What exactly was Michael Barbian doing?

From Wired News, who have been terrific in covering the recount/irregularity stories...

As a statewide election recount got underway in Ohio last week, a Democratic congressman called on the FBI to impound vote-tabulating computers in at least one county and investigate suspicions of election tampering in the state.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee, sought the investigation after an Ohio election official disclosed in an affidavit (.pdf) that an employee of Triad Governmental Systems, the company that wrote voting software used with punch-card machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties, dismantled Hocking County's tabulation computer days before the recount and "put a patch on it."

Conyers called the action "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering." A spokesman for the Green Party, one of the parties requesting the recount, called it "compelling evidence" of deliberate tampering. A public hearing in Ohio on Monday will determine if there is cause for an investigation.

But Sherole Eaton, a Democrat and the deputy director of elections for Hocking County who wrote the affidavit, said her words have been blown out of proportion. She doesn't think Triad tampered with the votes and is a little angry that the Green Party and others have spun her words to imply that they did.

Eaton's story came to light only when members of the Green Party contacted her before the recount to discuss the procedures and asked who had access to the counting software. When Eaton mentioned Triad's recent visit, the Green Party took the information to Conyers and presented it at an ad hoc Judicial Committee hearing in Ohio as evidence of possible vote tampering.

Eaton said that after the Green Party started spreading the information around, she decided to write the affidavit to get her account on record so that it would not be distorted or misinterpreted.

Doug Jones, Iowa's chief examiner of voting equipment and a computer scientist at the University of Iowa who has been a leading critic of electronic voting machines, said the matter was less likely a case of election tampering than poor election procedures and oversight. But he added that even if no one tampered with votes, the fact that someone had unsupervised access to tabulating equipment before the recount was a breach of security procedures and might even violate Ohio election law.

"The tabulating room should be viewed as a secure computer systems site where nobody goes in there unsupervised, but the affidavit suggests there was no supervision in the tabulating room," Jones said. He said that suspicions of tampering are just as destructive to the integrity of an election as actual tampering and laws prohibiting unsupervised access to voting equipment should be enforced.

According to Eaton's affidavit, Michael Barbian, a technician for Triad, called Eaton on Dec. 10 to say he'd be coming to the office to "check out" the elections computer before the recount Dec. 14. When he arrived to examine the machine, a 14-year-old Dell PC, the computer wouldn't boot up. Barbian told Eaton the computer's internal battery was dead and that "stored information" on it was "gone."

Barbian told Eaton he "could put a patch on" the computer and "proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get information" to put into the computer. When the computer was fixed, Barbian asked Eaton which precinct the county planned to hand-count, then returned to the tabulating room. When he came out again, he said the computer was ready and told them to reboot it once to reset the internal clock, then leave it on so the battery could recharge.

Voting activists have seized the detail about the "patch" and the precinct as proof that Barbian rigged the machine. Under Ohio's recount law, a county must first hand-count 3 percent of ballots and then run them through a machine count. If the hand tally matches the machine tally, the county can recount the remaining ballots by machine only. But if the hand and machine counts differ, the county must hand-count all ballots.

So activists say Barbian asked about the precinct so he could set the machine to record only those ballots correctly, while tampering with votes in other precincts.

Hocking completed its recount Wednesday, and the results differed from the certified results by only three votes. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry picked up an additional vote each when pregnant chads fell out of two ballots that had previously shown no vote in the presidential race. A second extra vote went to Kerry from a previously uncounted absentee ballot. Bush won Hocking County with 6,935 votes to John Kerry's 6,173.

In the end, the county hand-counted a different precinct from the one Eaton told Barbian it would count. The county changed the precinct after members of the Green Party expressed concern that Barbian knew which precinct was planned. The results of that precinct matched the original certified results.

Brett Rapp, president of Triad, said Barbian visited the Hocking County elections office before the recount because the state had mandated that only the presidential race would be recounted and Barbian had to set up the computer to count and report only that race on punch cards.

What exactly was Michael Barbian doing?

From Wired News, who have been terrific in covering the recount/irregularity stories...

As a statewide election recount got underway in Ohio last week, a Democratic congressman called on the FBI to impound vote-tabulating computers in at least one county and investigate suspicions of election tampering in the state.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), ranking Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee, sought the investigation after an Ohio election official disclosed in an affidavit (.pdf) that an employee of Triad Governmental Systems, the company that wrote voting software used with punch-card machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties, dismantled Hocking County's tabulation computer days before the recount and "put a patch on it."

Conyers called the action "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering." A spokesman for the Green Party, one of the parties requesting the recount, called it "compelling evidence" of deliberate tampering. A public hearing in Ohio on Monday will determine if there is cause for an investigation.

But Sherole Eaton, a Democrat and the deputy director of elections for Hocking County who wrote the affidavit, said her words have been blown out of proportion. She doesn't think Triad tampered with the votes and is a little angry that the Green Party and others have spun her words to imply that they did.

Eaton's story came to light only when members of the Green Party contacted her before the recount to discuss the procedures and asked who had access to the counting software. When Eaton mentioned Triad's recent visit, the Green Party took the information to Conyers and presented it at an ad hoc Judicial Committee hearing in Ohio as evidence of possible vote tampering.

Eaton said that after the Green Party started spreading the information around, she decided to write the affidavit to get her account on record so that it would not be distorted or misinterpreted.

Doug Jones, Iowa's chief examiner of voting equipment and a computer scientist at the University of Iowa who has been a leading critic of electronic voting machines, said the matter was less likely a case of election tampering than poor election procedures and oversight. But he added that even if no one tampered with votes, the fact that someone had unsupervised access to tabulating equipment before the recount was a breach of security procedures and might even violate Ohio election law.

"The tabulating room should be viewed as a secure computer systems site where nobody goes in there unsupervised, but the affidavit suggests there was no supervision in the tabulating room," Jones said. He said that suspicions of tampering are just as destructive to the integrity of an election as actual tampering and laws prohibiting unsupervised access to voting equipment should be enforced.

According to Eaton's affidavit, Michael Barbian, a technician for Triad, called Eaton on Dec. 10 to say he'd be coming to the office to "check out" the elections computer before the recount Dec. 14. When he arrived to examine the machine, a 14-year-old Dell PC, the computer wouldn't boot up. Barbian told Eaton the computer's internal battery was dead and that "stored information" on it was "gone."

Barbian told Eaton he "could put a patch on" the computer and "proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get information" to put into the computer. When the computer was fixed, Barbian asked Eaton which precinct the county planned to hand-count, then returned to the tabulating room. When he came out again, he said the computer was ready and told them to reboot it once to reset the internal clock, then leave it on so the battery could recharge.

Voting activists have seized the detail about the "patch" and the precinct as proof that Barbian rigged the machine. Under Ohio's recount law, a county must first hand-count 3 percent of ballots and then run them through a machine count. If the hand tally matches the machine tally, the county can recount the remaining ballots by machine only. But if the hand and machine counts differ, the county must hand-count all ballots.

