SOURCE: Gouverneur Times

...Democrats used similar tactics when questionable elections revealed themselves, such as in New Hampshire's "First in the Nation" Primary Election disaster last year, when Hillary Clinton inexplicably was said to have defeated Barack Obama. Oddly enough, Obama was found to be the winner in the towns where New Hampshire still carries out citizen-overseen, precinct-based hand-counts immediately following the close of polls. But he lost - by a nearly inverse amount - in towns where Diebold's paper-based op-scan systems, instead of actual human beings, were used to tally ballots.

Northern NY News Written by Brad Friedman Monday, 30 November 2009 15:34

Editor's Note: This in-depth study of the issues in NY-23's e-voting pilot program was written exclusively for The Gouverneur Times.

Last week, Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate for New York's 23rd Congressional District followed up his two un-concessions (one of them, apparently, Glenn Beck-induced), following his Election Night concession (which he later, unconvincingly said he was "forced" into), with yet another concession. That last concession, presuming it was his final one, "un" or otherwise, bore a striking resemblance to so many politicians who put partisan politics and their own perceptions of what may be best for their own political career far ahead of the will of the voters and of democracy itself.

The language, cowardly spirit and selfishness of Hoffman's latest concession rings almost identical to that of Sen. John Kerry's when he similarly disrespected the voters by cutting and running before all votes had been transparently counted and as evidence of wide-spread failures in Ohio's electoral system had only begun to come to light on the day following the 2004 Presidential Election. Where there was a great deal of evidence of clear improprieties by election officials all across the state of Ohio as the polls closed on Election Night 2004, similar evidence of impropriety by election officials or voters has yet to surface in the NY-23 race. What has surfaced, however, is unacceptable failure after failure in the new e-voting system which voters in the district were indeed forced to use - as guinea pigs in live democracy -- for the first time during the November 3rd U.S. House Special Election.

Those initially reported failures have only increased as more eyeballs scrutinize the reported results. That Hoffman seems wholly unaware of those failures - and the history of failure after failure by Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc., the company which partnered with the Canadian firm Dominion Voting to the tune of tens of millions of tax-payer dollars for new machines that don't work, and don't allow the voters to know if their election was tabulated accurately - is, in itself an embarrassment and a slap in the face to NY-23 voters.

"The Boards of Elections, both state and county, need to work closely to ensure the seamless use of these machines in the 2010 statewide and midterm elections," Hoffman said in his (presumably) final concession, as if to confirm the Watertown Daily Times' impression of him as having "no grasp of the bread-and-butter issues pertinent to district residents", every bit as much as Kerry's next-day surrender served to confirm the Right's narrative that he was unable to stand up and fight for Americans. New York voters don't need the "seamless use of these machines" next year, they need transparent, oversee-able democracy in which all votes are counted and counted both accurately and publicly, and in which the supporters of both the winner and loser of every election can know, with certainty and their own eyes, that their election has been tabulated as per their true intent.

To that end, some one hundred years of decidedly imperfect, but far more transparent, mechanical lever voting systems are being tossed aside in favor of the failed technology of secret vote counting systems made by a private, morally bankrupt and nearly-fiscally bankrupt voting machine company. Hoffman is either unaware of that, or simply doesn't care - unless, of course, he was just "forced", again, to offer that latest concession. 

article" title="" href="http://www.gouverneurtimes.com/images/stories/2009/11/30/sequoiavotingsystems_fencedin.jpg" rel="nofollow">The Disaster That Is Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc.

Sequoia's storied history of election failure began at least as far back as 2000, though the evidence of their duplicity would not become known -- and even then just barely -- until 2007 when seven whistleblowers from the company, including Quality Control employees, appeared on camera and by name in a breath-taking investigate report on HDNet. The employees' stunning revelations were that they had been given no choice, despite protestation after protestation, to use inferior paper stock in making the ballots for Florida only in the 2000 Presidential Election. Moreover, they were instructed, again despite their protestations, to misalign the chads on the ballots being sent to to Palm Beach County only. (See Part 3 of Dan Rather's award-winning video report here.)

Though the company initially vowed to produce documentation, following the report (they refused to cooperate with HDNet during the report itself) to explain who had signed off on the paper which the employees refused to use, several times, before they were forced to do so, to this day, they have not offered any reasonable explanation or even the name of the person who overrode the multiple refusals of company employees. Where the Sequoia workers had once prided themselves on their "defect free product", the fiasco of hanging chads on Palm Beach County's ballots helped lead the country into 36 days of a near-Constitutional crisis following the 2000 General Election.

