As you decry the alleged election fraud in Iran, keep in mind that the majority of the nation's election officials - like NH's state election officials - have knowingly approved fraud-friendly and defective vote counting computers. Across the nation, the vast majority of our local election officials, have long ceased to fulfill their constitutional duties. In NH, most of our election officials prefer to let LHS Associates and Diebold Corporation take over - and I do mean takeover - our democracy. Forget Iran; it's time to say "NO" to concealed vote counting here in America.

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The New York Times has come out with yet another editorial in support of concealed vote counting in America, hyping it up as "trustworthy" computerized vote counting and encouraging Congress to pass yet another version of Congressman Rush Holt's (D-NJ) corporate-backed computerized voting bill.

SOURCE: OpEd News

Secret Vote Counting and the Lost Art of Democratic Elections

In February 2009 Allison Kilkenny reported that "The Obama administration on Friday told a federal judge it would not deviate from the Bush administration's position that detainees held at a U.S. air base in Afghanistan have no right to sue in U.S. courts."

In early May 2009 the Wall Street Journal issued another troubling report from the "change we can believe in" administration:"The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Why is the Obama administration continuing to erode civil liberties in the manner so cynically embodied in contemporary governmental acts like the Patriot Act?

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"God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it." -Daniel Webster

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SOURCE: wtic.com

Election Audit: Some Cards Faulty; Devices Used Were Correctly Programmed

Matt Dwyer Reporting

Click here to read the full Post-Election Audit of Memory Cards for the November 2008 Elections

Click here to read the full Statistical Analysis of the Post Election Audit Data 2008 November Elections

A UConn Voting Technology Research Center audit finds all of the memory cards actually used in electronic voting machines during the November, 2008 election in Connecticut were correctly programmed, and most of the hand recounts matched the machine counts.  

But the audit found about 9 percent of the memory cards could not be used because of problems found before they were put in place.  Replacement cards had to be rushed to one voting location, when none of the original cards would work.

SOURCE: BlackBoxVoting.ORG

Support our work here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html

Usually fighting for public rights and observable elections is just like running on a hamster wheel -- constant battles about uncertified, defective voting machines, hiding freedom of information documents, and quibble, quibble, quibble about hand counts, spot checks, digital signatures, cryptography, certifications, testing...but Germany just took a big short cut and got off the hamster wheel altogether! We can learn a lot from what Germany just did.

What's important is WHY Germany banned computerized voting. Newspapers gave the impression that Germany banned e-voting due to "security issues" or bugs. NOT SO: The ban was based on HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS. This stopped e-voting dead in Germany. No more hamster wheel.

This decision represents spectacular progress for the US voting rights groups who believe computerized, secret vote counting violates inalienable rights. Germany gave us effective argumentation for this. It starts with reframing the issue of computerized voting into basic human rights.

The details of Germany's knock-out punch arguments are below. If you feel uncomfortable about computerized voting, the controversial Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and the new 2009 Holt Bill that expands on HAVA, here's real hope for change.

For years now, leaders like voting rights lawyer Paul Lehto, Nancy Tobi (Democracy for New Hampshire/Election Defense Alliance), and Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, and have been focusing on these issues from the standpoint of human rights. We believe that counting votes on computers controlled by insiders violates inalienable rights, specifically the right to public scrutiny of public elections.

Germany agrees.

Last week, Germany's Supreme Court equivalent, its federal constitutional court, issued a decision that computerized vote counting is unconstitutional.

The good news is, we in NH don't really need to worry about this latest disclosure of the fraud-friendly designs in the Diebold voting machines counting almost 90% of NH votes. The bad news is, we don't have to worry about it because the State of NH conducts virtually no oversight on these machines so their fraud-friendly "audit" logs are not a worry to us.

SOURCE: Wired.com

Diebold Admits Systemic Audit Log Failure; State Vows Inquiry

By Kim Zetter March 17, 2009 | 6:29:04 PM

SACRAMENTO, California — Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on election day.

New Hampshire knows how to honestly and openly count our votes. In many of our NH towns, this happens at every election, where the votes are counted in open meeting, as required by the NH Constitution, with full public oversight.

So why don't we count our votes openly and honestly throughout the state?

In many of our cities and towns, accounting for almost 90% of our ballots, NH votes are counted in secret with no public oversight or verification that the count is honest and true.

In these cities and towns, our ballots are counted by LHS Associates. LHS is the New England affiliate of a private corporation (Diebold), which has a criminal history, partisan ties, and uses secret vote counting software developed by a convicted embezzler who used to work with Watergate plumber Egil "Bud" Krogh, and whose specialty is alteration of computer records.

I know this sounds crazy, but it's true. We have handed over our elections, the mechanism of our democracy, to a private corporation with a disturbingly shady past.

Democracy depends on open government. This is the basis of the NH Right to Know Law and the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Over the past year or so I have been meeting relatively little success in my attempts to obtain public records from the NH Secretary of State. Most of my requests are met with "We have no documentation responsive to this request". This indicates an alarming lack of policy and process documentation in the office of the Secretary of State, precluding any meaningful oversight and auditability of the state and national security-critical functions this office fulfills.

