Guest Blogged by David Safier of Blog for Arizona
If a judge’s ruling in Pima County, Arizona, stands, ballots from the long-contested 2006 Regional Transit Authority (RTA) election will be destroyed, and there will never be a definitive answer as to whether or not the election may have been rigged, as critics have charged.
It’s too late for the actual results of the election to be changed, but knowing whether the election was tampered with is critical to guaranteeing the integrity of future elections, according to local Election Integrity advocates who won a landmark lawsuit, resulting in the unprecedented release of terrabytes of Diebold databases. The databases, containing information on how voters voted, were found by the judge in the suit, to be public records.
Yet, the same people who ran the ’06 RTA election are still in charge of elections in Pima County, and the same election software is still in place. If one election was rigged, there is little stopping them from rigging others in the future.
The RTA bond measure was reportedly passed by voters in 2006, but Pima County Democrats and Libertarians believe there is substantial evidence the measure actually went down and the results were flipped in the vote counting computer. The optical-scan paper ballots themselves have never actually been counted. They’re sitting in sealed boxes in the County Treasurer’s office, and may soon be destroyed. The Democrats and Libertarians went to court last month, asking the judge to save the ballots, so they may actually be counted in the future.
In his ruling, however, Judge Charles Harrington’s claims he has no jurisdiction in the matter…
Attorney Bill Risner, a veteran of many election integrity battles (he won the earlier case that resulted in the election databases being released to the political parties), argued the case for saving the ballots. Because Arizona law says an election has to be challenged within five days, he didn’t ask that the RTA measure be overturned if the ballots show the results were rigged. He knows the results will stand even if there is absolute proof of election tabulation fraud.
Instead, Risner argued that the reason to save, then count the ballots is to provide “prospective relief for the next election.” If fraud is discovered, he noted, the county will be forced to create more intensive safeguards in its elections division.
Three groups are opposing the Democrats and Libertarians: Pima County, which is in charge of the elections; the County Treasurer, who has the ballots in her possession; and the County Republican Party, which for some reason believes it has a stake in making sure the ballots are destroyed.
Risner said the court should begin with the assumption that the election was rigged and counting the ballots would reveal the fraud. That would make it the court’s duty, he argued, to rule that the ballots are saved so the rigging, if it occurred, can be uncovered.
The County’s attorney argued that, even if the RTA election was rigged, enough safeguards have been put into place in the past two years that it can never happen again.
(While it’s true that the Democratic Party’s Election Integrity Committee worked with the County to create procedures to protect the ballots and the transmission of votes from the polling booths to the vote counting computer, none of the procedures would stop an election from being stolen if election officials are intent on rigging the results in the final computer vote count.)
A truly bizarre argument came from the Treasurer’s attorney, who said, if the election were rigged, we’re better off not knowing the truth, since that would destroy the credibility of the work being done with the RTA bond money. “It’s inappropriate to do something that would have such a dramatic effect,” he said.
Even though the Republican’s lawyer isn’t scheduled to present arguments until a court date in late February, the judge made his decision, asserting that he has no jurisdiction over the matter.
Risner plans to file a motion to reconsider with the judge. If that isn’t successful, he plans to appeal the judge’s decision and will ask that the ballots be preserved pending the appeal.
A few interesting wrinkles to the story:
- The Democratic Party supported the RTA bond measure, so the party’s quest to count the ballots has nothing to do with wanting the measure overturned.
- Though Pima County has plenty of lawyers of its own, it hired outside lawyers for the County and the Treasurer to argue the case. Risner believes the reason is, the county lawyers may know things that would make it difficult for them to argue for destruction of the ballots. “The County Attorney’s office…wants to get separation from the matter,” he said.
- The State Attorney General has an open criminal investigation on the RTA elections, and he can demand that the ballots be counted at any time, though he has remained silent on the counting issue. That’s one reason Risner thinks the judge doesn’t want to touch the issue of the ballots. “Judges view political cases as a hot rock,” Risner said. “They really want to hand it to someone else.” (Risner and other local EI advocates are seen confronting AG Terry Goddard about that, at a public meeting, in this video.)
