    
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 11475
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 4 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2012 - 8:00 am: | 
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By Bev Harris
The genius of democracy is dispersed public control.
As we saw in Iowa when alert public citizens captured evidence of the actual vote count BEFORE it was reported by a centralized state committee, the state Republican Party and the news media initially claimed victory for the wrong winner. They only corrected this mis-call two weeks later, buying the favored candidate half a month of fund raising prowess and prestige.
In South Carolina, 100% of election results will be redirected through a private Barcelona, Spain-owned company, Scytl/SOE Software, before being reported to the public.
There is only one way to immediately find out whether Scytl/SOE reported the right results*, and that is for members of the public to capture evidence of reported precinct results when polls close tonight. Think of it as a giant neighborhood watch.
Precinct results should be posted at each polling site. In addition, during poll closing the public has a right to be in the polling place watching and videotaping what goes on.
Here is a four-minute video showing exactly what to do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3_xFb1sWKU
By the way, the results will be published here:
http://www.enr-scvotes.org/SC/36831/63425/en/select-county.html
Compare photos of what you capture at polling places to the results reported at the above link.
For computer buffs, there's another thing you can do. (The above steps are easy and can be done by anyone.) But for tech buffs, you can download multiple times during the evening, and there are even Web snapshot tools to expedite this. It is not uncommon to see results change or disappear midstream.
In Broward County FL, the results reported by Scytl-owned SOE Software in 2008 showed an entire candidate, who was winning, disappear into vapor in the middle of the count, and in Hillsborough County FL and Dallas County TX, votes that had been reported began to disappear.
The way to see this is to download "time slices" -- snapshots at various points in time, and compare them. More information for those of you who like technical stuff is available in the Black Box Voting Tool Kit - http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.pdf
Follow Black Box Voting for further developments.
* Well, you have to put an asterisk alongside "the right results" because in South Carolinia you get a two-fer. Results could be incorrect at either end of the pipeline -- from the ES&S iVotronic paperless touchscreen voting machines, which have a history of incorrect totals, or from the private results reporting firm Scytl/SOE Software, which has centralized control over what gets reported. |