For example, when I requested the names of all people responsible for the central tabulation of the 2009 Presidential election, I was told they have no documentation responsive to my request. How would you feel if you asked your bank for the names of the people handling your money, ie, their employees, and were told the bank has no records of those names? Are our votes worth less than our dollars?

A recent audit of the Department of State reached the same conclusions.

The taxpayers of NH deserve better than this. The voters of NH deserve better than this. And with NH holding its position of first in the nation primary, the nation deserves better than this.

All of my public records requests and state responses can be reviewed here.

The current request is found here.

When citizens tried to observe the central tabulation of election results, the NH Secretary of State told them they could not enter the "nonpublic" rooms where the tally was occurring and gave them a "warning" about videotaping events where the central tabulation was taking place.

On January 21 you have the opportunity to attend a public hearing on legislation to rid NH of the scourge of corporate controlled elections. Below is some information about the issue of open source code voting equipment. Open source voting, is naturally opposed by the corporate fraudsters currently controlling America's elections. With the blessing, I might add, of our public officials, such as the NH Department of State and Legislature, which have both granted unconditional approval - providing virtually no public oversight - to the corporate (alleged) fraudster Diebold and its affiliate LHS Associates (whose VP is a convicted drug trafficker) to run NH's elections.

SOURCE: Procon.org

Should source code for electronic voting machines be publicly available?

PRO ARGUMENTS

SOURCE: Professor Unger's blog Forward to the Past: Junk the Machines, Count Votes Manually Stephen H. Unger 8/5/08

Recording and tabulating votes in elections is a natural, straightforward, easy to implement, computer application. Right? In a world without ingenious bad guys, this might indeed be the case. Unfortunately, that's not where we live. While it is not too hard to design, implement, and operate computer-based ATM and EZ-Pass systems that will keep the bad guys at bay, this is almost impossible for the seemingly simpler problem of election systems. Below, I will first explain why I believe this, and then I will proclaim the good news, which is that we can get along very nicely without such systems.

What's So Hard About Counting Votes?

Consider the operation of an ATM (automated teller machine). When you key in a request for cash from your bank account, the money comes out along with a printed slip describing the transaction. At the end of the month, the transaction is listed on your bank statement. Those of little faith count the money carefully, verify that the transaction slip is correct, and, at the end of the month, reconcile their bank statements against the transaction slips and perhaps their own records. The chances of customers catching errors that short-change them and demanding redress are substantial. Clearly, the insiders (the banks), cannot profit by cheating ATM users. They must defend their system against attacks by outsiders trying to defraud them and their customers. In this struggle they have been moderately successful 1.

NOTE: All of my public records requests (PRR) thus far submitted to the NH Secretary of State may be found here. A review of my requests and the responses from the Dept. of State demonstrates their reticence to be accountable to the NH Right to Know Law. Most requests are met with "We have no documents responsive to this request" or a delay of 6 months or so, at expiration of delay time again more delays. Open government is the heart of democracy. This is the basis for the Right to Know Law.

Mr. Scanlan,

In your most recent response to my public records request you have indicated to me that future requests will be charged the exorbitant and prohibitive rate of $1.00 per page (as compared to the reasonable rate of $0.15 per page your office has charged through December 31, 2008.

I have been requesting public documents from your office for some time now, and your office has repeatedly flaunted the law and public access through obstructionism, delays and now it would appear your office is attempting to de facto eliminate public access by charging exorbitant fees.

Diebold, the sole source provider of vote "counting" computers to the State of NH, is exposed once again as a provider of fraud-friendly, error-prone, defective equipment that can not ensure election integrity by any stretch of the imagination. In California, election officials took the threat seriously and implemented security checks and procedures. In NH, state election officials, and most local election officials, do nothing to mitigate these known Diebold-enabled security risks in our elections.

SOURCE: - The BRAD BLOG - http://www.bradblog.com -

'Humboldt Transparency Project' Reveals Diebold, U.S. Federal E-Voting Scam

Hundreds of Lost Ballots, Illegal Voting System, and the Boondoggle Behind Billions of Federal Dollars Spent on Voting Machines That Don't Work All Illustrated by Simple Citizen Oversight, Free Open-Source Voting System in One California County...

Posted By Brad Friedman On 8th December 2008 @ 15:28

By John Gideon and Brad Friedman

"Some people have called those who have long decried our nation's move toward voting machines nuts or just sore losers," reads the editorial (1) from yesterday's Eureka Times-Standard.

"They were loud, and they were strident in proclaiming that they didn't trust election technologies as much as they trust the ability of actual human beings to count votes," the paper continues in response to the citizen's "Transparency Project" in Humboldt County, CA which, as The BRAD BLOG reported last week (2), discovered some 200 ballots that the county's Diebold optical-scan system had deleted from the initially certified count. Humboldt registrar Carolyn Crnich --- who deserves much credit for working with local election integrity advocates to allow them to create a more transparent, open-source optical-scan system as a check on the buggy Diebold hardware and software --- was forced to to re-certify the November 4th election with new results after the findings.