- John Brakey, head of Arizona’s election watchdog group Audit AZ, who has worked closely with Risner and with the County Democratic Party, has nothing but praise for the work Risner has done and continues to do. “Because of Bill,” Brakey said, “we’re looking at issues no one else in the country has been able to look at.”
Unvalidated on the front end. With all recourse dissolved eventually through red tape.
Three years later, these genius’s destroy the ballots, close the loop, leaving it all unvalidated on the back end.
Genius for those on the inside. Representation denied for those on the outside. Power, and job security, leadership guaranteed for those on the inside, while cops get used against any that question things from the outside.
And so it continues, never a honest sanity check of electronic vote tabulation devices. (Electronic Voting Machines) And nothing to prevent it happening again.
It’s insane the people accept the fact that databases get hacked, and personal account information spewed all over, or networks brought down by exploits, hardware failures from bad parts, and corruption from officials, yet somehow when dealing with elections, these electronic vote tabulation devices (Electronic Voting Machines) have less than a week uptime (your worm, trojan, bho, and virus infected windows box has more uptime!) are supposed to be the ultimate authority. When not one time (feel free to correct me) were their 100% results compared 100% to the paper ballots when questions or anomalies arise.
And yet still this broken system is not national, if not international headline news.
Somehow there has to be a way to make these vendors, and their friends–our officials–prove their electronic crap works as opposed to us proving they don’t with our own millions of dollars to fund it. And it can’t be testing that’s limited by so many rules that the test can’t be done. Even still where any testing is done, and the results show the electronic vote tabulation devices (Electronic Voting Machines) are crap, these crap machines remain.
While any ordinary working families watching their network news on their TV at 5PM, would think 2006 elections were done and over, the reality is they were only made to appear over once the corporate fascist media’s accredited journalists turned their $100k cameras away from the details.
These ballots should not be destroyed, instead they (and all paper ballots) should be used to destroy these vendors.
The only upside I see now, is with so many unemployed, there should be an unending supply of people should we force our officials to hand count paper ballots with public oversight.
But alas, the forces that be, like a thousand cuts, drag our paper ballots out into the darkness.
It’s exactly backwards.
This is a slam-dunk case of election malfeasance, basically verified by the move by insiders to destroy the ballots.
Cui Bono?
(Who benefits?)
That answers the question of guilt perfectly.
If there is nothing to hide, then there is no reason to destroy the ballots.
Obviously there IS something to hide.
Very black & white case here—No areas
of grey at all.
And by destroying the ballots teh Election Industry can continue the Lie:
There has never been a DOCUMENTED cases of fraud committed with electronic voting machines.
Destroy what few documents the black boxes produce and destroy the objected (non-software based records) and you are left with no way to document fraud did or did not happen.
Ageain the moment these ballots are destroyed the Election Technology Council (Election industry lobbists) will tout the fact that the settlement of the RTA case demonstrates once again
There has never been a DOCUMENTED cases of fraud committed with electronic voting machines.
And here in TN, where, after 4 years work, our General ASSembly finally passed a paper ballot bill last year – which was soooo important that they passed it nearly unanimously, but not important enough to implement it for the Nov. ’08 election – the Republicans won EVERY single contested seat and took over control of the state for the first time in forever. Amazing how they did that, and now that they’re in charge they intend to “Re-visit” the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act this spring… Wonder what needs to be changed? How ’bout the provision that calls for random audits of the paper ballots and the scanner machines? That’s what a letter to the editor writer proposed within days of the November election.