So activists say Barbian asked about the precinct so he could set the machine to record only those ballots correctly, while tampering with votes in other precincts.

Hocking completed its recount Wednesday, and the results differed from the certified results by only three votes. President Bush and Sen. John Kerry picked up an additional vote each when pregnant chads fell out of two ballots that had previously shown no vote in the presidential race. A second extra vote went to Kerry from a previously uncounted absentee ballot. Bush won Hocking County with 6,935 votes to John Kerry's 6,173.

In the end, the county hand-counted a different precinct from the one Eaton told Barbian it would count. The county changed the precinct after members of the Green Party expressed concern that Barbian knew which precinct was planned. The results of that precinct matched the original certified results.

Brett Rapp, president of Triad, said Barbian visited the Hocking County elections office before the recount because the state had mandated that only the presidential race would be recounted and Barbian had to set up the computer to count and report only that race on punch cards.

Triad up to no good

This was sent to us:

The minority leader for the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers had a Monday hearing in Columbus Ohio on the Ohio voting irregularities which turned "explosive". Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton, states in her affidavit that a representative of Triad Governmental Systems, the Ohio firm that created and maintains the vote-counting software in dozens of Ohio counties, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator last Friday, in advance of the state's recount, which is taking place this week. (Conyers is now asking FBI and County prosecutor to investigate.) Programmer Clint Curtis testified that he designed a program to hack the vote in Florida for Congressman Feeney. There was also evidence of major Republican vote suppression of urban, Democrat areas.

In a related development, Kerry lawyer, McTigue has unexpectedly sent Ohio counties a request for 11 ways to conduct the recount in Ohio that would increase transparancy and help ensure every vote is counted. However, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC-- the only mainstream commentator who has been taking the allegations of vote fraud in Ohio and elsewhere seriously--said that if Kerry really meant business he would have his own investigation and be more vocal. Furthermore, in another article several county officials claimed they did not have the money for Kerry's requests or were otherwise non-committal.

Washington Post on Ohio's "Lost" Votes

"Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," goes the headline in today's WaPo.

Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral college majority.

But similar problems occurred across the state and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters, poll workers, election observers and election board and party officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several cities.

In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to the Bush column.

In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election officials allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours -- many leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged.

This article was appearing on December 15, a month and a half after the election. You want to tell me why this same article could not have been printed a month ago?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT; or, Clint Curtis testifies

Clint Curtis, the programmer in Florida who claims he was asked to design software that could alter the votes of touchscreen voting machines, has given testimony to the Judiciary Committee Democrats -- Nadler, Conyers, et al -- under oath.

Here's a transcript. Thanks to Bradblog and Mark Crispin Miller's listserv for sending this out way.

Q: [Congressman Nadler] And did he ever express why he wanted a code to rig an election?

A: No. I immediately assumed that they were trying to keep you guys from cheating with it... so... [laughter] so... I wrote up the documentation of what you would look for in the source code. How you would make sure the you - CUT - Mrs. Yang, and said, here's your report. Here's your program. And she said, you don't understand, we need to hide the fraud in the source. In the source code.

Q: Hide the fraud, not reveal the fraud?

A: Not reveal the fraud because they needed to control the vote in South Florida, is what she said.

Q: That's what she said?

A: That's what she said.

Q: To your knowledge, to your knowledge, was this used?

A: I have no idea. I was ready to leave, so... (laughter) and and I was tired and left the company.

Q: In your testimony a minute ago I think you said just before you left in answer to Congresswoman Tubbs Jones question, that... would you just repeat what you said in terms of uh the the uh exit polls?

A: The exit polls should not be significantly different from the vote.

Q: And if they were you would conclude what?

A: I would conclude someone's playing with the vote?

Q: Not with the exit polls?

A: That's possible too.

Q: OK and that's why...

A: Something is definitely skewed.

Q: Something is skewed with one of the other above.

A: To select which one you'd have to see where the problem is.

Q: Let me ask you one further question. Assuming for the moment that such software, [UNINTELLIGABLE] such software to rig a vote was used, in one or more machines in Ohio or in Florida, couldn't you today detect that if you looked at the source code?

A: If you could get the machines and they had not been patched yet. I mean, once they get in and touch em', anything could happen. You could also set timers to do that, but then you could see the timer. Then you'd have to take those machines, decompile them, which I couldn't do, but possibly a Microsoft, an MIT something could do, you might... you might be able to.

Q: You might?

A: Depends on how good they are at destroying what they had.

Q: Destroying what they had by tampering the machine afterwards, or by programming them to destroy instructions in the first place?

A: Right. Because then since you...

Q: Either or both?

A: Either or both. You didn't actually seen what's in there, so you don't know if the code is running as a single executable or running in various modules. If it's running in modules you could make the code actually eat itself.

Q: Let me ask you one further question. We've.... I've heard that people who assume that lots of the election results, that a large fraction of the election result within the state may have been effected by deliberate fraud in a computer, are paranoid, because in order to do that you would have to have access to thousands of machines and that would be readily detectable. To what extent is that true?

A: In depends on the technology that used. If you use a central tabulation machine that fed in, all you'd have to do is set a flag. You set a flag; the central tabulation machine would flip your vote.

Q: So if you. So one person putting in bad code in a central tabulation machine could affect thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of votes?

A: Right.

Q: And...

A: And you could activate either automatically, or you could make is so that there's code existing on like an otonic (?) machine which feeds it, where you would punch it in, it would see the flag, the server would see the flag and then...

Q: And if you had a recount and no paper trail, would that be, as soon as that had happened, would that be reversible by seeing the discrepancy between the tabulator, the central tabulator code, and what the individual machines which had not been tampered with code?

A:Not if I wrote it.

Q: Why not? In other words...

A: In other words I could make it match.

Q: You could work back from the tabulator to the individual machines, so that the tabulator could tell the machines to switch their results?

A: Yes. It talks both ways. You could flip it to whatever you need.

Q: And they actually do talk to each other. this the machines and the tabulator?

A: As long as it's hooked up. As long as they are networked together, they can talk to each other.

Q: So in other words, there is absolutely no assurance whatsoever on anything with regards to these machines.


A: Absolutely none, unless you look at the source code and make sure it's safe before it goes in.

Q: Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]

Chair: Thank you Congressman Nadler. I know that Congresswoman Waters has questions, then Senator Miller, and then Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

Q: [Congresswoman Waters] This will only take a moment, if you would come back to the ...

A: I'm new at this.

Q: As you know, there has been a lot of discussion about that, I think it is Diebold Company. Their relationship to the President and a group within the administration and supposedly comments about helping to insure that the President is reelected. In your world in your environment, have you heard any of these kind of discussion? Do you know people from Diebold... do you have any sense of any actions that may have been taken?

