11-7-06: What to expect -- and look f...

Thread Last Poster Posts Pages Last Post   Start New Thread

Author Message   Bev Harris Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Site_admin Post Number: 113 Registered: 10-2006 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 5 (A keeper?) Posted on Monday, November 6, 2006 - 6:08 pm:        The best defense is a good offense, so VOTE! Now is not the time to retreat. Vote, and then find evidence to tell the story of what's really happening in U.S. elections. Things may look relatively smooth on election day, but the real fun begins after the polls close. That's when we see a lot of strange things. Look for: - Missing memory cards -- and remember, a memory card is a BALLOT BOX. This happens every election, to weird shrugs by election officials. About 70 ballot boxes went missing in Cuyahoga County during the May primary; a bunch went missing in Detroit last spring, and they've gone missing in places like Dekalb County Georgia, and various other locations. This is nothing to shrug about. Remember when a single ballot box was missing in Florida in the 2000 election? Everyone was going crazy, but now, you have dozens and dozens of these memory cards, cartridges, and "PEBs" -- all are small digital ballots boxes -- they are going missing. Very troubling. Watch for it. See if you can spot it. Report it! - Phantom votes -- this is when you have more votes than voters. There were about 100,000 more votes than voters in Tarrant County Texas during the primary, and more votes than voters in Ohio locations in 2004. What to look for: Do a quick check of the number of registered voters and compare with the number of votes that show up. Bizarre anomalies appear almost every election. Stage 2 is comparing the number of sign-ins in the pollbook with the number of votes that show up. - Sometimes you see disappearing votes. The number of votes goes DOWN while the number of precincts counted goes UP. This happened in Mohave County Arizona in the 2004 primary, and in Memphis in the Aug. 2006 primary. Alert watchers of county Web results often spot this and capture it in screen saves. What to do: Assign someone to capture screen shots each time the totals are updated and check for disappearing votes. - Obstructed vote counting -- we often see obstructions to being able to see the vote counting, even beyond the obstruction of counting inside a black box. In San Diego in 2005, a member of the Black Box Voting board of directors, Jim March, was arrested for trying to view the vote counting. I myself was surrounded by six members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department when I had the audacity to ask if I could view the vote counting there, which was taking place in a room no one could see. We expect to get many reports from citizens who are not allowed to view vote counting. If you are obstructed from viewing the central tally process, report it. - In the 10 days following the election, you can expect to see many unusual things pop up in the public records that are obtained by candidates. Of particular interest are the "event logs" that you get from Microsoft Windows, which runs most of the tallying software. This can show extra programs being run. Also of great interest are the voting machine event logs, which can show crazy voting dates -- like in Palm Beach County in 2004, where more than 4 dozen voting machines had votes time and date-stamped weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night, and Volusia County Florida in the same election, where a machine had votes date-stamped more than 10,000 years in the future. In San Diego in the June 2006 primary, the voting system event log shows that it dialed out to Diebold at 9:31 pm during the middle of its counting. - We also anticipate many peculiarities with provisional votes, extra optional paper ballot votes, absentee votes and various obstructions to voting around the country. - Another thing we look for is strange statistical patterns, like voting machines from one manufacturer giving results different from all the others, or one type of machine giving discrepant results, as happened in New Mexico in 2004. We saw three candidates in a row get 18,181 votes in Comal County Texas and one district in Minnesota had all the minor party candidates get the same vote percentage -- despite very big differences in how well known the candidates were. On election day itself, we'll see vote-flipping, where people vote for one candidate and another one's name pops up. And we'll see many other unusual things. I expect surprising new problems, like the new electronic poll books having problems finding themselves, and voting machines that don't match themselves (for example, having different results on their paper tape than they do on their screens). Document. Think photos, videos, and most of all, cleverly constructed requests for documents. You have the right to obtain a copy of just about any document you can think of, as long as it exists. Go hunting. See what you find. When you find important information, propagate it. Don't just call it into one place, but email it, send it to bloggers, give it to reporters, provide it to public officials. We want to improve elections, but first we need to make a solid, indisputable case. And to do that, we all need to get into action. Use your own common sense. Document. Propagate. Then push solutions through for true ciizen oversight. Now is your chance to take back your electoral process!   Russell Novkov Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Rnovkov Post Number: 145 Registered: 02-2006 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Monday, November 6, 2006 - 8:59 pm:        We do have a right to speak up. Russell J. Novkov   Uploader Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Uploader Post Number: 12 Registered: 09-2006 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 1 (A keeper?) Posted on Monday, November 6, 2006 - 11:39 pm:        Jim March here posting on somebody else's computer and a utility account. One key thing in many states is that if a voter is told to vote provisionally and does so, they do -=NOT=- sign the pollbook. This is the case in AZ and I believe many other states. What can happen is, crooked pollworkers can then shred the provisional ballot later (which isn't stuck in the usual ballot box) and substitute a real ballot into the ballot box later, because the number of people signing the poll roster will match the number of ballots in the box. Yes, this requires a pollworker board united in some sort of fairly frenzied ideology. But it CAN happen and it's been documented. Picture some fairly radical group specifically recruiting pollworker volunteers from within their own org. If they can get enough people into the process, by dumb luck some precincts will be 100% whatever-it-is. Look for any sign of "total ideologial unity" within pollworker boards. That's not supposed to happen and the more radical the ideology, the scarier it is...   