year, Brady calculated that at least 2,000 of Buchanan's 3,424 Palm Beach County votes were meant for Gore. If that were true, Gore's total gain -- with the overvotes -- might have been as much as 8,600 votes, the paper said.
Twenty-eight voters selected all 10 presidential candidates, the survey found.
The Post's analysis is independent of another review of the Florida vote by a consortium of media that includes CNN. In February, a separate Miami Herald review found a net gain of only 49 votes for Gore among about 10,000 ballots that Gore wanted hand-counted in the November election's aftermath.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/0...mbeach.recount/
The newspaper's review of discarded ballots found Gore lost 6,607 votes when voters marked more than one name on the county's "butterfly ballot." A leading Republican called the finding "speculation."
Voters who marked Gore's name and that of another candidate totaled more than 10 times the winning margin Bush received to claim Florida's 25 electoral votes and the White House, the Post concluded. The newspaper said the result was "an indictment of the butterfly ballot, political experts and partisan observers agree."
The newspaper's review of the overvotes found 5,330 Palm Beach County residents invalidated their ballots by punching chads for Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. The hole voters punched for Buchanan was located just above Gore's on the two-page ballot.
The ballots showed another 2,908 voters punched Gore and Socialist David McReynolds, whose hole appeared just below Gore's. Buchanan's and McReynolds' names appeared on the right page of the ballot, while Gore's was on the left.
The confusion hurt Bush, too: 1,631 people punched Bush and Buchanan, whose hole was below his on the ballot. But Gore was the bigger loser: the two Gore combinations, minus the Bush-Buchanan votes, totaled 6,607 lost votes for Gore, the Post found.
Palm Beach at heart of recount
The paper reviewed more than 19,000 punch cards in the county, which was at the center of what turned into a 37-day standoff in the courts. Bush won Florida by a 537-vote margin in official results, giving him a 271-267 majority in the Electoral College.
"What it shows is what we've been saying all along -- there is no question that the majority of people on Election Day believed they left the booth voting for Al Gore," Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff and his lead legal strategist in Florida, told the newspaper.
But former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, a Republican who advised Bush's recount effort in Florida, dismissed the Post's findings.
"You're trying too hard to find a correlation here," Racicot said. "You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation."
Almost half of the Gore-Buchanan over-votes were from precincts where most of the voters were 65 or older and Democrats. Even if 1 percent of the 6,607 votes were intended for Buchanan or McReynolds -- more than their combined portion of Palm Beach County's total vote -- Gore would still have gained 6,541 votes, the newspaper concluded.
"Are these stupid voters? Or is it a stupid voting system? There's certainly evidence here that these were not stupid voters," University of California-Berkeley Professor Henry Brady said.
Ballot designed to help elderly
Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa Lepore said she put the presidential candidates on two pages to keep the print size big enough for the county's many elderly voters. She has acknowledged it was a mistake.
Many of the voters said they had expected Gore and Bush to be the first two choices, as Florida law requires. Instead, they found Buchanan, on the opposite page, between them.
"The butterfly ballot discombobulated them," Brady said.
Three-fourths of the over-votes were punches for two candidates, most of which experts attributed to the ballot design, the paper said. The rest were for three or more candidates, which experts called voter error, not a design problem.
The review of over-votes was conducted between January 17 and January 29. Last year, Brady calculated that at least 2,000 of Buchanan's 3,424 Palm Beach County votes were meant for Gore. If that were true, Gore's total gain -- with the overvotes -- might have been as much as 8,600 votes, the paper said.
Twenty-eight voters selected all 10 presidential candidates, the survey found.
The Post's analysis is independent of another review of the Florida vote by a consortium of media that includes CNN. In February, a separate Miami Herald review found a net gain of only 49 votes for Gore among about 10,000 ballots that Gore wanted hand-counted in the November election's aftermath.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/0...mbeach.recount/
Judge rules for media on Florida voter list
Friday, July 2, 2004 (CNN) -- A state court judge in Florida ordered Thursday that the board of elections immediately release a list of nearly 50,000 suspected felons to CNN and other news organizations that last month sued the state for access to copies of the list.
The list is used to determine who will be eligible to vote in November's presidential election in the state.
In a statement issued shortly after the ruling was announced, Secretary of State Glenda Hood accepted the ruling as final.
"Now that the court has ruled that statute to be unconstitutional, we will make these records accessible to all interested parties," she said.
Florida bars people convicted of felonies in that state from voting.
In 2000, a similar list was the center of controversy when state officials acknowledged after the election that it contained thousands of names in error, thus barring eligible people from voting.
Many of the barred voters were African-Americans, who traditionally tend to vote Democratic.
Bush won the state by a 537-vote margin and, with it, the presidency.
The lawsuit, filed by CNN and joined by other news organizations, challenged a 2001 statute passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that limited the public's access to the list.
News organizations were allowed to inspect the list, but not make copies of it or take notes from it. (CNN asks Florida court for ineligible voters list)
"The right to inspect without the right to copy is an empty right indeed," said Leon County Circuit Judge Nikki Clark, in her six-page order.
"Whether the public chooses to inspect or copy [the list] is not the choice of the governmental agency which has custody of the record. It is the choice of the person who has requested access."
The judge went on to declare the statute unconstitutional because it failed to comply with a constitutional amendment guaranteeing public access to the state's public records.
The state has a right to an automatic 48-hour stay, if its lawyers appeal.
They would have to show cause why the information should continue to be withheld, said Tampa attorney Gregg D. Thomas of the law firm Holland & Knight, which is representing the news organizations.
"I think the long-term impact is that the citizens of Florida will have access to the interactions of their government to make sure that the government, particularly with regard to the right to vote, is conducting itself appropriately."
The list contains the names of 47,763 suspected felons.
The voter-exclusion list was compiled from state clemency reports, lists of felons and other databases, Thomas said.
The ACLU applauded the decision.
"This is good news for voters because now these records will be open and available for public inspection to help protect the right of every eligible voter in Florida," said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, which also joined the case. "Our interest in this case is to analyze the information on the list to prevent eligible voters from being wrongfully purged from the rolls."
Miami lawyer Joseph Klock Jr., representing the state, did not return a call Thursday.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/01/florida.elections/
Friday, July 2, 2004 (CNN) -- A state court judge in Florida ordered Thursday that the board of elections immediately release a list of nearly 50,000 suspected felons to CNN and other news organizations that last month sued the state for access to copies of the list.
The list is used to determine who will be eligible to vote in November's presidential election in the state.
In a statement issued shortly after the ruling was announced, Secretary of State Glenda Hood accepted the ruling as final.
"Now that the court has ruled that statute to be unconstitutional, we will make these records accessible to all interested parties," she said.
Florida bars people convicted of felonies in that state from voting.
In 2000, a similar list was the center of controversy when state officials acknowledged after the election that it contained thousands of names in error, thus barring eligible people from voting.
Many of the barred voters were African-Americans, who traditionally tend to vote Democratic.
Bush won the state by a 537-vote margin and, with it, the presidency.
The lawsuit, filed by CNN and joined by other news organizations, challenged a 2001 statute passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that limited the public's access to the list.
News organizations were allowed to inspect the list, but not make copies of it or take notes from it. (CNN asks Florida court for ineligible voters list)
"The right to inspect without the right to copy is an empty right indeed," said Leon County Circuit Judge Nikki Clark, in her six-page order.
"Whether the public chooses to inspect or copy [the list] is not the choice of the governmental agency which has custody of the record. It is the choice of the person who has requested access."