The few documents that were produced by Sequoia following Rather's report, only succeeded in further suggesting that they were guilty as charged, of having helped to game that election. Their response, including non-responsive documents for an entirely different election, wouldn't be the first time they played fast and loose with documentation when called on the carpet. Unfortunately, by the time of HDNet's startling investigative exposé, the country, or at least its media, had other, apparently more pressing things on their minds. Despite seven on-camera employees, identifying themselves by name to support their remarkable claims, not a single mainstream media outlet followed up on Rather's remarkable report, or even noted that it had been broadcast. 

The Havoc of HAVA and Sequoia's Good Fortune

Following the 2000 Presidential Election, Congress moved to "solve" the problems believed revealed by the Florida debacle, by allocating some $4 billion tax-payer dollars to states for the purchase of new electronic voting systems in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. At the time, there was a push for states to adopt expensive, paperless, touch-screen voting machines in response to the Florida nightmare. As luck would have it, there was only one voting machine company in America who had such a voting system good to go: Sequoia. Their touch-screen machines were the firest to be used county-wide, in Riverside, CA, in 2000. Federal dollars flowed into their coffers thereafter as the profit margin for such systems dwarfed the paper ballot business, though soon their wholly unverifiable touch-screen voting machines would begin failing in election after election as well.

In the 2004 election, undervote rates for the Presidential race - where voters appeared to vote for no candidate at all - were so high on Sequoia touch-screen systems used in states like New Mexico PDF, and counties like Snohomish, Washington PDF, that legal suits quickly followed, and the machines were dumped in both places soon thereafter in favor of paper ballot based optical-scan systems - though not before the un-credible election results were certified as legitimate.

In 2006, Sequoia touch-screens counted the same votes twice in Ocean County, New Jersey. In 2008, on Super Tuesday, even the Governor of New Jersey was held up from voting at all for 45 minutes when the Sequoia voting machines in Hoboken failed to even boot up. And, perhaps most frightening of all, I was able to reveal, the day before the 2006 General Election that the company's "Edge" touch-screen model, used in dozens of states, featured a yellow button on the back which, if pushed in a certain sequence, would allow any voter to vote as many times as they wanted, over and over and over again. "You won't ever have to stop until someone physically restrains you from voting," Ron Watt, a precinct inspector in Tehama County, CA told me at the time.

It was later revealed that the state's Republican Secretary of State, who had, himself, been on the 2006 ballot, had been informed of the issue long before, but took no action, and the machines were used in the election anyway. The new Democratic Secretary of State (the Republican would be unseated) later confirmed the alarming "yellow button" issue and decertified the machines for use in California. Several states around the country continue to use those same machines however, yellow button and all, even today, including swing states such as Nevada where the systems failed in one precinct after another during early voting as neither Obama nor the Democrats - much less McCain and the GOP - did a thing about it.

New Jersey is another one of the states which continues to use Sequoia touch-screen systems, even though their "AVC Advantage" systems reported inaccurate vote totals during 2008's Super Tuesday primary. The company subsequently threatened to sue two Princeton computer scientists if they dared to carry out the independent examination of the machines that NJ officials had asked them for following discovery of the debacle. A judge later ordered the machines subpoenaed and examined, over Sequoia's objections.

Sequoia even attempted to task their own "independent" contractor to carry out the examination instead, until The BRAD BLOG revealed the extremely embarrassing details of exactly who the company was hoping to use for their "independent" analysis. And what exactly were Sequoia's objections to real independent analysis of their failed systems? They argued that their voting systems were their own Intellectual Property, and the state of New Jersey had no business examining them in any way, even though they were used exclusively to tally the state's own public elections.