A: I don't know anything about that at all.

Q: Thank You

A: Sorry.

Chair: Senator Miller

Q: [Senator Miller] Thank you Madam Chair.

Chair: Sir.

Q: I suspect that people will attack you in terms of your credibility. Could you restate once again for the record your credentials?

A: I'm a programmer. I worked for NASA. I've worked for Exxon/Mobile. Worked for the Department of Transportation. And, other elements of my story, because this company... well let's get into it, why not? [LAUGHTER] This company also, they have a NASA contract. and they were basically downloading tons of information, I mean gigabytes worth, and handing it off to this little Chinese guy named Henry Ng [Lee or Nee?] and it didn't seem right and he was packing things and I wrote a program for DOT that allowed contractors to send their information into DOT and he was kind of the quality assurance guy for software. He put a wiretapping module in the program that went to the contractors so that it actually sent everything they sent back to Yang. So I reported all this and just last March, I think, he was arrested for attempting to send anti-tank missile chips to the capitol of Communist China. If that's correct, this is such a small thing. [LAUGHTER] Although I think that he only got a hundred dollar fine and no time.

Chair: Thank You.

Update: From that same Miller listserv, here was a response to the Curtis testimony. (Because I haven't gotten his permission, I'm not crediting with who it came from. But I think he makes good points, necessary to think about in weighing the Curtis testimony.):

Curtis indirectly contradicts himself by at first saying that the code could eat itself, either on command or by timers. If one were to think like a conspirator for a moment, you would force this code to "eat itself" as soon as the election was over to cover your tracks in case the machine is inspected. Then, Curtis says he could recreate the votes and make them match the tabulator computers going back into the voting machines. If the code has eaten itself, there is no way that this would work and there would be a variance in the votes.

All of his testimony is pure conjecture as he does not know for sure if his software or any other software was actually ever used. As I have said before, he uses the answer "I don't know" or "I have no idea" too much.

Also, being a programmer, if you decompile an executable, you will get machine language code. This is the language the CPU understands the easiest and is very easy to follow. If you follow the code and it makes a branch or jump command to a routine that is not there or immediately returns back to the main code, you could assume that something is wrong. You usually do not write routines that return immediately and leave it in production code. I have written C programs that had code that I used to test with that calls another routine. I comment this out when I am finished or delete it completely and it is not compiled into the executable generally. There are some compiler options that would retain comments, but that increases the final size of the code.

...His testimony is purely speculative and there was nothing jaw dropping about it except for naming Feeney publicly.....

More... Much more to talk about

Just read the recent postings on Keith's blog. I'll post later on tonight or tomorrow. Sorry for the delays -- and there are emails to answer, as well. I've been submerged. I'm now up for air again. Feels good.

Is the Ohio recount effort being obstructed?

John Conyers seems to think so.

Here's a press release from the Common Dreams progressive newswire.

WASHINGTON -- December 12 -- Yesterday, it came to the attention of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff that efforts to audit poll records in Greene County, Ohio are being obstructed by County Election officials and/or Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. According to Joan Quinn and Eve Robertson, two election observers researching voting records, Greene County officials initially gave Quinn and Robertson access to poll records, and then abruptly withdrew such access. Greene County Director of Elections Carole Garman claimed that she had withdrawn access to the voting records at the direction of Secretary Blackwell. Regardless of who ordered the denial of this access, such an action appears to violate Ohio law. Later, at the same office, election observers found the office unlocked, and what appeared to be locked ballot boxes, unattended. Prior to the withdrawal of access to the books, observers had found discrepancies in election records, and possible evidence of minority vote suppression.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote a letter to Blackwell on December 2 requesting answers to 34 questions about election irregularities and fraud in Ohio. This letter included questions about major discrepancies in Perry County poll books. Since that letter, additional documentation has been provided to the Democratic staff demonstrating similar problems in other counties.

Because of the urgency of the Greene County matter, Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested that Ms. Quinn testify at a hearing scheduled Monday in Columbus, Ohio. Ms. Quinn has agreed to do so and will also present sworn statements from corroborating witnesses. Conyers issued the following statement:

"The Recount effort is simply a search for the truth of what happened during the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio. We have now repeatedly seen election officials obstruct and stonewall this search for the truth. I am beginning to wonder what it is they are trying to hide."

ESS and Diebold

are owned by... brothers?

Hout doubted

Here's another WIred News piece on the attempted Debunking on the Hout study by McCullough et al. Problem: when someone claims that one argument against the Hout study is that "only two fo the 15 counties using touch-screen machines in Florida exhibited anomalous results" -- well, then what exactly happened in Broward and Palm Beach?

The explanation in the Wired piece: "There was something unusual that went on in two counties, but there are many other things that could give rise to this anomaly," [MIT Poli Sci professor Charles] Stewart said. "Most of them are things that we're pretty sure affected this presidential election -- such as get-out-the-vote efforts by Republicans and special efforts at mobilizing Jewish voters over the issue of Israel and terrorism."

Does that explain it enough to you, as to why the GOTV efforts would work any better in Broward and Palm Beach than in other Florida counties? It sure doesn't to me!

Cliff

Okay, okay, we have been asleep at the wheel -- or rather, have had to do the work that pays the bills. But there's a lot to catch up on.

First, here's the Cliff Curtis situation. Curtis claims that Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida asked him four years ago for software that could atler votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.

urtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.

Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate's total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.

Curtis said he initially believed Feeney wanted the code to see if such fraud were possible and to know how to detect it. The programmer told Feeney that such code could never be undetectable in source code, and he wrote a paper describing how to look for it. But when he gave the paper and code to his employer, Yang told him he was looking at it all wrong. They weren't looking at how to find code, Curtis said she told him. They needed code that couldn't be found.

"Her words were that it was needed to control the vote in West Palm Beach, Florida," Curtis said. "Once she said, 'We need to steal an election,' that put me back. I made it clear that I could not produce code that could do that and no one else should."

Even if the Curtis story turns out to be bogus -- the most alarming thing to take away from it is that even if this software was not used -- it could have been used. We refer back to our theory professed in some post from far long ago: in a nation with the top technological know-how and software companies in all the world, how can our electoral process be so suspectible to tampering?

39 voting machines were left unused in Franklin County

Franklin County -- yes, the same county that had a glitch that gave Bush near 4,000 extra votes -- left 39 voting machines unused while people waited in long lines to vote.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - While some voters waited in long lines to cast a ballot, the Franklin County elections board left 39 voting machines unused on Election Day.

The unused equipment amounted to 1.4 percent of the county's 2,840 machines.

Twenty-two machines left in a warehouse as emergency replacements were never used on Election Day and 17 replacement machines were shipped but never activated at the polls, according to Elections Director Matthew Damschroder.

Damschroder said the day before the election, he ordered that all 99 reserve machines be sent to precincts where long lines were expected.