The judge went on to declare the statute unconstitutional because it failed to comply with a constitutional amendment guaranteeing public access to the state's public records.
The state has a right to an automatic 48-hour stay, if its lawyers appeal.
They would have to show cause why the information should continue to be withheld, said Tampa attorney Gregg D. Thomas of the law firm Holland & Knight, which is representing the news organizations.
"I think the long-term impact is that the citizens of Florida will have access to the interactions of their government to make sure that the government, particularly with regard to the right to vote, is conducting itself appropriately."
The list contains the names of 47,763 suspected felons.
The voter-exclusion list was compiled from state clemency reports, lists of felons and other databases, Thomas said.
The ACLU applauded the decision.
"This is good news for voters because now these records will be open and available for public inspection to help protect the right of every eligible voter in Florida," said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, which also joined the case. "Our interest in this case is to analyze the information on the list to prevent eligible voters from being wrongfully purged from the rolls."
Miami lawyer Joseph Klock Jr., representing the state, did not return a call Thursday.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/01/florida.elections/
Florida List for Purge of Voters Proves Flawed
Published: July 10, 2004
Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials acknowledged yesterday. As a result, voters identifying themselves as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list.
Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American.
About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and about 11 percent as black.
In a presidential-election battleground state that decided the 2000 race by giving George W. Bush a margin of only 537 votes, the effect could be significant: black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Hispanics in Florida tend to vote Republican.
Elections officials of Florida's Republican administration denied any partisan motive in use of the method they adopted, and noted that it had been approved as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit.
''This was absolutely unintentional,'' said Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state, Glenda E. Hood, an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. ''The matching criteria were approved by several interested parties in the lawsuit, and the court. I don't know how it got by all those people without anyone noticing.''
Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Governor Bush, said: ''The governor is complying with the law and complying with the settlement. Recognizing now that there is a discrepancy, the Department of State is looking into the options.''
Anita Earls, one of the lawyers for plaintiffs in the civil rights suit, said state officials had not given them the kind of access to data that might have uncovered the flaw.
The method uses race as one of several factors in determining whether a felon has registered to vote. If a voter's first name, last name and date of birth are the same as those of a convicted felon but the race is different, the name is not put on the list for potential purging.
But the database of felons has only five variables for race: white, black, Asian, Indian and unknown. And a voter registered as Hispanic whose name and birth date matched a felon's would be left off the purge list unless his race was listed as unknown.
A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Kristen Perezluha, said the felon database used F.B.I. criteria for judging race and so never listed Hispanic.
Florida undertook a similar purge of voter rolls in 2000, but that list was shown to include the names of many who were not felons. The new effort at such a purge, begun by Governor Bush's administration in May, was supposed to be free of those problems. But after a state judge last week ordered the release of the current list, it became clear that thousands of felons who had been granted clemency were still on it.
Democrats said yesterday that the latest disclosure should be the last straw. ''Either this administration is acting incompetently in regard to voters' rights,'' said Scott Maddox, the Democratic state chairman, ''or they have ill will toward a certain class of voters. Either way, it's unacceptable.''
''The honorable thing to do,'' Mr. Maddox added, ''is throw the list out and not purge people erroneously on the eve of election.''
Some county election supervisors have said they are reluctant to use the state's list to purge the names of any voters. The law leaves that responsibility to the county officials, but it is unclear how many will use it.
''It's an impossible task to do properly,'' said Ion Sancho, the supervisor in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle.
The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported Wednesday, by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that the problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the data, state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who identified themselves as Hispanic.
Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000 voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately one million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...754C0A9629C8B63
Published: July 10, 2004
Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials acknowledged yesterday. As a result, voters identifying themselves as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list.
Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American.
About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and about 11 percent as black.
In a presidential-election battleground state that decided the 2000 race by giving George W. Bush a margin of only 537 votes, the effect could be significant: black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Hispanics in Florida tend to vote Republican.
Elections officials of Florida's Republican administration denied any partisan motive in use of the method they adopted, and noted that it had been approved as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit.
''This was absolutely unintentional,'' said Nicole de Lara, spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state, Glenda E. Hood, an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. ''The matching criteria were approved by several interested parties in the lawsuit, and the court. I don't know how it got by all those people without anyone noticing.''
Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for Governor Bush, said: ''The governor is complying with the law and complying with the settlement. Recognizing now that there is a discrepancy, the Department of State is looking into the options.''
Anita Earls, one of the lawyers for plaintiffs in the civil rights suit, said state officials had not given them the kind of access to data that might have uncovered the flaw.
The method uses race as one of several factors in determining whether a felon has registered to vote. If a voter's first name, last name and date of birth are the same as those of a convicted felon but the race is different, the name is not put on the list for potential purging.
But the database of felons has only five variables for race: white, black, Asian, Indian and unknown. And a voter registered as Hispanic whose name and birth date matched a felon's would be left off the purge list unless his race was listed as unknown.
A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Kristen Perezluha, said the felon database used F.B.I. criteria for judging race and so never listed Hispanic.
Florida undertook a similar purge of voter rolls in 2000, but that list was shown to include the names of many who were not felons. The new effort at such a purge, begun by Governor Bush's administration in May, was supposed to be free of those problems. But after a state judge last week ordered the release of the current list, it became clear that thousands of felons who had been granted clemency were still on it.
Democrats said yesterday that the latest disclosure should be the last straw. ''Either this administration is acting incompetently in regard to voters' rights,'' said Scott Maddox, the Democratic state chairman, ''or they have ill will toward a certain class of voters. Either way, it's unacceptable.''
''The honorable thing to do,'' Mr. Maddox added, ''is throw the list out and not purge people erroneously on the eve of election.''
Some county election supervisors have said they are reluctant to use the state's list to purge the names of any voters. The law leaves that responsibility to the county officials, but it is unclear how many will use it.
''It's an impossible task to do properly,'' said Ion Sancho, the supervisor in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle.
The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported Wednesday, by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that the problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the data, state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who identified themselves as Hispanic.
Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000 voters in Florida. But more than 90 percent of the approximately one million registered blacks there are Democrats. The exclusion of Hispanics from the purge list explains some of the wide discrepancy in party affiliation of voters on the felon list, which bears the names of 28,025 Democrats and just 9,521 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...754C0A9629C8B63
Florida scraps felon vote list
The list of 47,000 people is too flawed to be used to strike felons from voting rolls. County election supervisors express relief.
July 11, 2004
Nine days after making the names of more than 47,000 potential felon voters public, state officials have scrapped the entire list, saying it was too flawed to be trusted.
County supervisors of elections were told Saturday not to use the list of people the state believed had committed felonies and illegally registered to vote.
Florida is one of seven states that bars felons from voting unless their civil rights have been restored.
Counties were supposed to verify the information, contact the voters, and eliminate felons from their voter rolls, though few had started.
The state had tried to keep the list a secret. It fought a lawsuit aimed at opening the records to the public. A series of errors emerged once a Tallahassee judge rejected the state's arguments and released the records on July 1.
The error that proved final - and garnered national attention - was that Hispanics were largely overlooked because of glitches in how the state records information about race and ethnicity.
The list was created by cross-checking voter registration and criminal records. Of the more than 47,000 voters on the potential felon list, Hispanics made up one tenth of 1 percent - this in a state where nearly 1 in 5 residents is Hispanic.
Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a written statement Saturday saying the exclusion of Hispanics was "unintentional and unforeseen."
"We are deeply concerned and disappointed that this has occurred," Hood said.
Many Hispanic voters vote Republican. That they were largely omitted from a list disproportionately weighted with Democratic-leaning blacks has fueled theories that voter rolls were being manipulated for political motives. State officials said it was data errors, not politics, that excluded Hispanics from the list.