The same argument has long been offered, outrageously, by virtually every private voting machine company which has taken over control of our public elections in just about every state in the union, thanks to that Help America Vote Act and the continuing assertions in Congress that these company's "trade secrets" must be protected. New York is the last hold-out in the union, but that too may be coming to an end unless citizens in the state take action. But Sequoia's objection to independent examination of their systems was even more ludicrous than most since, as it turns out, unbeknownst to the public and federal and state officials, the company didn't actually own the Intellectual Property they claimed in court that they did.article" title="" href="http://www.gouverneurtimes.com/images/stories/2009/11/30/jackblaine_sequoiasmartmatic_liedaboutchavez.jpg" rel="nofollow">

In an exclusive series of investigate reports in 2008, I detailed evidence that the company was near bankruptcy, had been quietly fending off a hostile takeover from a competitor, and, in fact, didn't even have actual ownership of the Intellectual Property on any of their voting systems in use at the time. Worse, they had lied to federal officials about their continuing relationship with Smartmatic, a Venezuelan firm with ties to Hugo Chavez, which still owned the IP rights to all Sequoia voting machines. In the course of my reports, a company-wide teleconference was called to answer to the material I had exposed - even company employees hadn't been told about these issues at the time - and the company's CEO, Jack Blaine, admitted to them, in what he thought had been a confidential call, that it was Smartmatic, not Sequoia, who had control of the Intellectual Property that they had been fighting so hard to protect in one court case after another.

While the IP on the newer machines currently being tested on New York voters may no longer belong to the Venezuelan firm, Sequoia's history of lying to federal, state and county officials makes that difficult to know for certain.

article" title="" href="http://www.gouverneurtimes.com/images/stories/2009/11/30/sequoiavotingsystems_numberoneinhacking_large.gif" rel="nofollow">The Sequoia Hacks

In addition to simply failing to work or tabulate votes correctly, Sequoia Voting Systems' voting machines -- which they once proudly, and falsely, advertised as "Tamper Proof" - have been hacked on numerous occasions in multiple states.

In 2006, while demonstrating how Sequoia's e-voting systems couldn'tbe hacked in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, Carnegie Mellon University professor Dr. Michael Shamos, a proponent of non-transparent, non-verifiable e-voting, accidentally hacked one of them. To the county's credit, they decided to pass on Sequoia machines after the incident.

Unfortunately, they moved to equally disastrous and failed voting machines made by ES&S, the world's largest supplier of voting machines which has just taken over Diebold's voting division, ensuring they will now control some 75% of votes cast in this country, unless the purchase is blocked by a pending Dept. of Justice antitrust division investigation.

Such hacks are really child's play for someone determined to rig an election with the sort of chicanery for which we have a rich history in this country. In 2007, a Princeton professor paid just $86 a piece online to purchase five Sequoia touch-screen machines which the state of New Jersey had recently purchased for $8000 each. He was then able to hack them in short order.

"We can take a version of Sequoia's software program and modify it to do something different - like appear to count votes, but really move them from one candidate to another," Princeton's Professor of Computer Science Andrew Appel said at the time. "And it can be programmed to do that only on Tuesdays in November, and at any other time. You can't detect it." The machines, he explained, can be "easily... rigged to throw an election."

Those very same Sequoia machines are still used to tabulate elections in New Jersey. In 2008, the University of California, Santa Barbara released a video showing how, in about 30 seconds, a virus could be inserted into a Sequoia "Edge" touch-screen system - one with a so-called "voter-verifiable paper audit trail" (VVPAT) printer attached to it -- in such a way that the viral hack could flip an entire election, and never be discovered as having been tampered with at all.

In August of this year, Sequoia's "AVC Advantage" voting machine was hacked again when a team of computer scientists at University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan and Princeton University revealed yet another way to electronically manipulate votes undetectably, this time by replacing chips in the machines themselves, which is much easier than it sounds. As with almost all of the failures and hacks before it, the media largely yawned at the latest revelations, Democrats took no action, and Republicans again ignored such concerns as the stuff of conspiracy theory and nonsense. 

Sequoia Can't Even Count on Paper

Of course, it's not just touch-screen systems which fail to serve their only purpose, the paper ballot-based optical-scan systems - the type being tested on New York voters - made by all of the voting machine companies, routinely fail as well, as the Gouverneur Times has been detailing in regard to the NY-23 Special Election.

More disturbingly, even when such machines don't fail, it's often impossible to know whether they've failed or not. The secret way in which these systems count votes -- inside a computer, which citizens are unable to verify for accuracy -- make it virtually impossible to know if there have been any problems until it's largely too late to do anything about them.

