[Ed Note: Please see the update at the bottom of this article, for the state’s explanation concerning the 1.1 million voter records discussed in the following.]
The Republican War on Voting continues apace.
In addition to the recent, outrageously bad decision by the Supreme Court to approve Indiana’s draconian polling place Photo ID restrictions, sure to keep thousands of legal voters from even being able to cast votes in tomorrow’s important Primary Election — despite the state’s inability to offer up a single instance of in-person polling place voter impersonation that’s ever occurred during the state’s entire history (as we’ve covered here, here and here, for example) — another 1.1 million voters have now been purged from the voting rolls altogether, reports Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, as based on the Hoosier State’s own data.
Moreover, the state will use unverifiable touch-screen style voting systems across the state. One widely used system, made by MicroVote, will be used despite having been decertified, and two other systems, made by ES&S and Diebold, have been found vulnerable to undetectable vote-flipping viruses by several reputable universities.
According to Harris’ report…
Now, the voter rolls are supposed to be tidied up prior to each election. Indiana’s last general election was in Nov. 2006, and they have had a slew of special and general elections since then. So how have 1.1 million voters — 26 percent of the current statewide list — escaped the regularly scheduled voter registration cleanup squads? Who are these million voters and where do they come from?
One quarter-million of them come from just two northwestern Indiana counties: Lake and Porter. Lake County reports purging 137,164 voters and neighboring Porter County canceled out 124,958 voters.
Lake County, the home of Gary, Indiana, has spawned the Jackson Five and a great old musical (The Music Man) and and has been referred to as “the second most liberal county in America.” Lake County has one of the heaviest concentrations of African-American voters that you’ll find anywhere in the USA.
Nearby Porter County, the home of Valparaiso, is 95% white and went solidly for Bush in the 2004 election. It also has a lot of college kids.
For whatever reason, these two counties had … what … massive data entry problems? Exceptionally messy records? Lots of dead people who climbed back into their graves? Or will we see a lot of disappointed voters on Tuesday, when they perhaps learn that they were among the lucky million people who got purged?
Harris goes on to offer several useful documents for helping to monitor the situation tomorrow, including a spreadsheet (EXCEL), detailing which sort of unverifiable voting machine will be used in each county. She notes one of the most widely used across Indiana, the MicroVote system, has been decertified for use, but has been grandfathered in for continued use in the state nonetheless. That, despite the same system having been found to have failed spectacularly in other states such as Tennessee and Pennsylvania, and MicroVote’s own insurance company’s allegations that the machines are defective.
Several counties in Indiana also use the ES&S iVotronic, the same type of DRE (touch-screen) voting system which lost 18,000 votes entirely in Florida’s 2006 13th Congressional district election, which was subsequently found to be vulnerable to the same type of undetectable vote-flipping virus which Princeton University was able to embed in a Diebold AccuVote TS (touch-screen) system.
That same Diebold system will also be in use in several counties in Indiana tomorrow.
For the record, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has still flatly refused to issue any warnings about either of those findings, as made years ago now, by computer scientists at reputable universities, despite the EAC’s federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandate to act as a clearinghouse for such voting system problems.
Also, for the record, North Carolina will be using unverifiable touch-screen voting systems in many counties as well tomorrow, even though a state law — passed after thousands of votes were entirely lost on e-voting systems during their 2004 election — requires “paper trails” on such machines. As The BRAD BLOG has many times reported, such “paper trails” on DRE-style voting systems do not make them any more reliable or verifiably accurate, as they can be hacked just as easily, and undetectably, as DRE systems without such “paper trails.”
UPDATE: A number of folks around the net have offered skepticism and/or what they believe to be explanations concerning Harris’ numbers, as taken from the IN SoS website.
For example, “dedmonds” at DailyKos writes…
4.3 million would still represent a better than 90% registration, which is truly impressive in American politics.
So if there were 5.4 million registered voters, it’s a good thing some of them were purged from the rolls.
Now, should there be some checking into the exact details of the purging? Almost certainly. But is the purging some sort of de facto sign of Evil Things afoot in Indiana?