Damschroder said he learned the extent of the unused machines last the week. He said the new information meant that there were fewer unused machines than was thought, and he said no election results were affected.

Damschroder said the discrepancies occurred because information from the board's warehouse about the placement of machines wasn't communicated with his office staff when he prepared his postelection report.

Thomas Rosenberg, a lawyer who helped monitor the election for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Franklin County, called the revelations "disturbing" but said it was too soon to jump to conclusions.

"We hope that it is nothing more than human beings made errors of judgment for which all we can do is take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again," he said.

Damschroder said technicians hired to repair and deliver machines on Election Day indicated they had tried to deliver all of the machines. In some cases, the polls were closed or workers said they weren't needed, Damschroder said.

Recounting Alaska

It's happening: a recount of the Alaska Senate race.

Alaskans For Fair Elections is now seeking technical consultations with people familiar with
the AccuVote ballot and Diebold software. Contact: David Koester, swarming@mosquitonet.com, or Ed Davis, edavis@mosquitonet.com.

The Recount Alaska effort is citing exit poll discrepancies that predicted Tony Knowles would beat Lisa Murkowski -- he lost -- and speculation of Diebold craziness.

One thing that makes me skeptical of any problems in the state is that Alaska is always a firmly Republican state in Presidential races; I easily buy the idea that all the people coming in to vote for Bush brought Murkowski in on the coattails. Especially given that voters in Alaska were seeing Bush ads -- run on national cable -- and weren't seeing Kerry ads -- which were placed only on local television in swing states.

But, another recount funded!

Conyers on C-Span

John Conyers, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the first three Congressmen to demand an investigation into irregularities by the GAO, hosted a forum yesterday on the 2004 election vote in Ohio and possible irregularities in the vote itself and the subsequent counting of ballots. You can view the forum, which was carried on C-Span, on the C-Span website.

David Corn on the irregularities

The likable -- at least when I met him, and certainly one of the few people who looked good in Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at Spin Alley bit -- David Corn of the Nation casts a skeptical eye towards charges of voter fraud.

Corn: "In pieces for The Nation magazine, I've noted that there is good cause to worry about the integrity of a voting system that is overseen by partisan players and that relies in part upon paperless electronic voting machines that are manufactured by companies that are led by pro-GOP executives and that refuse to reveal the computer codes they use. But I've also cautioned against declaring that the potential for abuse means the system was abused to flip the results. Exit polls that differ from reported vote counts are not necessarily proof of foul play, and statistical analyses that seem to raise questions need thorough vetting before they are waved about as signs of chicanery."

Corn also takes issue with the Hout Berkeley study that suggested that something was rotten in Broward and Palm Beach counties. (Though, weirdly, he keeps referring the Hout study as a study by three graduate students -- which makes me worry that Corn got his Berkeley studies confused. No -- I've been corrected, there were three graduate students working with Hout on the project.)

Corn continues: "A strong case that the election was stolen--either in Ohio or Florida--still has yet to be made. Statistical arguments are not convincing without concrete evidence (or widespread support among statistical experts). When reporters looked at actual ballots in Florida they found the armchair analysts were way off in their assumptions. And a recount requested by Ralph Nader in a limited number of precincts in New Hampshire--after Bush received higher than expected vote tallies in those parts of the Granite State--found little change from the original results. KPFK, the Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles, was a bit ahead of the facts when it issued a statement on November 23 noting it was projecting that Kerry "has won the State of Ohio and thus the Presidency by a minimum electoral college count of 272 to 266."

Yet even the skeptical Corn does give credence to other concerns. "Yet the voting system is shaky enough to warrant serious concern. The General Accountability Office was right to agree to a request from Representative John Conyers and four other Democratic House members that it investigate election irregularities in the 2004 election. According to these members of Congress, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and the counting of provisional ballots. ... There are Bush critics who probably never will accept the November 2 results. And the systemic problems that do exist--secretive voting technologies, the opportunity for partisan hacks to engage in voter suppression--will allow these people to hang on to their worst fears and to continue to share look-at-this! emails with fellow believers (or nonbelievers). But the evidence to date is that the election results were not rigged but were produced by a flawed system."

Recounts in Alaska?

Believe it.

Kerry lost there by, um, a gajillion votes, but Tony Knowles lost to Lisa Murkowski in the Senate race by about 3 percent, or 9,400 votes. Knowles himself doesn't believe a recount would give him a win.

But Recount Alaska cites "exit polls on Election Day putting Knowles in the lead, so Murkowski's solid victory is curious. Second, the machines that optically scan most ballots cast in Alaska "have proven anomalous in Florida and were the basis for (Ralph) Nader calling for a recount in New Hampshire."

Except the New Hampshire recount turned up nothing. Alaska's Accuvote optical ballot scanners were, yes, built by Diebold.

They have $6,700 raised, and need to get to $10,000 by 5 pm tomorrow. (Wednesday.)

"Whatever It Takes": Ohio Update

Catching up on the last few days of Ohio...

Green Party press release from yesterday: "Federal Judge Rules That Ohio Recount Will Go Forward in All Counties." "The judge also provisionally granted the motion by the Kerry-Edwards campaign to intervene in the lawsuit in defense of the position of Cobb and Libertarian Michael Badnarik. Although the judge did not agree with Cobb that the recount should proceed on an expedited basis, the Cobb campaign is confident that a full and complete recount will take place."

***

Juan Gonzalez in today's NY Daily News: "Ohio was the decisive state in the election and none of the challenges is expected to prevent the Electoral College from making the President's reelection official. But the hand recount may be able to tell why nearly 93,000 voters who went to the polls did not register any vote for President." The piece features a Democratic state senator saying that his touchscreen voting machine registered a vote for Bush: "I hate to be part of the conspiracy crowd, but it happened to me," said State Sen. Bob Hagan (D-Youngstown). Hagan said he then repeated his vote for Kerry, and this time his candidate's name lit up properly. (Note: I'd been under the impression that Ohio was all punch cards and optical scan ballots. But apparently there were touchscreen machines in use. Sorry for the confusion.)

Gonzalez: "Something tells me no bank in America would accept as many computer problems in tracking its money as Ohio's elections board had in tracking its votes on Nov. 2."

***

The Green Party formally submits their recount demand today, as well as their bonds to the 88 counties in Ohio. David Cobb and others will hold a press conference at 2:00 pm. Details here.

***

The NY Times: "As Questions Keep Coming, Ohio Certifies Its Vote Count." "The Ohio secretary of state officially certified on Monday that President Bush won that swing state by roughly 119,000 votes, but an array of Democrats, third-party candidates and independent groups continued to question the results, issuing new demands for a statewide recount and a formal investigation of the vote." Remember when any coverage just focused on crazy Internet rumors? As Triumph the Insult Comic Dog said, "Ah, those were the days."