"Not including Hispanic felons that may be voters on the list . . . was an oversight and a mistake. . . . And we accept responsibility and that's why we're pulling it back," said Gov. Jeb Bush, who was in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday at an "African-Americans for Bush" rally in support of his brother's re-election as president.
Scrapping the list for the 2004 election came as a relief to local supervisors of elections, who have openly been wondering how they were going to accurately verify information on the list with few resources and no training.
Late Friday night, Pasco Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning sat in his office wondering what would happen if he did nothing with the list. On his desk was an unsigned $14,000 contract to a Melbourne company to verify the list.
To his relief Saturday, Browning had left the office without signing the contract.
"It was a lose-lose situation," Browning said of the potential felons list. "The reality of it was there seemed to be too many things creeping up that were not thought out, or thought about."
"I think it's a good decision," Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark said Saturday afternoon. "Especially this year when we know that the state is going to be so closely scrutinized about everything we do, relative to the election."
Bush's communications director, Jill Bratina, said the governor's goal was fair and smooth elections. "The governor spoke with the secretary this (Saturday) morning. She informed him of the decision, and he was supportive of it," she said.
Democrats and voting rights advocates at once claimed victory and commended the state for dumping the list.
"This is clearly a victory for the Democratic Party," Florida Democratic Party Chairman Scott Maddox, "but it is more so a victory for democracy. Democrats, Republicans and independents alike will benefit from the ability to exercise their constitutional right to vote instead of being erroneously purged by this administration."
State Sen. Les Miller, D-Tampa, viewed the decision with cautious optimism.
"I'm very happy they decided not to use this list," Miller said. "My concern is, what's next? Does this mean this list will not be used anymore, period? Or is this something that they're going to look at next week, where we'll have to come up with a different definition of how they're going to try to purge people from that list?"
Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization was preparing to ask Hood on Monday to order supervisors to stop using the list. He said the errors discovered so far were more than enough to justify the state abandoning it.
"It appears the information on this list is not sufficiently reliable to deprive anybody of their right to vote," Simon said. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of other errors."
And errors had been piling up.
The first was a group of more than 2,500 people who had their rights restored but found themselves on the list. They were put on the list because they registered to vote before they got their rights restored, a move the state insisted made them ineligible to vote.
But on Wednesday, faced with the threat of lawsuits, the state reversed its stance and cleared those who had received clemency to vote, regardless of when they registered.
Then, a St. Petersburg Times analysis of a random, representative sample of 5,529 names on the potential felons list in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties found the state's list to be substantially accurate. But as many as 220 names on the list - or about 4 percent - were wrong, based upon incomplete or incorrect information.
If the Times local estimate of 4 percent were applied statewide, the list of incorrect entries would reach more than 1,800.
Last weekend, the Sarasota Herald Tribune noted that Hispanics were nearly nonexistent in the potential felons list, despite representing nearly a fifth of the state's population. The state admitted there could be a problem, but said Hispanics were not omitted for political gain.
The reason Hispanics were being overlooked is that state criminal records and voter registration rolls do not account for race and ethnic categories in the same way.
The state's criminal database, used to find the names of felons, did not have "Hispanic" as a category. Voter registration rolls do. When the two lists were matched, the Hispanic discrepancy made an accurate count impossible.
"This is a very complex process and the more I looked at it, the more complex it got," Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson said. "The way the information is developed, the entire system was complicated."
Johnson's office was gearing up to verify the list - office space in the Hillsborough County court clerk's office had been set aside - when the clemency problems made them wait.
In Citrus County, Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill had to call an employee in the office on Saturday working on the list to tell her to go home. The end of the list came as a relief - and a surprise - to both.
"There's just too much controversy about this," Gill said. "If the list isn't right, we shouldn't be using it."
- Times staff writers Jay Cridlin, Joni James and Steve Bousquet contributed to this report, which includes information from the Associated Press. Matthew Waite can be reached at waite@sptimes.com or 727 893-8568.
The list of 47,000 people is too flawed to be used to strike felons from voting rolls. County election supervisors express relief.
July 11, 2004
Nine days after making the names of more than 47,000 potential felon voters public, state officials have scrapped the entire list, saying it was too flawed to be trusted.
County supervisors of elections were told Saturday not to use the list of people the state believed had committed felonies and illegally registered to vote.
Florida is one of seven states that bars felons from voting unless their civil rights have been restored.
Counties were supposed to verify the information, contact the voters, and eliminate felons from their voter rolls, though few had started.
The state had tried to keep the list a secret. It fought a lawsuit aimed at opening the records to the public. A series of errors emerged once a Tallahassee judge rejected the state's arguments and released the records on July 1.
The error that proved final - and garnered national attention - was that Hispanics were largely overlooked because of glitches in how the state records information about race and ethnicity.
The list was created by cross-checking voter registration and criminal records. Of the more than 47,000 voters on the potential felon list, Hispanics made up one tenth of 1 percent - this in a state where nearly 1 in 5 residents is Hispanic.
Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a written statement Saturday saying the exclusion of Hispanics was "unintentional and unforeseen."
"We are deeply concerned and disappointed that this has occurred," Hood said.
Many Hispanic voters vote Republican. That they were largely omitted from a list disproportionately weighted with Democratic-leaning blacks has fueled theories that voter rolls were being manipulated for political motives. State officials said it was data errors, not politics, that excluded Hispanics from the list.
"Not including Hispanic felons that may be voters on the list . . . was an oversight and a mistake. . . . And we accept responsibility and that's why we're pulling it back," said Gov. Jeb Bush, who was in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday at an "African-Americans for Bush" rally in support of his brother's re-election as president.
Scrapping the list for the 2004 election came as a relief to local supervisors of elections, who have openly been wondering how they were going to accurately verify information on the list with few resources and no training.
Late Friday night, Pasco Supervisor of Elections Kurt Browning sat in his office wondering what would happen if he did nothing with the list. On his desk was an unsigned $14,000 contract to a Melbourne company to verify the list.
To his relief Saturday, Browning had left the office without signing the contract.
"It was a lose-lose situation," Browning said of the potential felons list. "The reality of it was there seemed to be too many things creeping up that were not thought out, or thought about."
"I think it's a good decision," Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark said Saturday afternoon. "Especially this year when we know that the state is going to be so closely scrutinized about everything we do, relative to the election."
Bush's communications director, Jill Bratina, said the governor's goal was fair and smooth elections. "The governor spoke with the secretary this (Saturday) morning. She informed him of the decision, and he was supportive of it," she said.
Democrats and voting rights advocates at once claimed victory and commended the state for dumping the list.
"This is clearly a victory for the Democratic Party," Florida Democratic Party Chairman Scott Maddox, "but it is more so a victory for democracy. Democrats, Republicans and independents alike will benefit from the ability to exercise their constitutional right to vote instead of being erroneously purged by this administration."
State Sen. Les Miller, D-Tampa, viewed the decision with cautious optimism.
"I'm very happy they decided not to use this list," Miller said. "My concern is, what's next? Does this mean this list will not be used anymore, period? Or is this something that they're going to look at next week, where we'll have to come up with a different definition of how they're going to try to purge people from that list?"
Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization was preparing to ask Hood on Monday to order supervisors to stop using the list. He said the errors discovered so far were more than enough to justify the state abandoning it.
"It appears the information on this list is not sufficiently reliable to deprive anybody of their right to vote," Simon said. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of other errors."
And errors had been piling up.