Hardly.
…before, unfortunately, somewhat discrediting him/herself by making the usual, de rigeur dKos-style allegations of “poor sourcing” (the source for the numbers is the Indiana SoS’s own website) lack of “due diligence” and the self-destructive, if oft-made at that site, claim that “As a community, we lose a huge amount of our power if we become the little blog that cried wolf.”
Meanwhile, our colleague Steve Rosenfeld of Alternet, in the middle of several others stories (as are we), was able to do a bit of actual due-diligence, unlike the dKos poster above who seemed more interested in calling others out, rather than doing any actual legwork of his/her own.
Rosenfeld says he spoke with Matt Tusing, Chief of Staff to Indiana’s Republican Sec. of State Todd Rokita. According to Rosenfeld, Tusing explained that the 1.1 million registration records marked as “Canceled” in the state database don’t actually mean the voters were purged. He was told anytime a record is changed in the database it results in that record being marked as “Canceled.” So voters purged because they died, or voters who moved from one location to another who changed their registration, would both result in a “Canceled” voter, according to Tusing’s explanation.
We checked with Harris, who wrote back to say that she had been hearing that “the numbers could be explained this way or that,” as the dKos diarist mentioned above, “but Porter County could not be explained at all no matter what.”
In reply to Rosenfeld’s explanation, as received from the IN SoS along with a few other sources he’d cross-checked against, Harris still had concerns, even in the light of “Canceled” not actually meaning canceled, but meaning changed…
And in Porter County, this would mean that 115% of the current registered list was changed, edited, updated, what have you. That means basically every voter in the county, some more than once. In Monroe County, 85% of the records were altered, edited, changed, what have you.
That’s a different concern, but still very much a concern. At least, in Indiana (I think), it does no good to go in and alter a Democrat registration to make it Republican, because Republicans can vote in the Democratic primary. I’m not sure it goes the other way though.
It is also a concern now that they’ve added the new ID laws, along with a requirement that the names match on the roster and the government-issued ID.
Think about this: You don’t have to purge if you can just go in and alter a bunch of spellings, or addresses. And with electronic pollbooks, how would they ever even find you? If I change your name to Brad Freeman [ed note: my name is actually spelled “Brad Friedman”], and your address from 56143 Oak Lane to 65413 Oak, that electronic poll book — and maybe that stubborn or partisan pollworker — won’t find it.
She goes on to note, however, that she “like[s] the idea of having the computer flag every time a change is made, if that’s what it’s doing.”
So what is it really doing? And should Rokita’s office be trusted here? He is, after all, the state Republican most responsible for pushing the reprehensible, unconstitutional Photo ID restriction law with misleading (at best) information, despite being unable to cite a single instance of in-person, polling place voter impersonation fraud — ever in state history — of the type the law was deceptively “designed” to protect against.
That law is sure to disenfranchise thousands of voters tomorrow and this November. And we’ll find out tomorrow, and this November, whether his office’s explanation of the 1.1 million voter records “changed,” but not inappropriately “canceled” or purged, was accurate or not…hopefully…
The New Hampshire Recount
Here is more evidence of the astroturfing attacks on BradBlog.
Posted by: SocraticGadfly on January 23, 2008
Maybe it’s a coincidence the poster’s name is so similar to mine.
I guess some folks like to catapult the propaganda. Olbermann had some good reports on how astroturfers {Bush et al} like to repeat things over and over again. The Bivings Group is another one that thinks rumors can go viral.
The fake persuaders by George Monbiot
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,715153,00.html
Here’s the Plan:
1) McCain has already won; the day to day operation of the conspiracy to destroy American democracy from within now consists solely of making that predetermined result believable to enough Americans that they get away with it.
2) The main techniques they are using are a) stealing primaries for Hillary to keep her in the “race”, b) Keeping their presstitutes in the corporate whore media blabbering non-stop about manufactured controversies having nothing to do with how Obama would act as President, and c) treating loony-tunes Grandpa with kid-gloves so he appears as though OTHERS might accept him as president.