In California, unlike NH, election officials take seriously the risks posed by using known defective Diebold vote counting equipment. The equipment in question is the same equipment used in New Hampshire, where it was unconditionally approved and where state election officials and the legislature have refused every citizen request to provide oversight on the technology, despite alerts from Diebold itself. And yes, Diebold's spokesman is really named "Mr. Riggall."

SOURCE: Times-Standard.com

Local elections office commended
BY Thadeus Greenson/The Times-Standard
Posted: 12/07/2008 01:36:29 AM PST

Since 2004, Premier Elections Solutions has known about the programming error in its software that caused almost 200 ballots to be dropped from Humboldt County's final November election tally, but that came as news to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office.

”Secretary Bowen is certainly concerned about Premier's carelessness with yet another elections product and thinks it's distressing that the company took virtually no action for years on this apparent defect,” Secretary of State Press Secretary Kate Folmar wrote in an e-mail to the Times-Standard. “Secretary Bowen is talking with the company, county elections officials and others about how to prevent this problem from ever happening again in California.”

BY Nancy Tobi

SOURCE: OpEdNews

Downloadable PDF

An article from Humboldt County, California, (cited here and appended below in full) shows what happens when election officials work in friendly and cooperative collaboration with citizen watchdogs to protect democratic elections. Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich worked with a local citizen election watchdog group to create the Humboldt Election Transparency Project. From the article:

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The basic idea behind the first-of-its-kind transparency project is fairly simple: every ballot cast in an election is passed through an optical scanner after being officially counted and the images are then placed online and available for download. Software, created by volunteer Mitch Trachtenberg, then allows viewers to sort the ballots by precinct or race to conduct recounts at their pleasure. Shortly after the election was officially certified Monday, Crnich said she got an e-mail from Trachtenberg saying something was amiss.

”(Eureka's) Precinct 1E-45 seemed out of kilter,” she said. “The count just wasn't adding up.” After double checking all of the precinct's logs and ballots, Crnich said she discovered a deck of 197 vote-by-mail ballots for the precinct that had been run through the ballot counting optical scanner, but did not seem to appear in the final vote tallies.

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Someday, we hope to be able to post a story like this about New Hampshire.

Unfortunately, to this point, NH's response to citizen pressure has been both defensive and offensive (in every sense of the word).

In fact, according to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting:

"Black Box Voting had recommended the transparency project methodology, specifically, to New Hampshire in 2007, along with another optional method of the transparency project using video to compare input to output. New Hampshire showed absolutely no interest in any of these ideas."

When election watchdogs attempted to provide citizen oversight during the 2008 Primary recount, they were met with intimidation and obstructionism.

SOURCE: BlackBoxVoting.ORG

Below you will find the transcript of a video -- and a link, so you can see for yourself. This video pertains to perhaps THE most important issue in election protection today, the RIGHT TO KNOW.

We will continue to run down pointless rabbit holes seeking election reform if we don't focus on the core issues. The truth is, it doesn't matter how secure or how accurate a voting system is, if the public does not have the right to know; every change in election procedures or legislation must be examined through the lens of whether it helps or hurts our right to know.

The right to know is built into the founding documents of our nation. It is especially important in the area of elections, because it is through elections that we exercise control over our government. The argumentation for right to know can be framed as follows:

Diebold Touch-Screen Memory Cards and Other Documents Sought for Retention as Allegations of Racketeering Scheme 'to Corrupt Elections in the U.S. Over the Course of This Decade' Spread to Encompass '02 and '08 Senate Races in the Peach State...

Guest blogged by Steve Heller of Velvet Revolution

SOURCE: http://www.bradblog.com

The lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the civil RICO lawsuit King Lincoln v. Blackwell in Ohio has served a document hold request to Georgia Sec. of State Karen Handel in advance of the December 2nd run-off election between incumbent U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R) and his opponent, Jim Martin (D).

Today's letter from attorney Cliff Arnebeck (posted in full at the end of this article) requests "any records of official investigation of the reported use of uncertified patches by Diebold in two Democratic Georgia counties in 2002, reported by former Diebold consultant Chris Hood."

Final touches put on public campaign finance plan

SOURCE: Fosters.com

By ADAM D. KRAUSS
akraussfosters.com
akrauss@fosters.com
Article Date: Sunday, November 23, 2008

CONCORD — A hearing on setting up a quasi-publicly funded campaign financing system for the state was momentarily interrupted Friday when the chairman asked about students standing in the back of the room.

They were there with State Sen. Jackie Cilley, D-Barrington, who said some of her business students at the University of New Hampshire, after exploring the Statehouse, may be candidates one day.

"You won't have to do what I do and beg for money every few years," she told them.

That may be true if the Legislature adopts the plan by the New Hampshire Commission on Public Funding of Elections, which has been making changes to a draft report ahead of submitting the proposal to the governor, legislative leaders and the secretary of state on Dec. 1.

September 2007 Harri Hursti testified before the NH Legislature and representatives from the Department of State. Here is some of what they heard. (And ignored.)