The first was a group of more than 2,500 people who had their rights restored but found themselves on the list. They were put on the list because they registered to vote before they got their rights restored, a move the state insisted made them ineligible to vote.
But on Wednesday, faced with the threat of lawsuits, the state reversed its stance and cleared those who had received clemency to vote, regardless of when they registered.
Then, a St. Petersburg Times analysis of a random, representative sample of 5,529 names on the potential felons list in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties found the state's list to be substantially accurate. But as many as 220 names on the list - or about 4 percent - were wrong, based upon incomplete or incorrect information.
If the Times local estimate of 4 percent were applied statewide, the list of incorrect entries would reach more than 1,800.
Last weekend, the Sarasota Herald Tribune noted that Hispanics were nearly nonexistent in the potential felons list, despite representing nearly a fifth of the state's population. The state admitted there could be a problem, but said Hispanics were not omitted for political gain.
The reason Hispanics were being overlooked is that state criminal records and voter registration rolls do not account for race and ethnic categories in the same way.
The state's criminal database, used to find the names of felons, did not have "Hispanic" as a category. Voter registration rolls do. When the two lists were matched, the Hispanic discrepancy made an accurate count impossible.
"This is a very complex process and the more I looked at it, the more complex it got," Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson said. "The way the information is developed, the entire system was complicated."
Johnson's office was gearing up to verify the list - office space in the Hillsborough County court clerk's office had been set aside - when the clemency problems made them wait.
In Citrus County, Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill had to call an employee in the office on Saturday working on the list to tell her to go home. The end of the list came as a relief - and a surprise - to both.
"There's just too much controversy about this," Gill said. "If the list isn't right, we shouldn't be using it."
- Times staff writers Jay Cridlin, Joni James and Steve Bousquet contributed to this report, which includes information from the Associated Press. Matthew Waite can be reached at waite@sptimes.com or 727 893-8568.
TWO OHIO ELECTION OFFICIALS CONVICTED FOR RIGGING 2004 PRESIDENTIAL RECOUNT
CLEVELAND (AP) — Two election workers in the state's most populous county were convicted Wednesday of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount so they could avoid a more thorough review of the votes. A third employee who had been charged was acquitted on all counts.
Jacqueline Maiden, the elections' coordinator who was the board's third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee.
Maiden and Dreamer also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4071
CLEVELAND (AP) — Two election workers in the state's most populous county were convicted Wednesday of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount so they could avoid a more thorough review of the votes. A third employee who had been charged was acquitted on all counts.
Jacqueline Maiden, the elections' coordinator who was the board's third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee.
Maiden and Dreamer also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4071
Katherine Harris' 'W' Files
(CBS) Government computers in the office of Florida's top elections official contained documents endorsing George W. Bush's candidacy for president, an initial review of computer files showed.
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who also served as co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign, had said repeatedly that she had erected "a firewall" during the election between her state office and the Republican Party.
The documents found on her state computers endorsing Mr. Bush were among tens of thousands of computer files released by Harris last week after reporters questioned whether she had erased records about the 2000 election that a newspaper had asked to examine.
One of the documents was titled "George W. Bush Talking Points." It was dated March 14, 2000, and endorsed Mr. Bush's nomination for president, saying he had "proven in Texas that he can manage like an executive, govern across party lines and lead with inclusiveness."
Amazing Race: look back on the 2000 election.
Another document, written for Harris, urged Republicans to support Mr. Bush and "send the loudest possible message that we are ready to lead!" The speech was written following the New Hampshire primary, which Mr. Bush lost to Arizona Sen. John McCain.
"I am a bit biased. I co-chair the campaign effort of George W. Bush … I hope it will be 'W,'" the document read. Harris was supposed to deliver the speech in Orlando.
Harris' spokesman, David Host, said the "talking points" speech was sent by someone outside Harris' office and that she never delivered the remarks. He said he did not know who sent the document. Host said he had not seen the second document and could not comment on it.
Harris agreed to allow news organizations to check the hard drives of four computers in her office after a report in The New York Times questioned whether Republican operatives influenced how Harris told elections officials to treat overseas absentee ballots.
News organizations hired Minneapolis-based Ontrack Data International Inc. to inspect the computer hard drives to recover anything that may have been erased as well as everything still on the computers.
Technicians with the firm said the computers showed no evidence of wholesale intentional erasures, although some files had been deleted.
Kerry Stillman, an official with the state Commission on Ethics, could not comment on individual cases, but said using state equipment and time for political activity falls under the state law governing misuse of public position.
In a statement released by her office, Harris said no records were destroyed and "no partisan political activity transpired in my office during the recount period."
Harris released the computer files after the Times reported that a draft memo to Harris from her staff after the election said overseas ballots had to be postmarked or signed and dated by Election Day.
The newspaper reported that Harris later said overseas ballots had to be "executed" by Election Day but were not required to be postmarked by Election Day.
The Times report contended that Republican operatives waged a county-by-county campaign to get election boards in GOP-heavy counties to accept late absentee ballots while arguing that Democratic counties should disregard such ballots.
The effort, according to the Times, led to vast disparities in what ballot mistakes were tolerated.
An initial review by The Associated Press on Tuesday turned up no evidence that Harris switched positions on the absentee ballots.
Florida officials counted hundreds of disputed overseas ballots, which were crucial to Mr. Bush's 537-vote victory in Florida over Al Gore.
Democrats have complained bitterly that Harris used her position to boost Mr. Bush's chances of winning the state.
While Gore came out ahead in the national popular vote in 2000, the narrow victory in Florida gave Mr. Bush the state's 25 electoral votes he needed to win the presidency. A recount of thousands of Florida ballots and resulting court battles held up a resolution to the election for five weeks; Gore conceded on Dec. 13.
Harris is considering running for Congress.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/08/08/...ain305435.shtml
(CBS) Government computers in the office of Florida's top elections official contained documents endorsing George W. Bush's candidacy for president, an initial review of computer files showed.
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who also served as co-chair of Bush's Florida campaign, had said repeatedly that she had erected "a firewall" during the election between her state office and the Republican Party.
The documents found on her state computers endorsing Mr. Bush were among tens of thousands of computer files released by Harris last week after reporters questioned whether she had erased records about the 2000 election that a newspaper had asked to examine.
One of the documents was titled "George W. Bush Talking Points." It was dated March 14, 2000, and endorsed Mr. Bush's nomination for president, saying he had "proven in Texas that he can manage like an executive, govern across party lines and lead with inclusiveness."
Amazing Race: look back on the 2000 election.
Another document, written for Harris, urged Republicans to support Mr. Bush and "send the loudest possible message that we are ready to lead!" The speech was written following the New Hampshire primary, which Mr. Bush lost to Arizona Sen. John McCain.
"I am a bit biased. I co-chair the campaign effort of George W. Bush … I hope it will be 'W,'" the document read. Harris was supposed to deliver the speech in Orlando.
Harris' spokesman, David Host, said the "talking points" speech was sent by someone outside Harris' office and that she never delivered the remarks. He said he did not know who sent the document. Host said he had not seen the second document and could not comment on it.
Harris agreed to allow news organizations to check the hard drives of four computers in her office after a report in The New York Times questioned whether Republican operatives influenced how Harris told elections officials to treat overseas absentee ballots.
News organizations hired Minneapolis-based Ontrack Data International Inc. to inspect the computer hard drives to recover anything that may have been erased as well as everything still on the computers.
Technicians with the firm said the computers showed no evidence of wholesale intentional erasures, although some files had been deleted.