My colleague Richard Hayes Phillips, who so expertly and painstakingly documented the mountain of election system failures and perfidy in Ohio in his book Witness to a Crime, pointed out just a few of those newly emerging failures in NY-23 just last week in the Gouverneur Times. His report detailed "impossible numbers" which were certified in a number of counties, including negative numbers of ballots to help balance the books for what are known as "phantom votes" - more votes than the number of voters who actually voted in the race.

article" title="" href="http://www.gouverneurtimes.com/images/stories/2009/11/30/michelleshafer_sequoiavotingsystems_noevidence.jpg" rel="nofollow">Unfortunately, that is not uncommon with voting systems made by Sequoia. Last year, the Washington D.C. Board of Elections found that the company's hardware and software were to blame when some 1,500 phantom votes were recorded on tabulators from a single precinct alone where just over 300 voters voted. The company had first attempted to blame human error (the usual excuse from these companies) and/or "static electricity" somehow, as Sequoia Vice President and spokesperson Michele Shafer lied (as has become her stock in trade) to the Washington Post. "There's absolutely no problem with the machines in the polling places. No. No," she misleadingly told the paper.

The independent report from the D.C Board of Elections found otherwise. That incident came on the heels of yet another embarrassing Sequoia op-scan failure in Palm Beach, Florida - the home of the original, still unexplained Sequoia punch-card disaster from 2000, where op-scan systems replaced the touch-screens outlawed by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist not long after he took office in 2006. In a 2008 election, on the county's new Sequoia op-scan system, a contested race for Circuit Judge went on for weeks as differing counts occurred every time the same ballots were run through the same scanners. In other words, the same scanners failed to count the same ballots the same way twice. As the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:

Election workers took 262 ballots previously rejected by the machines as over- or under-votes in the judicial race and ran them through two machines. All of them should have been rejected again in the tests. That didn't happen. On the first two tests of 160 ballots, the machines accepted three ballots as good votes. On tests on 102 more ballots that should have been rejected, the machines first accepted 13 ballots as good votes and then 90 on a second run.

These are the same type of machines, made by the same company, which NY-23 voters recently used, and which all New Yorkers will soon be forced to use, unless something changes quickly. And I haven't even mentioned the still-unexplained -16,022 votes (that's negative 16,022 votes) tallied for - or actually against - Al Gore on optical-scan systems made by Diebold in Volusia County, FL back in 2000.

Or the 9 races overturned in Pottowatamie County, Iowa's 2006 Republican Primary when paper-based optical-scan systems made by ES&S were found, by a sharp-eyed election official, to have failed spectacularly. I could go on, of course, as the examples I've provided for failures by Sequoia Voting Systems on both touch-screen and op-scan systems, along with their continuing lies and obfuscations on the facts surrounding them, and the fiscal health and/or control of their company could fill an entire book. Sadly, this article just touches on just a few of the most well-known failures. We can now add the failures of the Special Election in NY-23 to the record books. 

The Real Choice: Democracy First or Democracy Denied

As in all of these failures, it is the voters who lose, not the candidates, as it's not the candidates' election to lose. It doesn't belong to them, it belongs to us, the voters, or we, the people. When the media turned away from what happened in Ohio in 2004 on the basis that "John Kerry, who had the most to lose, didn't challenge the election, so why should we investigate what happened?", those of us in the non-partisan Election Integrity community where outraged. John Kerry didn't have the most to lose, we, the people, did. No matter who one supported in that election (and I find it necessary to note here the I did not vote for Kerry), we all lose when democracy is denied in any election. And when citizens can't have confidence in the results of an election, because they are unable to personally verify its accuracy, democracy has been denied and our entire system of self-governance is threatened.

Last week I noted that a full hand-count was merited in the NY-23 race given all of the reported failures in the administration of the election. That, despite believing that Hoffman was an embarrassing candidate for the voters of New York and ill-equipped to represent them in Congress. Nonetheless, if its found that he received more votes than anybody else in the race, I would fight to the end for him to be seated in the U.S. House.

That's how democracy works - or is supposed to. But at this late date, even if a hand-count of all ballots in the district were carried out, there would be little way for we the people to know that the ballots being counted, after weeks of being gone from public oversight, were actually the same ballots as cast on Election Day.

Partial "audits" of a percentage of ballots (really little more than spot-checks) in the days and weeks following an election do little to shore up public confidence in the results. Such post-election audits, as proven in Ohio, can be easily gamed. When the Green and Libertarian parties jointly called for a full state "recount" in Ohio in 2004, election officials in Cuyahoga County pre-counted the supposedly "random" 3% sample of ballots the night before they were counted the next day in public.

They had hoped to ensure the sample would match up with the original Election Night count in order to avoid a full county-wide hand-count, as mandated by law in the event that there were any inconsistencies found in the hand-count of the "random" sample. Several election officials in the county would later be convicted to the maximum sentence for having rigged the Ohio Presidential Election recount. It was all too late, of course, to mean anything to the results of the election.