3) The scam is not focussing on getting Americans to vote for Grandpa, per se, rather it is to make it seem like OTHERS voted for him. Remember this point, it is crucial.
Just like very few were swayed with the beyond-absurd lying/ranting of the Swift Boat Liars for bush, very few will be swayed by the corporate media lying about Obama and shilling for McSame. That is not the goal. Rather the goal is to get Americans to believe that OTHERS are stupid enough to fall for the lies/spin.
Remember the British magazine cover headline after the 2004 “election” that read “How can 51,000,000 people be so stupid?” (Answer: they weren’t. the “election” was stolen with the electronic vote-stealing machines.) That is what is going on here. On the day after the “election” look for the media whores to be wailing about how “racist,” “stupid,” and “frightened of bogey men” the Americans “voters” were on “election” day, which caused them to vote for a loon rather than a statesman.
It worked last time; it will work again. True, they may have to buy out the integrity of more polling companies to pull off the charade this time, but they have lots of our (tax) money to do just that.
Face it: these vermin can NOT allow themselves to be voted out, since the chances of being arrested and convicted on myriad crimes is near 100% once they are not in control of the executive branch (“Justice” Dept).
Beware 911 #2 if it looks like the election theft operation won’t fly.
Patriot is correct. The game is to make it appear that this is an evenly divided country. So the last eight years, astroturfers have been screaming all over the internet how evil Bush and Cheney are. That has kept people in the realm of emotions, rather than hard facts. Our problems are institutional.
The astroturfers are going with the viral meme that McCain is not part and parcel of Shrub and Company. Or they go with the but, but, but Clinton Democrappers are no better.
So yes, it appears that this Hillary/Obama fighting has been completely scripted with the aim of bringing the illusion that McCain can compete with Obama.
With all due respect to Godwin’s Law, people who think Hitler was the primary cause of Nazi power should take a look at Wilhem Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. He eloquently argued that it was the psychology of the masses which form the bedrock for totalitarianism. I think that is close to an exact quote.
So then you have folks like Hertzberg, Lindeman, Kos Zuniga calling the majority of people conspiracy theorists on hobby horses, and then they run with some lame election integrity movement which calls for paper trails off the machines.
To the bunch of us who keep speaking out, the message is, sure, you figured it out, but no one is listening, no one cares.
But for them to do that, they are stuck with using PR firms, special interests, and useful idiots to keep repeating:
Brad – If Indiana’s population is 6.5 million, isn’t 4.3 million voters(66%) more likely than 5.4 million(83%)? Does anyone know the average percent registered voters to the population? If there are a large number of college students, wouldn’t that contribute to a large number of changes? This does seem like a large number of voter registrations removed, but perhaps it is really within standard norms. Need more data to evaluate. I would think the larger problem would be the new voter id requirement.
The purge explains Clinton’s surge.
They are pulling out all stops to have neoCon hillary run against neoCon McCain.
Thanks a log for the Suckology Strider.
Question, was this a state purge or a private (choicepoint type) purge?
Update: According to Steve Rosenfeld, the Chief of Staff for the Indiana Secretary of State has told him that the number of registrations “cancelled” does not mean they were cancelled, it means they were changed.
Well that’s a relief, because I’ve been digging further through all kinds of arcane reports going back several years, and the number cancelled in Porter County cannot possibly be justified under any scenario using the listed number of duplicates, moved, died, disappeared etc.
Therefore Porter County just had 115% of the registrations on its list CHANGED. Possibilities: 100% of the registrations were changed in some way, some more than once; or, some of the registrations were left along but most were changed more than once; or, most were left alone but some were changed over and over.
Feel better now?
By the way, I was not too bothered by the rabies attacks on Kos, and the dithering about Indiana having only 6 million people. The EAC reports as of 2004 indicated there were 4.7 million people of age to vote, and had a very high percentage of them voting, with some counties having more than 100% of their eligible voters vote.