Jim March Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Jimmarch Post Number: 116 Registered: 05-2006 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 9:47 am:        Just confirming that was me .   Monica N. Striplin Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Mstriplin Post Number: 1 Registered: 11-2006 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 12:25 pm:        Me and my mother contacted the Recorder of Elections in Phoenix, Arizona, because we voted using early mail-in ballots, and after mailing the ballots, we started receiving calls from the Democratic party stating that as of November 1st we had not returned our ballots to the County Recorder, however we mailed them on October 25th. When we called the recorder of elections, they simply say the ballots have been received, but not when or whether they've been counted. What should we do? Should we go and vote again, or should we wait until after the elections, as directed by individuals in the recorder's office? Or should we file a complaint?   Len Rideout Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Rideout Post Number: 5 Registered: 06-2006 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 3:48 pm:        Monica, At this point, I see no reason to doubt the word of the recorder of elections that your ballots have been received. After the rush of Election Day, they may be able to pull your ballots and prove this to you. Of course, I am an infrequent poster to this blog. Maybe others will disagree with my assessment. Len Rideout Concord, MA   Jim March Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Jimmarch Post Number: 117 Registered: 05-2006 Best of Black Box? N/A Votes: 0 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 5:56 pm:        I'm in Pima County right now, and I've just asked some people in Democratic circles what's going on. The recorder's offices in Pima and Maricopa (Phoenix area) counties are backed up on reporting "what's come in" but the votes have come in and been processed. That's what's being told to party officials.   Janine L. Busald Voting Rights Forum Participant Username: Janine_b Post Number: 1 Registered: 11-2006 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 2 (A keeper?) Posted on Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 1:09 am:        I don't know if this is exactly the right place for this, but I'm so frustrated right now that I'm posting this anywhere I can in hopes of getting the message out to anyone and everyone who will listen and DO something about it. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi is saying that impeachment is off the table! She claims the American people don't want impeachment. Is she nuts?!? As I understand it, that's exactly what a majority of the American people do want! Now that we have a Democratic Congress, they need to launch investigations into Republican corruption that lead us into the war in Iraq and torture, Cheney shot someone in the face, signing statements, the lifting of habaes corpus, as well as some scandals right here at home. Those investigations are going to lead to impeachment, or they should if the Democrats have any backbone this time and if the people stand up and insist on it, they will have spines. The Republicans have committed heinous crimes and they need to be brought to justice on it. If the Democrats don't have any intention of bringing them to justice on their own, then we the People need to MAKE them bring the Republicans to justice. Start letter-writing, fax-sending, and phone-calling campaigns to your Democratic congressional leaders and ALL Democratic congressional leaders, both incumbent and newly-elected, to let them know how you feel and insist on investigations leading to impeachment. PLEASE, if you feel as strongly about this as I do, PLEASE notify your Democratic congressional leaders to do the right thing and not let the Republicans off scott free. Our Constitution is hanging by a very thin thread. It is up to us, the People, to save it. We can't sit by and expect Congress to save it for us. They won't do it, they are more concerned about their careers than they are about the Constitution. We, the People, have to make Congress do our bidding; it's what we elected them to do. But we can't just cast our votes and sit back and leave the rest to them. Now that we have them in office, we have to be in their faces and make sure they know what we want them to do and then make sure they DO it. They need to be frequently reminded that they are there to serve us, to carry out our will, not their own agendas and personal wills. Only by our being continually in their faces will they know and not be able to forget what we want them to do. Democracy is not free! The Founding Fathers and Patriots worked their butts off, and some even gave their lives, to earn the right to Democracy in the first place in this country. Now we have to do our part and work our butts off and be willing to give our very lives if necessary to save this Democracy for the generations yet to come. Don't leave it to them to do the work, there may not be anything left for them to do if we don't do it now. Sincerely, JanineB janineb@humboldt1.com http://the-holistic-life.blogspot.com

Add Your Message Here Post: -Color- Black Red Green Blue Yellow Purple Orange Cyan Gray White -Font- Arial Courier Symbol Times Verdana -Size- Smallest (-2) Small (-1) Normal Large (+1) Largest (+2) Username: Posting Information: This is a private posting area. Only registered users and moderators may post messages here. Password: Options: Enable HTML code in message Automatically activate URLs in message Action:

All original content on this website is Copyright (c) 2008-2009 by Black Box Voting. All rights reserved.
Forums powered by Discus Professional - www.discusware.com.
Original site and logo design is by Andy Markley - art101.com.