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Board Administrator
Username: admin
Post Number: 264
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 62 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 5:44 am: | 
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An update on the Black Box Voting “Help America Audit” project:
This is the second of three short updates for donors, and it pertains to computer analysis and audits. The third update is about our “Activate the Eagles” program for empowering volunteers.
HELP AMERICA AUDIT:
The news coming out of Ohio -- vote suppression and punch card problems (Triad) -- is
fascinating. As you know if you have been following this site, we are a nonpartisan 501c(3) organization and are prohibited by law from becoming involved in recounts or partisan politics. You can expect more news from Ohio, especially in the areas of punch card integrity and vote suppression.
You can follow the latest breaking news in a new section on our Web site: Click “News Stories” at this link - http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/discus.cgi
As you will see, vote suppression and punch card issues in Ohio, though significant, are only a small part of problems with elections.
Our voting system is not transparent (even if punch cards go away and we deal more effectively with suppression). To date, almost nowhere have the elections held on optical scan and touch screen machines really been audited. Citizens are finding their questions surprisingly unwelcome in too many places.
The pain of millions of Americans, who were forced to vote on paperless touch-screens against their will, who have no idea if their provisional ballot was counted, who wonder whether the central tabulators lost or altered their optical scan ballot vote, whose voter registration was lost in the computer, who were not allowed to watch or ask questions, either during voting machine purchase or while votes were being tabulated, will not be go away simply by doing investigations into Triad voting systems (a punch card manufacturer that is being phased out) in Ohio.
What we need is REAL electoral reform, so that all votes, everywhere, for all positions, are cast and counted accurately. That is the mission of Black Box Voting. We are in it for the long haul, and our overall mission is to force accountability and transparency back into our electoral system, on both local and national levels. Now the real work begins:
THE “HELP AMERICA AUDIT” CAMPAIGN
On Election Night, Nov 2, 2004, Black Box Voting sent out a massive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. What we requested were audit documents – internal logs from the voting machines themselves, in every county in America.
We quickly learned that county officials were even less familiar with their own audit logs than we were.
- Many thought their systems had no audit logs (but the logs are required by the FEC).
- Some thought their audit logs were a proprietary secret (but the logs are a public record).
- Many officials refused to provide any records until after the election was a) certified b)
recounted, c) their staff had taken a vacation and d) after the New Year.
- Many more officials "lost" or "never received" the request (even after we sent it three times and, in the case of Duval County Florida, also hand delivered it).
Serving Palm Beach County's Theresa LePore with a lawsuit for obstructing records has helped persuade officials to cooperate, but the next big push for volunteers will be telephone follow up to nudge officials into coming up with the goods. Most officials provide only part of the request, without explanation, so follow up is also needed to collect the full set of documents.
STATUS OF CURRENT ACTIONS:
Our first audit, Volusia County Florida, using the documents we received from our Nov. 2 request, resulted in a lawsuit seeking to set aside the election in that county due to missing records and discrepancies. We are still working on Volusia County.
Our second audit, Palm Beach County, Florida, resulted in a lawsuit against Theresa LePore (of butterfly ballot fame in the 2000 election) for unlawfully withholding records. She has still refused to part with a large part of the records, and we are still fighting to get them. We will win this fight; the question is, how long can she delay.
Our third audit, Lucas County, Ohio, is our first “open source” public audit. We have posted internal logs for the Diebold optical scan voting machines online. If you have skills with computer records, or auditing, please join us in the effort. You can find the Lucas County audit on this week’s featured forum:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/discus.cgi
Our fourth audit is nationwide in scope, and pertains to auditing various documents to identify the remote access setup for the Diebold central tabulator, which was used in 30 states, and counted at least 40 million votes on Nov. 2. We have posted a number of documents about this, which you can also find in the forum workspace at the above link.
We are learning that we have to put one more significant piece in place, in order to make public, "open source" auditing work: We will need to develop guidelines on election procedures and audit methods for those who are analyzing the records.
Most people have focused on statistical analysis, which is helpful as a red flag.
Auditing, though, is the act of comparing independent sets of records to see if they match. In order to do a comparison, you need to know what records exist and what information each record contains. Then you need to be clever about selecting the most productive spot-check items, and that requires some knowledge of election procedures and the ability to think like a bad guy.
We'll be publishing "How to Audit" guidelines as we continue with Help America Audit. These will continue to evolve for at least a year, as we learn more about the various logs for each manufacturer and learn more about weaknesses in election procedures.
In order to activate a truly “open source” audit, we first had to beef up our Web site security and capacity. That is in progress. We have added two new domains: bbvdocs.org, which will be a gigantic document repository, and bbvforums.org, which provides a workspace for citizens who wish to help bring back transparent, accountable elections.
We also got a whole new look – thanks to the donated talents of Andy Markley, at Art101.com – and our Web site, http://www.blackboxvoting.org, is undergoing a transformation that will make it easier to navigate and find information.
Another piece of infrastructure needed for “Help America Audit” is a specific document scanner that can convert paper computer logs into text files, and burn them to CD, so we can upload them to the Web for open source audits. Before the election, with almost no funding, we were working out of our homes (Actually, more accurately: We were working out of Motel 6's across the country).
During the election, we had a one-month donation of office space. We are now arranging for modest but more permanent space, and we need that to house the document scanner and computers.
During the next two weeks, we will begin converting thousands of pages of documents into Internet-friendly form, and we will start posting them online.
You may remember a group called Judicial Watch, who did the hand recount of Florida in 2000. As you’ll recall, they were not finished in 10 days, or even 30 days. The project we have undertaken is large, but of critical importance, and will continue throughout 2005. The information we are obtaining will be used in court and to guide corrective legislation.
We have already targeted additional locations for more auditing. These locations include:
Cuyahoga County, Ohio
Snohomish County, Washington
Pima County, Arizona
Brevard, Duval, Broward, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Orange, and Miami-Dade counties in Florida
Several counties in New Mexico
El Paso, Collin, and Comal counties in Texas
San Bernardino, Riverside, Alameda, Kern, and Los Angeles counties in California
We are also following up on several FOIA requests pertaining to the actions of members of NASED and the ITA certifiers.
We do need your continued participation. Please become a part of the action -- and if all this auditing sounds daunting, never fear: You will find many different kinds of volunteer actions, to suit your temperament, on the Black Box Voting (.ORG) Web site. The next e-mail, “Activating the Eagles,” will deal with that.
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