Indeed, we need to be ever vigilant
shw
Technical analysis of the election databases uncovered unprecedented anomalies that clearly show that the 2006 RTA election was manipulated. Conveniently, NO backup of the database was saved and set aside on election night Tuesday 16th of May 2006 which is standard practice. Not until May 19th at 5:01 pm (three days later) was the election-night database first backed up and saved. Comparison of the database from the May 19th and another database saved on Saturday May 20th reveals the many discrepancies – among these, we see precincts where replacement memory card data was fed in that either added to the vote totals or in some cases subtracted ballots. Ballot purging can’t happen without a significant paper trail, which is nowhere in evidence. What we can’t see clearly is what happens to the database between 16th at 4pm and the 19th at 5pm. The audit log only records when you go through the GEMS front door. However, the backdoor is MS-Access, and Ted Downing finding the MS-Access manual on election night next to the central tabulator and then later Bill Risner found out that the election department owns a Cropscanner – a known burglar tool to illegally program Diebold precinct memory cards. (Link to video on how to do that:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8186883351933387074
What this all adds up to is this: a very high failure rate of memory cards would be the only thing that could legitimately explain all these uploads. Failure rates this high should have caused the county to blame Diebold – but they didn’t. Why? Because it appears to be self-inflicted and they knew it! Something was going wrong. We know from the audit logs that the re-uploads of memory cards started fast and furious after 11:00pm on election night, yet eyewitness observers say they went home between 10:30pm and 11pm because “everything was winding downâ€. Once they left, things wound back up again per the logs.
The other fly in the ointment is that the Oro Valley town council race was nail-biter close – the final official difference between winner and loser was three votes. They knew it was close and they knew it would trigger a mandatory recount. Faced with problems likely caused by amateur tampering with memory cards and/or the central tabulator database, they tweaked votes and ballots up and down in various precincts to make the results balance. We know the tweaking was politically motivated because of the memory cards reloaded after the main body were done, all 22 of the Oro Valley memory cards were affected. A technical glitch wouldn’t focus so heavily on Oro Valley but hand-repairing the Oro Valley recount certainly would.
Upshot: we don’t think this would have been caught at all except for the Oro Valley race being so close. That caused them to scramble to clean up the data by hand, and they left traces of tampering while doing so. This is also likely why they stopped taking snapshots of the progress of the election between the 16th and 19th, to give them time to do the cleanup. And it’s that cleanup effort that screams out from the logs and casts doubt on this entire election, including the RTA race.
These and many other facts lead AUDIT-AZ to believe that the RTA election was likely stolen.
Furthermore, last week, Tom Ryan PhD a member of the Pima County Election Integrity Commission, submitted to the commission a report titled “Anomalies in the GEMS databases from the May 16, 2006 Bond Electionâ€Link to report:
http://www.fatallyflawedthemovie.com/pages/orocoverup.html
From the first trial (we won) with Judge Michael Miller; Excerpts from Memorandum, Declaration and Exhibits and these are just four examples of many we have:
I. iBeta reported to the Arizona General: “During testing it was discovered that the GEMS software exhibits fundamental security flaws that make definitive validation of data impossible due to ease of data and log manipulation.†Link
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/files/iBeta_report.pdf
II. The county’s lawyer, Pima County Chief Civil Deputy Christopher Straub, explained in his opening statement that the GEMS software is not secure. “The databases themselves are not secured. We know that and we agree they can be altered using Microsoft Access.†(Opening Statement, Trial Transcript, Dec. 4, 2007, Christopher Straub, “Because it can be easily manipulated, the bottom line is in this whole thing is we’re only going to catch stupid people, all right, because one could also alter the audit logs. One could do anything.â€
III. David Jefferson, Ph.D.: “The security mechanisms that are there are ‘in general hopelessly inadequate to prevent manipulation of ballot records or vote totals by anyone with even a very short period of access to the system. …â€
IV. California Secretary of State Office Source Code Review of the Diebold Voting System: “Our analysis shows the technological controls in the Diebold software do not provide sufficient security to guarantee a trustworthy election. The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes.â€
• Link to Judge Harrington’s decision: http://www.fatallyflawedthemovie.com/media/Harrington%20Ruling.pdf
• Link to Motion to Reconsider by Bill Risner filed 2/4/09:
http://www.fatallyflawedthemov…..2_4_09.pdf
Link to Motion to Reconsider by Bill Risner filed 2/4/09:
http://www.fatallyflawedthemovie.com/media/Final%20-%20Motion%20for%20Reconsideration%20filed%202_4_09.pdf
Argh. This sucks! Sucks! Goddamn it! Between this and the Feeney decision, it seems like there will never be ANY accountability. Steal with impunity, everyone. Consequences? It is to laugh.