Kerry Stillman, an official with the state Commission on Ethics, could not comment on individual cases, but said using state equipment and time for political activity falls under the state law governing misuse of public position.
In a statement released by her office, Harris said no records were destroyed and "no partisan political activity transpired in my office during the recount period."
Harris released the computer files after the Times reported that a draft memo to Harris from her staff after the election said overseas ballots had to be postmarked or signed and dated by Election Day.
The newspaper reported that Harris later said overseas ballots had to be "executed" by Election Day but were not required to be postmarked by Election Day.
The Times report contended that Republican operatives waged a county-by-county campaign to get election boards in GOP-heavy counties to accept late absentee ballots while arguing that Democratic counties should disregard such ballots.
The effort, according to the Times, led to vast disparities in what ballot mistakes were tolerated.
An initial review by The Associated Press on Tuesday turned up no evidence that Harris switched positions on the absentee ballots.
Florida officials counted hundreds of disputed overseas ballots, which were crucial to Mr. Bush's 537-vote victory in Florida over Al Gore.
Democrats have complained bitterly that Harris used her position to boost Mr. Bush's chances of winning the state.
While Gore came out ahead in the national popular vote in 2000, the narrow victory in Florida gave Mr. Bush the state's 25 electoral votes he needed to win the presidency. A recount of thousands of Florida ballots and resulting court battles held up a resolution to the election for five weeks; Gore conceded on Dec. 13.
Harris is considering running for Congress.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/08/08/...ain305435.shtml
Good work on the voting fraud research, Lesley!
Maybe some mod/admin can move this thread to the
election '08 forum or the lobby before it gets buried
here in the multimedia. There is certainly more info to
come in the upcoming weeks.
footer:
One thing i found remarkable with this movie "Recount" when it comes to
underlining the hidden real message is the starring of John Hurt (as Warren Christopher)
who played the main protagonist Winston Smith in "1984" and also the evil chancellor
Sutler in "V for Vendetta". Good job on the casting!
Maybe some mod/admin can move this thread to the
election '08 forum or the lobby before it gets buried
here in the multimedia. There is certainly more info to
come in the upcoming weeks.
footer:
One thing i found remarkable with this movie "Recount" when it comes to
underlining the hidden real message is the starring of John Hurt (as Warren Christopher)
who played the main protagonist Winston Smith in "1984" and also the evil chancellor
Sutler in "V for Vendetta". Good job on the casting!
I found the entire movie on some japanes video site:
Pt.1
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzk4NTI4MzI=.html
Pt.2
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzk4NTM1NDg=.html
Pt.1
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzk4NTI4MzI=.html
Pt.2
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzk4NTM1NDg=.html
QUOTE (Carl Bank @ Nov 1 2008, 08:17 AM) 
I found the entire movie on some japanes video site:
Good work Carl and LL.
(Now if only my net connection was up to it. It has been good over the last week but now neighbours are back, their wireless popped up last evening, and my connection drops out again. I was awaiting their return with interest and expected what happened. This is the trouble with an oversubscribed optic fibre (cable) network.)
I am intrigued by the way that the Obama campaign has been reported over here [1] as walking away from McCain and yet in a swing state, Ohio, they are now trying to show that McCain's chances are improving. Now that is curious. Is not Ohio one of those 'Vote Fraud' states? [2] I think I can see what is comming.
But then we all realise that Obama and McCain are the different faces of the same coin - more or less.
[1] The BBC's Justine Webb is just too smirky for my tastes. I figure he could be one of the security services BBC moles.
[2] I note your mention of Ohio in your #7 post LL.
EDIT: tpyo
QUOTE (Carl Bank @ Nov 3 2008, 03:57 AM)
Good work on the voting fraud research, Lesley!
Maybe some mod/admin can move this thread to the
election '08 forum or the lobby before it gets buried
here in the multimedia. There is certainly more info to
come in the upcoming weeks.
footer:
One thing i found remarkable with this movie "Recount" when it comes to
underlining the hidden real message is the starring of John Hurt (as Warren Christopher)
who played the main protagonist Winston Smith in "1984" and also the evil chancellor
Sutler in "V for Vendetta". Good job on the casting!
Maybe some mod/admin can move this thread to the
election '08 forum or the lobby before it gets buried
here in the multimedia. There is certainly more info to
come in the upcoming weeks.
footer:
One thing i found remarkable with this movie "Recount" when it comes to
underlining the hidden real message is the starring of John Hurt (as Warren Christopher)
who played the main protagonist Winston Smith in "1984" and also the evil chancellor
Sutler in "V for Vendetta". Good job on the casting!
Thank you Carl. And thank you for adding the movie For Me...i couldn't find an Embed for the life of me..tho i didnt really try too hard i guess lol.
Topic Moved to Campaign
Six years ago the world watched dumbfounded as the Florida 2000 fiasco exposed the messy underbelly of U.S. election administration. Since then states have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new electronic voting equipment to ensure that the nation would never experience such mishaps again.
But two recent and lengthy reports examining this year's May primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio -- a pivotal state where the electoral votes gave President Bush his second win in 2004 -- make it clear that Florida-like fiascos are far from behind us.
The reports, totaling more than 500 pages, paint a disturbing picture of how million-dollar equipment and security safeguards can quickly be undone by poor product design, improper election procedures and inadequate training. From destroyed ballots and vote totals that didn't add up to lost equipment and breaches in security protocols, Cuyahoga's primary is a perfect study in how not to run an election.
The findings have ominous national implications. Cuyahoga County could play an important role in deciding two races in next week's election that will help decide which party controls the Senate and House. But one of the reports concluded that problems in the county were so extensive that meaningful improvements likely could not be achieved before that election, or even before the 2008 presidential election.
Moreover, few voting activists and election experts believe the problems are unique to Cuyahoga.
"I suspect that Cuyahoga County may be below average (in terms of how well it ran its election), but if you lift up the rock and look at election administration across the country, you'll see the same thing elsewhere," says David Dill, Stanford computer scientist and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, a proponent of paper-verified elections.
The problems in Cuyahoga County, a heavily Democratic county that encompasses Cleveland, began with a glitch in the design of the optical-scan ballots -- black lines separating sections of the ballot were too thick, and the fill-in bubbles were in the wrong place, preventing scanners from reading them.
The gaffe caused a six-day delay in election results, but wasn't insurmountable. The county hired an army of office temp workers to recast the votes from the 18,000 optical-scan ballots onto touch-screen machines -- both types of voting machines, made by Diebold Election Systems, were used in the county for the first time in the primary.
On the surface, that seemed to solve the problem. But a post-election audit of votes and election procedures revealed deeper issues in the way the state's most populous county ran its primary -- problems that, if not fixed, could open the state to serious legal challenges from candidates and voters in a close election.
Among the findings in one report (.pdf) prepared by the Cuyahoga Election Review Panel:
There were also problems with tracking the voting machines themselves, according to a second report (.pdf) produced by the California-based Election Science Institute. ESI was hired before the election by Cuyahoga's Board of Commissioners to audit the election and measure the accuracy, reliability and usability of the county's new voting machines.
Out of 467 touch-screen machines assigned to 145 precincts that ESI audited, officials couldn't locate 29 machines after the election, despite days of searching. And 24 machines that were found had no data on them. "All their paperwork says (the machines) were deployed to polling locations but we can't figure out why there's no election data on them," says ESI founder Steve Hertzberg.
It's possible the machines were sent to polls but never used -- perhaps they malfunctioned or voter turnout was so low the machines weren't needed. But so far no explanation has been forthcoming. Cuyahoga County election director Michael Vu responded to initial questions from Wired News, but did not respond to follow-up questions about the missing machines and data
Experts say the chaos in Cuyahoga is a bellwether of broader election-administration problems nationwide.