"Even before Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, issued the final tally, the Democratic National Committee said it would appoint an expert panel to review voting problems in Ohio - including long lines, voting machine errors and understaffed polling stations - that it said had disenfranchised voters in predominantly Democratic urban districts.

Democratic officials, walking a fine line between their angry liberal base and centrist voters who consider the election over, said they were not contesting the results. But they said they planned to use the results of their investigation, which is to be completed by the summer, to demand changes to the electoral systems in Ohio and other states."

***

Dec 6: "DNC Chair McAuliffe and Voting Rights Institute Chair Donna Brazile Announce Comprehensive Investigative Study on Election Practices in Ohio"

"The DNC investigative study will examine the legitimate questions and concerns that have been raised in Ohio and will develop factual information which will be critically important in crafting further necessary election reforms. Specifically, the investigation will seek to address questions surrounding the issues of adequate voting resources (machines, pollworkers, etc), the high number of provisional ballots – valid and invalid – as compared with other states, anomalies in the reported results as compared with exit polls, historical data, and reported anomalies within counties and precincts and whether the touch-screen machines and tabulating systems functioned properly.

To address these questions and more, the DNC, at its own expense, will assemble a top-flight team of recognized experts to be named at a later date including:

a political scientist expert in quantitative analysis;
an expert or experts in the design of computer hardware and software systems;
an expert in voting systems and machines;
an investigator with forensic expertise; and
a pollster to survey voters who cast provisional ballots and to conduct other original survey research as needed.

This team will be supported by DNC and state party staff, consultants who were deeply involved in the election effort in Ohio, Ohio attorneys and the DNC legal team."

The DNC's list of experts sounds like a wonky version of the Breakfast Club!.A nerd, a jock, a princess, and an investgiator with forensic expertise!

"You just bought yourself another Saturday, McAullife!"

Ohio is certifiable

So according to this AP story in the New York Times website, two major challenges are expected to unfold today as Ohio Sec. of State Ken "Do you really have to identify him as Sec of State anymore" Blackwell certifies the state's final presidential election results.

Blackwell's declaration will have Bush be the winner at about 119,000 votes. The two challenges?

"Lawyers representing voters upset about problems at the polls plan to contest the results with the Ohio Supreme Court, citing documented cases of long lines, a shortage of machines and a pattern of problems in predominantly black neighborhoods.

In addition, third party candidates, bolstered by a favorable federal court ruling, plan to file requests for a recount in each of Ohio's 88 counties. About 400 people rallied at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus on Saturday to demand a recount begin immediately."

Read the rest of it.

BREAKING NEWS: Washington State Governor's Race Recount to Happen

This just in: after two machine counts that brought the margin of victory for Republican Dino Rossi to 42 votes over Democrat Chrristine Gregoire, there's gonna be another count -- this time a hand recount -- in Washington State.

OLYMPIA - Washington Democrats, hoping the third time's the charm, will pay for yet another recount in the state's ultra-close governor's race that remains unsettled after more than a month.

The party also is heading to the state Supreme Court to seek a ruling that all ballots be treated the same from county to county. That would mean considering some previously uncounted ballots, particularly in Democratic-leaning King County.

Democrat Christine Gregoire, 57, best known for her successful battle with the tobacco industry as the state's three-term attorney general, trailed Republican Dino Rossi, 45, a former state Senate budget chairman, by just 42 votes after a machine recount was certified earlier this week.

Rossi won the initial vote count by 261 ballots, a margin so close it triggered the mandatory machine recount.

Republicans were outraged at the prospect of a third vote count and a legal battle.

"It sounds like they want to make Florida look like a tea party," complained Mary Lane, a Rossi spokeswoman. "It's outrageous, it's dangerous and it shows how little Christine Gregoire cares about the Democratic process. She will do virtually anything to try to win.

"We are not going to let this stand. We will not let her try to steal this election. Dino has won this election twice legitimately and Christine Gregoire is trying to overturn this election illegitimately."

State Democratic Chairman Paul Berendt said the party gave the secretary of state's office a cashier's check for $730,000 to order a recount of all 2.9 million votes cast for governor on Nov. 2 - not just votes in selected counties. A flood of online contributions this week allowed the party to pay for the hand count.

"We're going to count every vote in every county, whether it's a Rossi county or a Gregoire county," Berendt said in remarks prepared for a news conference with outgoing Gov. Gary Locke and former Gov. Booth Gardner, all Democrats.

Gregoire had told party leaders she was prepared to give up her quest for the governor's mansion if only a partial recount were ordered. "No games," she said Thursday.

The hand count is expected to cost the party over $1 million, including legal costs, and leaders said it was a backbreaking job to raise that kind of money in just a week.

Secretary of State Sam Reed is expected to order the new count on Monday and most counties are expected to begin the laborious job Wednesday. Reed said the count should be completed by Dec. 23 unless there are legal challenges.

I can't emphasize two things more strongly: one, how much more effective a hand recount is to a manual one, and two, how smart and right it was for Gregoire to push for a recount of all counties, and not just cherrypicked ones where she was more likely to find undercounted votes.

House Dems send a little letter to Mr. Blackwell

Here's more on Conyers and 11 other House Dems -- presumably the ones who pushed for the GAO investigation -- contacting Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

The letter, which asks 34 questions of the chief state elections official and Bush Ohio campaign chair, seeks a thorough accounting of a “one-two punch that may well have altered and suppressed votes, particularly minority and Democratic voters.”

The letter is signed by twelve House Democrats, including the minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, Jr.

Among other things, the letter questions the terror alert lockdown in Warren County (the FBI says they know nothing about it; County officials said there was a level-10 threat they received a tip on from an FBI agent).

It also calls attention to Perry County, where voting tallies suggest some voters were allowed to cast more than one ballot, and to two additional precincts which had more votes for President than voters.

Other irregularities include a county where voters cast 5,000 more votes for an underfunded Democratic Supreme Court candidate that they did for the most well-funded Democratic presidential candidate in history, John Kerry; heavily African American counties which cast huge numbers of votes for third-party candidates (nearly 3000 percent more than they did in 2000); extraordinarily high “spoiled” ballot rates in some counties; and a county where voters complained that votes for Kerry registered as votes for Bush.

A second section deals with the shortages of voting machines in Democratic and minority counties versus the surplus of machines in wealthier, more Republican areas of the state.

Here's the pdf file of the letter to Blackwell. Enjoy!

Conyers contacting Blackwell; Kerry campaign joining recount effort official

Here's yesterday's Associated Press story by John McCarthy on the Kerry campaign joining the recount effort in Ohio.

Money quote: "The Kerry-Edwards campaign felt it had to intervene," said Daniel Hoffheimer, a Cincinnati lawyer who represents the campaign in Ohio. "We did not want a recount to go forward if it only was 87 (of Ohio's 88) counties."

Second money quote: "The Kerry campaign isn't disputing the outcome of President Bush's Nov. 2 victory in Ohio -- a 136,000-vote margin, based on unofficial results -- but wants to make sure any recount is "done accurately and completely," Hoffheimer said."