I think it’s pretty clear that Indiana didn’t then have, and quite possibly still doesn’t have, accurate voter rolls.
Now let me share with you a scenario that’s been bothering me about these voter ID scenarios, and as we all know, Indiana is requiring government-issued voter IDs with a match (but not requiring an “exact” match) on the name and a match on the address.
So I’m in a position to “cancel” or “change” a whole bunch of records. I know that those IDs now have to match name and address. Ya know what? I don’t NEED to purge. All I have to do is introduce typos.
I’m going to change Brad Friedman’s name to Brad Freeman. People will think it is human error. And if his county uses electronic pollbooks, they won’t be able to find his name when they key in “Friedman”. To make sure he can’t vote anything but provisional, I’ll juxtapose a couple numbers on his address. Suppose he lives at 5917 Oak Drive. I’ll make that 9517 Oak. Human error. Human error. Human error.
And if Brad Friedman votes provisional will the canvassing board accept Brad Freeman at a slightly different address? Probably not, if they don’t feel like it. And if Brad Freeman is the typo introduced while changing the record, Brad FRIEDMAN can be 100 percent certain that his vote won’t figure into the network projections.
Not to worry. They say they were only changing the registrations, not purging them…
Or maybe Brad Freeman suddenly out of nowhere votes for McCain? Or the electronic pollbook shows that he has already voted…Whose to know if he didn’t show up to vote?
Can I has revolution yet?
With electronic voting and registration, we are screwed.
It can be altered from anywhere.
With hand registration, not computerized, it has to be done at the county office.
If they’re going to steal them, at least make them work for it
I agree with Dredd at comment #5: This voter ID law was hurried in to effect by the SCOTUS to benefit Hillary Clinton in the Indiana primary. Are we returning to Jim Crow?
Yes.
Floridiot #8
That is so yesterday and soooooo tomorrow murthafu**er … all this softwar thingy … {Ed Note: YouTube full screen links don’t work, Dredd. If you’ll get the regular one, I’ll stick it in here for you. –99} … and demsum …
DU Post From A Bash Bev Thread
It’s obvious what’s going on. People slander Bev Harris and BradBlog all the time and are protected for no clear reason by the management of Daily{CIA}Kos and the {Un}Democratic Underground.
DU and DKos have been besieged for years by astroturfers. All sorts of slander and attacks are made with no proof. The election integrity movement has been taken over by advocates of electronic voting posing as activists.
How come Verified Voting Foundation isn’t coming under fire? It couldn’t be more obvious that they are the gatekeepers, not Brad or Bev.
I think Diebold and others deep down are supporting groups like the Verified Voting Foundation.
The goal of the astroturfers is to trumpet out some kind of paper trail for electronic machines. The vendors would keep their contracts, while the limited hangout of noise would carry on with their froths about grifters and tinfoilers.
There’s yet another new thread at DU making claims about Ms. Harris with no proof.
link
We are returning to Jim Crow (assuming we left it) … but we didn’t … we right it …
The rest is an illusion … no laurels to rest on … I know … I lived on laurel just off … melrose … recently enough …
The empire is going down … save yourself … embrace the earth … die with dignity …
George Bush said, ” I’ll take two and then the next one is all yours. We’ll have the election machines so screwed up even you can win.” John said,”I appreciate it big guy.” From then on John McCain liked George Bush. He never really had before. Only prob. with the happy ending. The next eight years were tough on John. His cancer came back..some thought it was eating into his brain. With the internets and all, the news was trickling out John was on 100% disability to the tune of $58,300 some odd a year. Might bother the poorer class who all know you can’t work when you get that check.
Bev #7
I still got a crush on you luvie … DU and KOS kiss my sweet booty …
goodbyebadbye you empiricist narcolepcy sufferers … send the empire a valentine … get fucked …Question… can any “john/jane doe” do an exit poll?
Anyone who criticizes Bev Harris for her work on fascism (evote machine style) is challenged to a duel between two sailboats casting off from Seattle and sailing NW to Kodiak Island … the one who makes it there wins. No holds barred.