"It should be a general wake-up call for all states and localities to make sure they have addressed these problems in their statutes and procedures to make sure that they don't run into the same problems," says Thad Hall, a political science professor at the University of Utah who assisted with the ESI report. "People should be taking all of this very seriously."
Beyond sloppy procedures, the ESI report found technological problems with the printers installed on the county's 5,000 new Diebold touch-screen machines. The printers produce the voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, mandated by a new Ohio law.
The printer problems turned up when the ESI team set out to examine the accuracy of the touch-screen machines. The team compared four sets of vote data from a sampling of 145 precincts. The data included electronic votes recorded on removable memory cards (used to tally the official count); electronic votes on flash memory inside the touch-screen machines; individual ballots on the paper-audit trail rolls; and a summary total of those ballots printed at the end of the paper roll.
Although the majority of the paper rolls were easy to read, 40 rolls contained ballots that were physically compromised in some way: Rolls were crumpled accordion-style due to paper jams; ballots were printed atop one another, making them illegible; rolls were torn and taped. Eighty-seven rolls were missing entirely.
The compromised ballots and missing paper rolls demonstrate that the paper trails voting activists spent three years pressuring states to mandate could be useless in a recount. Per Ohio's recount law, and laws in 14 other states that mandate paper trails, the paper roll is the official ballot in a recount.
But the law doesn't address what to do when paper records are illegible. An administrative rule from the secretary of state says the official ballot would revert to the electronic record if the paper trail were illegible or destroyed, which, in theory, would get every vote counted.
VerifiedVoting.org's Dill cautions that if just 10 percent of an election's paper rolls are compromised, the purpose of the paper is defeated, and a door is once again open for someone to rig an election.
"If someone wanted to fix an election they could program the machine to produce a certain number of faulty paper ballots so that (officials) had to count the electronic ones instead," Dill says.
The machines should be designed to shut down if the printer jams or poll workers load the paper improperly, says Dill.
Dan Tokaji, assistant professor of law at Ohio State University, says the issue of illegible ballots and conflicting recount laws clearly weren't well thought out in advance by Ohio lawmakers.
"It's quite possible we could see litigation over this issue in the event of a close election," he says, noting that the same problem could arise in other states. "We know about the problems with paper trails in Cuyahoga, but in other counties both in and out of Ohio we really haven't done a careful assessment. So I don't think we know how widespread the problems with the VVPAT system are."
And unfortunately, he says, most people don't worry about the problems or fix them until after there's a blowup similar to what occurred in Florida.
Vote discrepancies also turn up in the ESI audit, and voting activists seized on this aspect of the investigation as evidence that there were problems with Diebold's software. On about 80 paper rolls, the votes totaled from the individual ballots didn't match the summary of votes at the end of the roll. In most cases the count was off by one to five votes, but in some it was off by more than 25.
Here, too, paper jams were the culprit, says Gary Smith, director of elections in Forsyth County, Georgia, who led the paper count for ESI. Printer problems led to missing and illegible ballots, causing the final numbers to be higher than the sum of the individual ballots. When his team printed fresh paper records from the memory cards, the totals from individual ballots matched the summaries at the end of the rolls.
The ESI audit also uncovered mismatches between paper-vote totals and the digital totals from the memory cards, and 13 cases in which the removable memory cards and the flash memory inside the machines didn't match up.
Diebold said there are innocent explanations for why memory card totals didn't match flash memory totals. Eleven of the discrepancies were a side effect of election workers' transference of botched optical-scan votes onto touch-screen machines. Because they failed to also add the optical-scan votes to the flash-memory data from those machines, the two sets of data didn't match when ESI compared them.
The other two discrepancies occurred when poll workers placed memory cards in the wrong machines, then moved the cards to the correct machines after voters had already cast a few ballots on the machines -- a switch that did not affect the voting tally, but seriously complicated the audit afterward. When election staff gave ESI data for those machines, they were unaware that some votes on these memory cards were backed up on the flash memory of other machines.
Cuyahoga County election director Vu says his staff has verified Diebold's conclusions but ESI has not had a chance to independently verify the explanations. However, all these issues point to the most important finding from Cuyahoga County, says Hertzberg: it was so difficult for ESI to get accurate and complete data to conduct its recount.
ESI had been assured by Vu's office that the data ESI was auditing did not include optical-scan votes, says Hertzberg. In fact, ESI had to request data from Vu's office six times because it kept getting the wrong data, or data that was tainted with optical-scan votes.
Vu's staff also had a dozen different versions of the same vote data but no file-management system or naming conventions to keep track of them or explain why so many versions existed, says Hertzberg. "So these guys were sitting there trying to search for which data set to give us and they couldn't figure it out," he says.
Political scientist Michael Alvarez of the Caltech/MIT Voting Project, who helped with the ESI report, agrees: Although many people focused on the vote discrepancies, the fact that ESI found it so difficult to conduct an audit is the biggest problem, and it doesn't bode well for what could happen in November or in a close presidential race.
"An independent entity, be they ESI or be they anybody else ... should be able to walk in and very easily replicate that election outcome," Alvarez says. "That's the sort of thing that is what induces voter and candidate and media confidence in the process."
Vu says his office was overwhelmed with the task of adjusting to new procedures and equipment. His staff also never anticipated that poll workers would swap memory cards between machines; they're addressing this issue in poll worker training for November. "For the most part," he says, "the majority of the county did relatively well."
Hertzberg worries that things could be worse Nov. 7 because turnout is expected to be larger than in the primary. Cuyahoga has 1 million registered voters. Hertzberg urged Vu to develop and practice a manual count procedure before Election Day, but says there's been no movement.
"It's going to take time," Vu says. "You can't go from having problems in one election to perfection in the next election." Vu says he has made some changes for November, but mentions only issues with poll worker training, pay and recruitment.
The county Board of Elections and Board of Commissioners did recently appoint The Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University to monitor progress in the implementation of reforms recommended by the two reports, and the group will monitor the county's actual conduct during elections.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/n...9?currentPage=1
But two recent and lengthy reports examining this year's May primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio -- a pivotal state where the electoral votes gave President Bush his second win in 2004 -- make it clear that Florida-like fiascos are far from behind us.
The reports, totaling more than 500 pages, paint a disturbing picture of how million-dollar equipment and security safeguards can quickly be undone by poor product design, improper election procedures and inadequate training. From destroyed ballots and vote totals that didn't add up to lost equipment and breaches in security protocols, Cuyahoga's primary is a perfect study in how not to run an election.
The findings have ominous national implications. Cuyahoga County could play an important role in deciding two races in next week's election that will help decide which party controls the Senate and House. But one of the reports concluded that problems in the county were so extensive that meaningful improvements likely could not be achieved before that election, or even before the 2008 presidential election.
Moreover, few voting activists and election experts believe the problems are unique to Cuyahoga.
"I suspect that Cuyahoga County may be below average (in terms of how well it ran its election), but if you lift up the rock and look at election administration across the country, you'll see the same thing elsewhere," says David Dill, Stanford computer scientist and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, a proponent of paper-verified elections.
The problems in Cuyahoga County, a heavily Democratic county that encompasses Cleveland, began with a glitch in the design of the optical-scan ballots -- black lines separating sections of the ballot were too thick, and the fill-in bubbles were in the wrong place, preventing scanners from reading them.