But here's other big news:

In another development, Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., sent a letter to Blackwell asking for his assistance in a House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff investigation of "election irregularities." That probe would be in addition to one sought by the Government Accountability Office.

Newshour covers the fraud brigade

Remember when none of it was getting coverage. Or that the only coverage was dismissing any talk of irregularities as internet rumors and innuendos?

Yeah, I don't miss those days.

Jim Lehrer and company did 15-20 minutes last night on the voter irregularities -- beginning with a montage and then having a guest on from Electionline.org. If you have real player, you can check it out here.

(Thanks to Jorgey for the tip.)

"Help douse the fire that is raging"

"Unfortunately, every development in Ohio is now subject to incredible claims and speculation.   And why not?  Before an election recount petition can actually begin, Ohio must first "certify" its results.  Now, 4 weeks after the election, (and just 2 weeks before Ohio's 20 electoral votes are sent to Congress) the Ohio certification is still dragging on at a snail's pace.  Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell seems unconcerned.    Did I mention that Kenneth Blackwell was the chairman in Ohio for the Bush-Cheney campaign?  Did you know that based on his timeline for the certification period, recount filing date, and then the recount itself... Ohio will have exactly one day to examine and recount 6 million votes before Ohio's electoral slate is formally sent to Congress? And yet my colleagues and I sometimes wonder why the "conspiracy theorists" on the net are going nuts. 

The fact is, a lot of people over the last month have blown opportunities to tamp down the internet wildfire and restore some confidence in the outcome of the 2004 election.  The exit polling organization (that received $10 million from the networks, by the way) should have come out weeks ago and explained why their exit polls were inaccurate?  I accept the group's quiet explanations that their workers, in some states, were improperly trained and that the mathematical models analysts relied upon throughout the day were problematic.  But the consortium should should swallow their pride, hold a full blown press conference, and help douse the fire that is raging.  And Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell would help himself and the nation by speeding up Ohio's election certification so the recount can start immediately.   The way to get even with those recount petitioners is to prove their allegations baseless and do it well before Ohio's electors are sent to Congress."

Some crazed conspiracy theorist? Some fringe journalist?

Nope. David Shuster, MSNBC News.

Florida election reforms...

are at least a step in the right direction. Extending voting over 11 days sounds like a smart idea to me. A good way to alleviate the lines. (And a little harder on Republican suppress-the-vote dirty tricks!) Too bad they couldn't have passed such reform last year.

Two things...

...people have been emailing us about.

First, the Keith Olbermann/Bev Harris disagreement. Keith writes in his blog that he's been greatly troubled by the self-promotional ways of Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org and a major proponent of examining the Florida irregularities. While we think that Bev Harris has done an excellent job of exposing how easily the Diebold tabulation systems for optican scan ballots could be hacked -- not that they were, but that they so easily could have been -- we also have found that a lot of her tactics and information don't always put corroboration first. Still, she has contributed in amassing much information about the flaws and faults of the voting technologies created by ESS, Sequoia, and Diebold.

Second, many readers have emailed us about the response to the Berkeley paper by Michael Hout, prepared by a Professor B.D. McCullough of Drexel University and Florenz Plassman of SUNY Binghamton. Our initial glances have found that McCullough and Plassman do not succeed in creating substantial doubts about Hout -- at one point, they claim that Hout did not subject his paper to peer review, only, in several stories I read, it was described that Hout and his partners did get peer notes and comments. That said, we'll take some time tonight to review the McCullough and Plassman paper. But we maintain, as Kevin Drum did on his blog for the Washington Monthly, that it's clear that something needs to be explained in Broward and Palm Beach, the two counties which Hout's paper seems to suggest were the true sites of irregularities that have not been explained... and are still not explained in McCullough and Plassmann's paper. (And for those who would suggest we don't like the McCullough paper just because we don't like the results, we remind you that we took a similarly sketpical eye towards a paper sympathetic to the charge of fraud that came from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.) More on this soon; thanks for your patience.

RD

Is it me or is Chris Gregoire pretty good lookin'? Oh, come on, it's not sexist if the media tells us that John Thune is attractive, too

Democrats have until 5 p.m. Friday to get the necessary funds to pay for a hand recount for the Washington governor's race, where 42 votes, after one machine recount, separate Chris Gregoire from Dino Rossi. John Kerry has helped those pushing for a recount get closer to that goal by donating $250,000 of unused funds (why those funds were unused, we can discuss sometime next April) to Gregoire for the recount effort. As we've mentioned before, there's a big difference in accuracy between a hand recount and a machine recount -- the fact is, machine recounts seem kinda absurd to us, since don't the machines then just not read or ignore many of the same ballots they did not read or ignore the first time around?

Yeah.

Anyway, go to Chris Gregoire's website.

First off, "Chris Gregoire's Transition team is now accepting applications." Good for her.

Second of all, to Gregoire's great credit, she explains why she's pushing for hand recounts across the state, and not just cherry-picking specific counties that are more likely to help her close that 42 vote gap. One of the biggest mistakes Al Gore made in 2000 was pushing for specific counties, rather than a statewide recount. The GOP might complain that Gregoire's statewide recount will cost more money and create more problems, but you better believe that if she were pushing for the less expensive particular counties recounts, that same GOP would be accusing her of cherry-picking.

Here is what she writes:

"I know it would be cheaper for the Party to do a limited hand count. And I know it would be possible to just count a few counties and put me in the lead.

"That doesn't work for the voters of our state. From the beginning this has been about getting all the votes counted so we can know for sure who won the governor's race.

"So, my request of the state Democratic Party is simple: count the entire state, or don't count at all. Counting every vote is the only right thing to do.

"Right now, the Governor-Elect's office sits empty in Olympia. The only way to fill it will be to have a statewide hand recount.

"In the meantime, both Senator Rossi and I are working on our transition and assembling an administration. Once the race is over, the winner will be able to take office with confidence. It may take a little while longer, but it's worth a few weeks to have four years of legitimacy."

Just out of curiosity, if a Washington state reader would mind emailing me, I'm curious -- Washington State is a state Kerry won pretty heavily. Gregoire was the state's popular Attorney General. Why was this race so close?

Emailing RottenDenmark

A reminder. I've written how to email RottenDenmark to the right here, under the little explanation paragraph of what this site is. I just had to write the email address in a strange way, due to a desire to escape Spam Robots. Please use that email address for all correspondence. Thankee.

Olbermann: "Ohio really, really messed up."

The Online Journalism Review has a great interview with Keith Olbermann on their website.

Here's the relevant material:

OJR: What first got you interested in voting irregularities, and why do you think you're the only mainstream news guy up on this?