I will plant you in the peace of the deep 6 of 7, the garder of surfer delight, the bitch, just to be pacific.
Wuss! Use a sword!
Floridiot #8
What … Brad was for McCain … WTF ???
99 #9 (niner nine niner nuef nuef #neuf)
Narcolepsy hath no boundaries … straight talkin newspaper mattress sidewalk blues … you has revolution …
99 #9
Would you let it 99?
a song for the anniversary of Kent State … a state of disbelief in all things Amurkan …
Dredd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jym-RtHHG0s
or for timid people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9c6KRFX9Sk
At worst, Bev is misguided but sincere advocate not deserving of such attacks. But I suspect the hyper-vigilant attacks to muddy any argument, any question she brings to daylight proves she is on to something.
But I dont thing she is misguided, I am sure she is a well-guided, sincere, and of most value of all, persistant advocate. As ancient wisdom of I-Ching says, Persistant Furthers. Perhaps in Bevs case we can say Great Persistant, Greatly Furthers.
For all us folks that are just observers and the chattering class, Brad and Bev work, work, work. Seldom have I seen a guestion raised by Bev prove a fruitless line of inquiry. But even if so, what in the world could a sincere person quibble with a watchdog, watching, standing alert. Sure, watchdogs might bark at a friendly visitor occasionally, but if they are not hyper-alert, always looking out for your safety, what kind of watch dog would they be?
What kind of nuts reject a watchdog as discredited and worthless because of a false alarm occasionally, at the worst. I say the kind of nut that criticizes and disses the watch dog is not sincere about the safety of the people the watchdog is guarding.
But compare track records of the watchdogs compared to their critics. I don’t think they have sounded false alarms. Everything Bev and Brad claim and have questioned gets reinforced with time, not disproven with time. Those that predict right should be relied on more in the future,not questioned more.
All the electronic voting concerns have expotentially expanded with more research, more experience. All the science such as exit polls, stats, computer science profs, etc confirm what these “lay” advocates foresaw. Poll-tapes in garbage in Florida in response to a public records request, 16,000 votes dissappear on electronic machines that are “certified”, Ohio election staff convicted of rigging a recount…come on, the watchdogs saw danger when it was coming and we are arguing about whether the dog barks too much. We are too much.
Brad and Bev are hard working heros, taking time to do the tedious, hard work of documenting the travestry of our election systems, only to get dissed and attacked over and over again by supposed liberal and pro-democratic rights blogs and communities. Brad and Bev are nuts; not conspriracy nuts, but nuts to keep working against such odds.
They have gotten attacked far too much for this to have been an organic or spontaneous response to their work.
Do people know that Andy Stephenson was in contact with a Mike Vreeland, that Andy dabbled into the tinfoil himself?
He isn’t here to protect himself, so I won’t rip into him, but none of the attacks on Brad or Bev add up, unless people are willing to dig deeply into it.
A hopefully-useful Kos-Armstrong timeline
People should check out that whole article. In short, Kos is a political pimp who mysteriously rose to the top of the blogosphere despite being a below average writer.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Markos_Moulitsas_Z%C3%BAniga
The technology community in San Francisco? That would have included Steven Hertzberg, correct?
Oh, would it surprise anyone that Robert Hertzberg made a donation to Joe Lieberman? It’s true.
Do people realise that Robert Hertzberg as a California assemblyman sponsored one of the first election technology funding bills after the 2000 election was stolen? It’s true.
I could write page after page of prose on everything I’ve absorbed. Sometimes it gets me into trouble. But I’ve had to scrape and claw to get my voice out. When I make a mistake, I admit it. Now how did Kos rise to such power so quickly?
Ok, pardon my indulgence, one more link-
http://www.planetwork.net/2004conf/program.html
One of the sessions was described as thus:
So all these people were invited to this same conference?
Markos Zuniga, DailyKos.com
David Dill, VerifiedVoting.org
Steven Hertzberg, VoteWatch
Arthur Keller, Open Voting Consortium, UCSC
Just say no to electronic voting machines. Just say no to Lindeman and the Verified Voting Foundation. Just say no to corporate pigs dressed in progressive clothes.