The gaffe caused a six-day delay in election results, but wasn't insurmountable. The county hired an army of office temp workers to recast the votes from the 18,000 optical-scan ballots onto touch-screen machines -- both types of voting machines, made by Diebold Election Systems, were used in the county for the first time in the primary.
On the surface, that seemed to solve the problem. But a post-election audit of votes and election procedures revealed deeper issues in the way the state's most populous county ran its primary -- problems that, if not fixed, could open the state to serious legal challenges from candidates and voters in a close election.
Among the findings in one report (.pdf) prepared by the Cuyahoga Election Review Panel:
- Due to poor chain of custody for supplies and equipment, 812 voter-access cards (which voters place in touch-screen machines to cast their ballot) were lost, along with 215 card encoders, which program the voter-access cards. Three hundred thirteen keys to the voting machines' memory-card compartments, where votes are stored, also went missing.
- Officials set up two user accounts on the computer running vote-tabulation software, then assigned one password to both accounts and allowed multiple people to use them, thwarting any effort to identify individuals who might access and alter the system.
- Sixty Board of Election employees took touch-screen machines home a weekend before the election to test a procedure for transmitting data on election night.
- The election board hired 69 taxis to transport observers to precincts to collect memory cards and paper rolls on election night. But many cab drivers ended up gathering the materials themselves, and about half the cabs returned to the warehouse with election data, but no observer.
- In at least 79 precincts the number of voters who signed the poll books didn't match the number of ballots cast. At least eight precincts had more ballots cast than registered voters. Because some polling places served several precincts, some of the discrepancies are explained by voters being directed to the wrong machines, an error that did not result in uncounted votes. But even when investigators tallied ballots and signatures for all precincts in a polling place, 15 locations still had mismatches. In one case investigators found 342 more voters than ballots.
There were also problems with tracking the voting machines themselves, according to a second report (.pdf) produced by the California-based Election Science Institute. ESI was hired before the election by Cuyahoga's Board of Commissioners to audit the election and measure the accuracy, reliability and usability of the county's new voting machines.
Out of 467 touch-screen machines assigned to 145 precincts that ESI audited, officials couldn't locate 29 machines after the election, despite days of searching. And 24 machines that were found had no data on them. "All their paperwork says (the machines) were deployed to polling locations but we can't figure out why there's no election data on them," says ESI founder Steve Hertzberg.
It's possible the machines were sent to polls but never used -- perhaps they malfunctioned or voter turnout was so low the machines weren't needed. But so far no explanation has been forthcoming. Cuyahoga County election director Michael Vu responded to initial questions from Wired News, but did not respond to follow-up questions about the missing machines and data
Experts say the chaos in Cuyahoga is a bellwether of broader election-administration problems nationwide.
"It should be a general wake-up call for all states and localities to make sure they have addressed these problems in their statutes and procedures to make sure that they don't run into the same problems," says Thad Hall, a political science professor at the University of Utah who assisted with the ESI report. "People should be taking all of this very seriously."
Beyond sloppy procedures, the ESI report found technological problems with the printers installed on the county's 5,000 new Diebold touch-screen machines. The printers produce the voter-verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, mandated by a new Ohio law.
The printer problems turned up when the ESI team set out to examine the accuracy of the touch-screen machines. The team compared four sets of vote data from a sampling of 145 precincts. The data included electronic votes recorded on removable memory cards (used to tally the official count); electronic votes on flash memory inside the touch-screen machines; individual ballots on the paper-audit trail rolls; and a summary total of those ballots printed at the end of the paper roll.
Although the majority of the paper rolls were easy to read, 40 rolls contained ballots that were physically compromised in some way: Rolls were crumpled accordion-style due to paper jams; ballots were printed atop one another, making them illegible; rolls were torn and taped. Eighty-seven rolls were missing entirely.
The compromised ballots and missing paper rolls demonstrate that the paper trails voting activists spent three years pressuring states to mandate could be useless in a recount. Per Ohio's recount law, and laws in 14 other states that mandate paper trails, the paper roll is the official ballot in a recount.
But the law doesn't address what to do when paper records are illegible. An administrative rule from the secretary of state says the official ballot would revert to the electronic record if the paper trail were illegible or destroyed, which, in theory, would get every vote counted.
VerifiedVoting.org's Dill cautions that if just 10 percent of an election's paper rolls are compromised, the purpose of the paper is defeated, and a door is once again open for someone to rig an election.
"If someone wanted to fix an election they could program the machine to produce a certain number of faulty paper ballots so that (officials) had to count the electronic ones instead," Dill says.
The machines should be designed to shut down if the printer jams or poll workers load the paper improperly, says Dill.
Dan Tokaji, assistant professor of law at Ohio State University, says the issue of illegible ballots and conflicting recount laws clearly weren't well thought out in advance by Ohio lawmakers.
"It's quite possible we could see litigation over this issue in the event of a close election," he says, noting that the same problem could arise in other states. "We know about the problems with paper trails in Cuyahoga, but in other counties both in and out of Ohio we really haven't done a careful assessment. So I don't think we know how widespread the problems with the VVPAT system are."
And unfortunately, he says, most people don't worry about the problems or fix them until after there's a blowup similar to what occurred in Florida.
Vote discrepancies also turn up in the ESI audit, and voting activists seized on this aspect of the investigation as evidence that there were problems with Diebold's software. On about 80 paper rolls, the votes totaled from the individual ballots didn't match the summary of votes at the end of the roll. In most cases the count was off by one to five votes, but in some it was off by more than 25.
Here, too, paper jams were the culprit, says Gary Smith, director of elections in Forsyth County, Georgia, who led the paper count for ESI. Printer problems led to missing and illegible ballots, causing the final numbers to be higher than the sum of the individual ballots. When his team printed fresh paper records from the memory cards, the totals from individual ballots matched the summaries at the end of the rolls.
The ESI audit also uncovered mismatches between paper-vote totals and the digital totals from the memory cards, and 13 cases in which the removable memory cards and the flash memory inside the machines didn't match up.
Diebold said there are innocent explanations for why memory card totals didn't match flash memory totals. Eleven of the discrepancies were a side effect of election workers' transference of botched optical-scan votes onto touch-screen machines. Because they failed to also add the optical-scan votes to the flash-memory data from those machines, the two sets of data didn't match when ESI compared them.
The other two discrepancies occurred when poll workers placed memory cards in the wrong machines, then moved the cards to the correct machines after voters had already cast a few ballots on the machines -- a switch that did not affect the voting tally, but seriously complicated the audit afterward. When election staff gave ESI data for those machines, they were unaware that some votes on these memory cards were backed up on the flash memory of other machines.
Cuyahoga County election director Vu says his staff has verified Diebold's conclusions but ESI has not had a chance to independently verify the explanations. However, all these issues point to the most important finding from Cuyahoga County, says Hertzberg: it was so difficult for ESI to get accurate and complete data to conduct its recount.
ESI had been assured by Vu's office that the data ESI was auditing did not include optical-scan votes, says Hertzberg. In fact, ESI had to request data from Vu's office six times because it kept getting the wrong data, or data that was tainted with optical-scan votes.
Vu's staff also had a dozen different versions of the same vote data but no file-management system or naming conventions to keep track of them or explain why so many versions existed, says Hertzberg. "So these guys were sitting there trying to search for which data set to give us and they couldn't figure it out," he says.
Political scientist Michael Alvarez of the Caltech/MIT Voting Project, who helped with the ESI report, agrees: Although many people focused on the vote discrepancies, the fact that ESI found it so difficult to conduct an audit is the biggest problem, and it doesn't bode well for what could happen in November or in a close presidential race.