KO: Ironically enough it was a piece in a newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer. MSM [mainstream media] in the heartland. It was the story of the still unexplained "lockdown" of the vote-counting in Warren County, Ohio. That just struck me as a terrific, very strange story. That was my doorway to a lot of terrific, very strange stories.

The MSM is beginning to get on board, as I suggested they might, as the Ohio recount becomes a reality. Chip Reid, a friend of mine who reports for NBC, went from doing a piece for Nightly News dismissing everything to just recently doing a piece on the Ohio recount, the reports of the flaky computer voting, etc. There was a Bev Harris sound bite in an Aaron Brown package on CNN the other night. They've only put a toe in the water, but they may yet dive in.

Relative to my being first, I think it's largely because I'm not a full-time political guy and not a partisan. The MSM political reporters are: 1) outcome-driven (when Kerry conceded, they checked out, largely because of exhaustion), and 2) driven by what the parties say about one another (Kerry concedes, Democrats stay in the background, Republicans say nothing -- so in their minds, where's the story?). My thought is that there are three components in the two-party system: Republicans, Democrats, and Voters.

Also I think TV has been reluctant because as an industry, we can soft-soap it all we want, but we did use those "early wave" exit polls to shape the tone of the early hours of election night coverage. We took so much grief in 2000, I think there's a natural reticence to publicize the fact that something might have gone wrong this time, too, especially when few of our critics in the newspapers are bringing it up themselves. There's a lot of passivity going around.

OJR: In your gut feeling, what do you think all the irregularities and recounts in Ohio and Florida will show, in the end?

KO: I can guarantee that they'll show that this Rube Goldbergian system of different voting laws, voting equipment, voting auditing we have in this country can't be taken for granted any more and must be standardized nationally, or we face a real threat to the democracy. As John Zogby said on the show the other night, yeah, it's great that 80% of the public thinks the election was absolutely legitimate. But, my God, that means one in five don't. That's an incredibly dangerous truth. We have to fix that.

Practically speaking, I suspect that the Ohio recount and whatever happens in Florida will not alter the outcome -- although I don't think that's the billion-to-one shot people assume. I'd say it's closer to 8:1. Ohio really, really messed up. And I think we'll see a lot of proved computerized disasters, and a lot of inappropriate partisanship.

OJR: How would you describe yourself politically on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum? How important do you think it is for MSM to be transparent on their political affiliations?

KO: I'm not political. I don't vote -- I don't believe journalists covering politics should (and I don't think the democracy would suffer if however many of us there are, recused ourselves). I have no more interest in the political outcome of an election than I did in the winner or loser of any ballgame I ever covered. I think transparency is vital; I think it's also, in these super-heated political times, unintentionally inescapable. If a reporter's work in turn winds up criticizing a candidate or party in some cases, and praising that same candidate or party in others, he's as close to neutral as he can be. If not, he's a partisan. The partisans outnumber the neutrals 1000:1.

It's a great interview, especially for anyone interested also interested in the topic of how blogging is changing how mainstream media covers the news.

(Thanks to Derelection for the tip.)

BREAKING NEWS: Provisional count done, Kerry +17,977; Total Ohio Bush margin +118, 506

The results are in, and done, with the Ohio provisional ballots.

Current "additional" vote count:
Bush +61,505
Kerry +79,482

Difference: Kerry+17,977

As of November 20, the vote totals were:

11477 of 11477 precincts - 100 percent

George W. Bush (i) 2,796,147 - 51 percent

 John F. Kerry 2,659,664 - 49 percent


for a margin on November 20 of 136,483.

Update: Oops. We originally thought that the glitch of 3,893 votes due to a faulty machine in Franklin County had not been factored in yet to these totals. But according to that Ohio Voter Suppression site, the 3,893 votes were factored into the totals for the provisional ballots for Franklin County.

Now factor in Kerry's margin in the provisionals, and now the difference between Kerry and Bush, for all those who were betting the over/under, is 118,506 votes. (The estimated number of ballots that did not register any vote for President, due to error or otherwise, in Ohio was 93,000.)

And with all the provisionals added and amended,

2,853,759 Bush
2,735,253 Kerry

(I unfortunately don't have the information for votes that the provisional ballots gave the third party candidates... and from what we're seeing in Cleveland, some of those numbers might be a little off, anyway.) I'd guess that about 30,000 or so people voted for a third party candidate, but we'll get those numbers soon.

But out of those people who cast a vote for either Bush or Kerry, 5,589,012, Bush received .5106 percent -- almost exactly 51% of those ballots. Meaning Kerry won .4894 -- almost exactly 49%.

I won't lie to you. 118,506 is a big number. But so was 4,000 from one little precinct, the extra votes a machine tacked on to Bush. And when a vote meant for Kerry went to Bush -- well, cut that margin down by two votes. But in all seriousness, the chances of Kerry pulling off Ohio are mathematically slim, slim, slim at best.

But that's not what this is about.

This is about the vote, the sanctity of our franchise, and the very real threats that exist to our confidence in it. If anything, this week's events in the Ukraine should remind us to take our elections and their results and the validation of those results incredibly seriously. I believe some things are worth the cost of a few hundred thousand dollars. The sanctity of our elections being one of them.

A hand recount will now determine how many of the 93,000 "undervotes" actually showed a clear sign indicating preference of a Presidential candidate -- in Florida 2000, about 7% of the undervote were determined to show indication, but in other recounts, it's grown to 20%. Let every vote be counted.

A hand recount will also determine whether there were any other tabulation glitches like that in Franklin County, and also help to shed light on whether there was anything off with the Warren County lockdown.

A hand recount might explain what in God's name happened in these Cleveland precincts.

And more than anything, a hand recount will give a country where in 2004 20% of voters think the President was not elected legitimately -- not 2000, folks, 2004 -- much-needed faith in the security and sanctity of our voting system.

Let the manual recounts begin!

Globe on Election irregularities nationwide

Anyone who suggests that this was an error-free election and that there shouldn't be any concerns about the technologies used in our voting apparatus would do well to read this Boston Globe survey of nationwide voting errors.

The rest of you should read it, too, just to make you feel good and warm and... strangely titillated about being skeptical.

Kerry's provisional margin: 16,875 with 84 of 88 reporting

Ohio provisional count, 84 of 88 counties reporting.

Bush +57,203
Kerry +74,078

Margin of difference + 16,875

Feds step in...

As this Plain Dealer article says -- and by the way, Plain Dealer ranks just below Times-Picayune as the most awesome newspaper name of all time -- after Summit County found that 4,301 of the 5,966 provisional ballots were, to their standards, valid, in a county where Kerry ended up winning 57% of the votes to Bush's 43%, the FBI is sweeping on in.

Why? Because election officials are continuing to investigate instances where as many as 20 people may have voted twice in the Nov. 2 election.

"Summit County Sheriff Drew Alexander and election officials said in separate interviews that the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Cleveland have joined the sheriff's probe into hundreds of irregular, or questionable, new voter registrations that were turned into the board before the election. U.S. Attorney Greg White declined to comment Wednesday."