There’s another strange name that pops up a lot on “progressive” messageboards. Ben Burch.
Here he viciously attacked Bev back in 2006 with nothing but lies. This guy seems to have plenty of pull with a number of message boards.
Here he supported Rob Pelletier of Diebold.
Now how is the internet not rigged? I’m not saying everyone is a fake. But come on.
If it is a fake site…it is a fake site where a lot of the TRUTH about Bev Harris’ antics is told.
To Bev with love.
http://sacxtra.com/images/bbv.org.jpg
All one has to do is look at the demographics and ethnicity of the voters who will be discouraged from voting. Election fraud and not voter fraud is what is going on and what went on in 2000 and 2004.
Indiana can join Michighan and Florida in the “votes dont count line.”
There is evidently big turnout in both Indiana and NC … good for the people.
Make it hard for them to throw the ’08 election.
Reply to DBran #4.
Your argument is right on the money. Indiana has a population of 6.3 million with 5.4 million register voters. The problem is, of the 6.3 million, only 4.73 million are of voting age (2006 census records show 25% are under age 18). The national average for those who will register to vote was 72% in 2004. That means that Indiana’s voting rolls should be much closer to 3.4 million, not 5.4 million.
With current registrations at 4.9 million, Indiana’s voter rolls are no where near accurate.
Fair elections include accurate voter rolls.
naschkatze #11
“This voter ID law was hurried in to effect by the SCOTUS to benefit Hillary Clinton in the Indiana primary.”
This law was used in the 2006 Indiana General Election, how is this now a “hurried” law?
From the article,
“That’s a different concern, but still very much a concern. At least, in Indiana (I think), it does no good to go in and alter a Democrat registration to make it Republican, because Republicans can vote in the Democratic primary. I’m not sure it goes the other way though.”
Since Indiana does not register voters by party, how would someone “alter a Democrat registration to make it Republican”?
Indiana is an open primary state. A voter can asked for a primary ballot for either party.
“Think about this: You don’t have to purge if you can just go in and alter a bunch of spellings, or addresses.”
This argument is not based in fact. Indiana’s ID law does not require correct address on the ID.
The Indiana SoS website says the id must have a photo, be current, have the voter’s name, and be issued by Indiana or the Federal Government. No where does it state that it must have the correct address.
An ID can hardly “be current” if it does not have the correct address on it Mark, and if anyone can ask for the ballot from any party, do you mean to imply that all that caterwauling about Democrats registering aliens and/or dead people is really Republicans requesting Democratic ballots for their perfidy?
Have you thought any of this through?
Agent 99, comment #35
“An ID can hardly “be current” if it does not have the correct address”.
How does a previous address change the expiration date on an ID card??
The fact is, it doesn’t. I pointed out, the Indiana SoS website does not support the argument that an ID is required to have a current address.
I voted in Indiana today, along with several members of my family. I can tell you for a fact that the polls accepted a photo ID with a previous address. They were concerned with the expiration date, not the address on the ID.
Whoever is trying to pass the “current address” is required as fact has not properly educated him/herself on the facts. They are flat out wrong.
As to “crossover voting”. Indiana doesn’t register voters by party. A voter can ask for either ballot. Having worked elections, I have seen primaries in the past where voters overwhelming decided to vote in one party’s primary over another’s. I am sure that happened today all over Indiana.
The bottom line is that the elections were stolen in 2000 and 2004. No one wants McCain. No one wants war. This is not a bitterly divided country. The people in charge right now either need to flee to Argentina or be prosecuted.
Obama is going to have to be held accountable. The War Industry must be whittled down by 90%. We need 100% disclosure and accountability with everything.
We need more protests. If McCain is cheated in, then f#!@ it, time to take everything up much more than a notch.
2006 was a big letdown. We are really going to have to hit the streets. Students, Professors, Union leaders, all extra-governmental groups need to mobilize to take back this country.
No more war. No more corruption.