A legitimate, transparent, public count was never held in Ohio, even though just six votes registered for John Kerry instead of George W. Bush in each of Ohio's precincts would have resulted in a different man -- for better or worse -- sitting in the White House for the next four years. Democracy denied. While state Election Integrity advocates such as New Yorkers for Verified Voting battled valiantly and successfully to avoid the implementation of touch-screen voting in the state, the result of that battle has been the use of the still-uncertified Sequoia/Dominion op-scan system that the entire state will soon be saddled with unless the movement by other Election Integrity advocates at the Election Transparency Coalition, fighting to keep the state's lever systems, is successful.

Though decidedly imperfect, at least the mechanical lever systems offer a chance at some form of transparency and reliability that optical-scan systems have proven, time and again, not to -- the op-scan systems made by Sequoia have proven no exception. For real transparency, and real citizen-overseeable elections - necessary for real self governance by We the People - there remains just one option with which I am familiar after years of covering these issues: Hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted at the polling place on Election Night in front of the entire citizenry, with the results publicly posted at the precinct, before any ballots are moved anywhere. That is "Democracy's Gold Standard" and that is what Doug Hoffman should have understood before he announced his intentions to "ensure the seamless use of these machines in the 2010 statewide and midterm elections."

That so many Republicans, and other folks from the Right that I've spoken to over the last week or two since the NY-23 fiasco, seem wholly uninformed about the matters mentioned above - matters at the very core of our democracy -- is disgraceful, though understandable. For years, these issues have been seen as the domain of "sore losers" on the Left, disappointed that Democrats lost one questionably close, potentially gamed electronic election after another. Many of us stood for democracy, insisting our concerns were not about the fate of any particular party, but for democracy itself, even as we were frequently marginalized as "conspiracy theorists" and erstwhile consumers of "sour grapes".

While Republicans excelled at such marginalization, Democrats used similar tactics when questionable elections revealed themselves, such as in New Hampshire's "First in the Nation" Primary Election disaster last year, when Hillary Clinton inexplicably was said to have defeated Barack Obama. Oddly enough, Obama was found to be the winner in the towns where New Hampshire still carries out citizen-overseen, precinct-based hand-counts immediately following the close of polls. But he lost - by a nearly inverse amount - in towns where Diebold's paper-based op-scan systems, instead of actual human beings, were used to tally ballots.

The systems used were the very same machines seen being hacked before our very eyes in HBO's Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy, which also includes footage of a Republican candidate having her vote flipped, time and again, to the Democratic candidate on a Sequoia touch-screen machine. (You can watch that chilling paper ballot op-scan hack above)

The result of election official denial, partisan marginalization of critics, and media dismissal: Most of these issues were neither carried, nor investigated, by mainstream media outlets at all.

Those outlets ill-served their readers, their viewers, and the citizenry of the U.S. as a whole by ignoring real concerns about election fraud - where a single person or voting machine failure can undetectably affect the results of an entire election - while focusing instead on horse-races and phony issues such as allegations of "rampant", though non-existent "voter fraud" by politically convenient and cynically scapegoated organizations such as ACORN.

It's time that We the People, of any and all parties, or none at all - at least those of us who claim to believe in real democracy, rather than partisan politics as usual -- finally stand up for it once and for all. I will stand in support of anyone, of any party, who does the same. Will you join me? These are, after all, issues not of Right and Left, but of right and wrong and it's only our very own democracy at stake in the bargain.

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Brad Friedman is an investigative reporter, blogger, election integrity advocate and expert, and the creator and publisher of The BRAD BLOG. He is a broadcaster and contributor to the UK's Guardian, Huffington Post, Computer World and other periodicals, a Fellow at the Commonweal Institute, and a frequent guest on radio and television outlets from Air America to Fox News. In addition to offering expert testimony on these matters to a number of federal and state electoral oversight commissions, he recently contributed a chapter on the disaster for voters that was the 2008 Election for the book Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-2009 and co-wrote an investigate report on the illegally certified Sequoia touch-screen voting machines, still in use in Nevada, for Mark Crispin Miller's book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 - 2008. This year his work on the mysterious death of Republican IT guru Mike Connell was cited with an award for "Excellence in Investigative Journalism" by Sonoma State University's 33-year old "Project Censored" organization