"An independent entity, be they ESI or be they anybody else ... should be able to walk in and very easily replicate that election outcome," Alvarez says. "That's the sort of thing that is what induces voter and candidate and media confidence in the process."
Vu says his office was overwhelmed with the task of adjusting to new procedures and equipment. His staff also never anticipated that poll workers would swap memory cards between machines; they're addressing this issue in poll worker training for November. "For the most part," he says, "the majority of the county did relatively well."
Hertzberg worries that things could be worse Nov. 7 because turnout is expected to be larger than in the primary. Cuyahoga has 1 million registered voters. Hertzberg urged Vu to develop and practice a manual count procedure before Election Day, but says there's been no movement.
"It's going to take time," Vu says. "You can't go from having problems in one election to perfection in the next election." Vu says he has made some changes for November, but mentions only issues with poll worker training, pay and recruitment.
The county Board of Elections and Board of Commissioners did recently appoint The Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University to monitor progress in the implementation of reforms recommended by the two reports, and the group will monitor the county's actual conduct during elections.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/n...9?currentPage=1
That 2000 (s)Election was a real cesspool. Watch "Bush's Brain" and find out about Karl Rove's dirty tricks that the Bushit Syndicate pulled on The Politician Previously Known as "McCain" in the 2000 Rethuglican Primary. It was more common knowledge down in Arizona (where McCain was a State Senator). Greg Palast and a Canadian "alternate" journalist covered Diebold VoteScam pretty well, but I can't recall the books and videos right now.
Then we had the Scully bonehead Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich business in 2004.
Now it's CorporobamaCain.
Then we had the Scully bonehead Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich business in 2004.
Now it's CorporobamaCain.
QUOTE (dMole @ Nov 1 2008, 08:50 PM)
Greg Palast and a Canadian "alternate" journalist covered Diebold VoteScam pretty well, but I can't recall the books and videos right now.
Then we had the Scully bonehead Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich business in 2004.
Now it's CorporobamaCain.
Then we had the Scully bonehead Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich business in 2004.
Now it's CorporobamaCain.
Greg Palast's was 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy' IIRC, I have a copy but it is out on loan at the moment. I also have Palast's 'Armed Madhouse'.
Vote-flipping reported from Obama to McKinney
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/bo...e=/8/78469.html
http://blackboxvoting.org/
A great movie was Robin Williams in "Man of the Year" about this subject, too.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0483726/
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/bo...e=/8/78469.html
http://blackboxvoting.org/
A great movie was Robin Williams in "Man of the Year" about this subject, too.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0483726/
it is just not the counting after the balloting that alters the tally.
it is the "caging" of voters[i.e., the removal of eligible voters from the rolls] prior to the election day.
very candidly, the amerikan system of voting has been structured so as to deny a free and fair balloting. it is structured to deny the anti-plutocrats a place in the election scheme. it is a system akin to "free" trade.
it has become my observation that the notion that the united states of amerika is a real democracy is a fraudulent one.
and i continue to find it an oddity that so many citizens think that they live in a democratic republic.
growing up in ohio, amongst the plutocrats, then living in massachusetts, colorado, texas[also amongst the plutocrats] i have concluded that there has never been an honest vote/ballot count in the history of the united states.
the usa is a country of extravagant illusions.
i could say so much more on this score.
but once again, it is going to be the systematic alteration of a voter's ballot that is going to govern the results. and that is an issue that the demtillians have had every chance to rectify - and have preferred not to rectify.
which reinforces my image of the true contest that is rigorously denied...that it is a plutocrat versus anti-plutocrat contest. that the plutocrats recognize that there is a legitimate reason for "class" warfare in the usa, and they will do anything to squelch it.
though i am a businessman. at heart i am a wobbly.
in this election, the contestants are two shadow boxers. just as they were in 2000, 2004.
plutocrat[statist] versus plutocrat[statist].
it is just another round of boxing's "bum of the week" club.
which one do the plutocrats want to "take the fall" in this round?
my guess is john mcclusterbomb. the disasta from alaska scares the sh*t out of them.
with obombya and bidmeup, the plutocrats know who they are getting. sycophants that they have created and promoted for years.
all the looting will go on as it has for decades.
and the booboisie will continue to be boobs. and ripped-off. and thinking that they really had a voice. that they were living in the most exceptional of all countries.
amerikan politcal illusions are as close to religion as you will ever encounter.
so it goes.
it is the "caging" of voters[i.e., the removal of eligible voters from the rolls] prior to the election day.
very candidly, the amerikan system of voting has been structured so as to deny a free and fair balloting. it is structured to deny the anti-plutocrats a place in the election scheme. it is a system akin to "free" trade.
it has become my observation that the notion that the united states of amerika is a real democracy is a fraudulent one.
and i continue to find it an oddity that so many citizens think that they live in a democratic republic.
growing up in ohio, amongst the plutocrats, then living in massachusetts, colorado, texas[also amongst the plutocrats] i have concluded that there has never been an honest vote/ballot count in the history of the united states.
the usa is a country of extravagant illusions.
i could say so much more on this score.
but once again, it is going to be the systematic alteration of a voter's ballot that is going to govern the results. and that is an issue that the demtillians have had every chance to rectify - and have preferred not to rectify.
which reinforces my image of the true contest that is rigorously denied...that it is a plutocrat versus anti-plutocrat contest. that the plutocrats recognize that there is a legitimate reason for "class" warfare in the usa, and they will do anything to squelch it.
though i am a businessman. at heart i am a wobbly.
in this election, the contestants are two shadow boxers. just as they were in 2000, 2004.
plutocrat[statist] versus plutocrat[statist].
it is just another round of boxing's "bum of the week" club.
which one do the plutocrats want to "take the fall" in this round?
my guess is john mcclusterbomb. the disasta from alaska scares the sh*t out of them.
with obombya and bidmeup, the plutocrats know who they are getting. sycophants that they have created and promoted for years.
all the looting will go on as it has for decades.
and the booboisie will continue to be boobs. and ripped-off. and thinking that they really had a voice. that they were living in the most exceptional of all countries.
amerikan politcal illusions are as close to religion as you will ever encounter.
so it goes.
Another great movie about the Great Amerikan Oligarchy was "Bulworth." Of course the movie critics shredded that movie and it did dismally at the box office IIRC, but find yourself a copy of the DVD.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118798/
I looked, but YouTube has taken down the clip of Bulworth's R-rated rap on Amerikan polidickz. Somehow I don't think this absence is accidental...
http://www.goleft.org/index.php/pop_culture/entry/514
Of course those 2 Corporobama plotting Skinheads were still at the top of the YouTube video page.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118798/
I looked, but YouTube has taken down the clip of Bulworth's R-rated rap on Amerikan polidickz. Somehow I don't think this absence is accidental...
http://www.goleft.org/index.php/pop_culture/entry/514
Of course those 2 Corporobama plotting Skinheads were still at the top of the YouTube video page.
QUOTE (Omega892R09 @ Nov 3 2008, 03:20 PM)
Greg Palast's was 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy' IIRC, I have a copy but it is out on loan at the moment. I also have Palast's 'Armed Madhouse'.
Thanks O892. I don't think one can accurately separate the Bushit Syndicate from PNAC, Carlyle, Hallibortion/KBR, 9/11, or the MIIC, so let me also recommend Danny Shecter?'s "Weapons of Mass Deception", "War is $ell," and "Iraq for Sale" DVD's.
The Canadian journalist was Barrie Zwicker, but I'm not sure whether the election fraud(s) were convered in "The Greatest Conspiracy You Never Saw" or not.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.