No word on whether they think the irregular voter registrations favored Kerry or Bush, but my hunch is that given how the FBI hasn't been investigating all of these other irregularities that favored Kerry... well, y'know... but yes, irregular voter registrations should be investigated, of course.

The morning papers

Here's a new blog providing an important service that Rotten Denmark has been too slack in performing ourselves -- compiling each day a linksheet to the articles in the mainstream media and newspapers related to the questions about the November 2 irregularities. No, we have no idea why it's called Grady the Cat, either. But as the author points out, there is much more coverage of irregularities than there was two weeks ago.

Hout (Rhymes with pout or hoot?)

We've been lazy in not yet tackling or dissecting a critique of the Hout report written by a statistician at Drexel University. We're gonna try to get to that sometime this week. Honest.

But in the meantime, Mickey has linked to Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly points about the Hout Paper from November 20. (Why is Mickey linking to news from November 20? Who cares! He's at least still on the story, even if he's on it from ten days ago! He'll be getting to the Juan Gonalez piece by December 13. Just in time for the electoral college!)

Drum cites sociologist Kieran Healey, and your little friends here at RottenDenmark talked about Kieran Healey's findings/postings on blog collective Crooked Timber in this post back on November 23 -- and what we said then still holds.

The evidence of the Hout paper may be that fraud was not systematic and statewide -- but in proving that not to be the case, both Drum and Healey suggest that there was something wrong, quite wrong, quite wrong and in need of explanation, in everyone's favorite two counties imitating vats of electoral cat piss, Broward and Palm Beach.

Could the Republican Party machine have been so better organized in Palm Beach and Broward -- two counties that are not Republican strongholds in any way, shape, or form -- such that they would do that much better in those counties than they had in 2000, and with a rate of improvement much larger than any other counties in the state?

Seems pretty fishy to me. Mickey? Now is not the time to be using Kausfiles to find out about unsigned LA area bands. The fate of the election is at stake! (Whose election? -- ed. Quit that!)

Ohio Provisional totals update, Chapter 831

81 of 88 counties having reported.

Bush 51,077
Kerry 57,308

Bush New England campaign head indicted for 2002 phone-jamming scam

Say this for the Democratic Party: the get out the vote operation is about getting the vote out. Not keeping the other side's voters in.

James Tobin, formerly the Republican National Committee's regional director and then the top Bush campaign official for New England -- yes, yes, but don't forget that Maine and New Hampshire were both swing state battlegrounds -- has been indicted on charges of orchestrating a low-tech version of a denial-of-service attack, setting up technology to block Democratic campaign telephones from reaching voters during the November 2002 -- that's 2002 -- election. Here's the AP's take on the story.

Internet DoS attacks overload a Web site's servers and cause them to be inaccessible. A simialr attack can be made on the phone networks, as Tobin is now accused of doing with five Democratic Party offices during Election Day, November 2002.

The four-count indictment says Tobin targeted the Manchester, NH, Professional Firefighters Association's phones in an attempt to interfere with its GOTV effort. Remember that 2002 saw one of the most tightly contested Senate races in the country, as Little Sununu beat Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

Tobin had resigned in October as Bush's 2004 New England campaign chairman, after allegations that he was involved in this classy business became public.

The indictment claims that Tobin and Chuck McGee, former executive director of the NH Republican Party, wrote a check for $15,600 to a Virginia company called GOP Marketplace, owned by GOP consultant Allen Raymond. GOP Marketplace allegedly hired a subcontractor to tie up the phones on Election Day by making hundreds of nuisance phone calls.

More than 800 hang-up calls tied up phones for about 1 1/2 hours.

NH State Democratic chairwoman Kathy Sullivan noted that she thought it was "unfortunate the Justice Department delayed, for whatever reasons that it did, until after the election... I hope this was not delayed for political reasons. Here we are, four weeks after the election, and President Bush's former New England campaign chairman is indicted.''

In 2002 Tobin was northeast political director for the Republican Senatorial Committee, the party operation working to elect Republicans to the Senate.

BREAKING NEWS: Abnormally High Totals for Third Party Candidates in Cleveland

Juan Gonzalez, co-host of public radio's Democracy Now but also a columnist for the NY Daily News -- you know, that liberal rag that... oops, endorsed Bush for President -- takes on Ohio in his column today, entitled "Ohio Tally Fit for Ukraine."

In doing so, Gonzalez gives new fuel for the pro-recount forces, material I hadn't seen coming up in other recent articles. And though I've taken a skeptic's eye to many stories recently, the report he gives about abnormal third party totals in black Cleveland, if true, is enormous in its significance.

In the piece, Gonzalez reveals what he and fellow Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses have discovered: more unusal vote totals in black neighborhoods. Here's Gonzalez:

And now Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I have uncovered some more unusual vote totals, this time in black neighborhoods of Cleveland. Those results are from the precinct-by-precinct tallies released by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, where Cleveland is located.

In the 4th Ward on Cleveland's East Side, for example, two fringe presidential candidates did surprisingly well.

In precinct 4F, located at Benedictine High School on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Kerry received 290 votes, Bush 21 and Michael Peroutka, candidate of the ultra-conservative anti-immigrant Constitutional Party, an amazing 215 votes!

That many black votes for Peroutka is about as likely as all those Jewish votes for Buchanan in Florida's Palm Beach County in 2000.

In precinct 4N, also at Benedictine High School, the tally was Kerry 318, Bush 21, and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik 163.

Back in 2000, the combined third-party votes in those two precincts - including the Nader vote - was 8. Cuyahoga, like most of Ohio's 88 counties, uses punch-card balloting.

"That's terrible, I can't believe it," said City Councilman Kenneth Johnson, who has represented the 4th Ward since 1980. "It's obviously a malfunction with the machines."

But Peroutka and Badnarik polled unusually well in a few other black precincts. In the 8th Ward's G precinct at Cory United Methodist Church, for instance, Badnarik tallied 51 votes - nearly three times better than Bush's 19. And in I precinct at the same church, Peroutka was the choice on 27 ballots, three times more than Bush's 8. In 2000, independent candidates received 9 votes from both precincts.

The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them.

In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry.

If this same pattern held true in other cities around Ohio, then quite possibly thousands of votes meant for Kerry somehow ended up in the tallies of the two independent candidates. So far, however, precinct-by-precinct results have not been posted by boards of elections in other counties, but by Thursday all official results are due.

On Monday, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell will certify Ohio's results and then a manual recount will be requested by the Green and Libertarian parties.

The Badnarik and Peroutka surge was not the only unusual occurrence in Cleveland.

Also unusual was the drop in the Democratic vote in scores of precincts compared to 2000. But more on that next time.

Now, a drop in a Democratic vote alone isn't evidence of fraud or glitches. But Gonzalez's comparison of the Third Party presidential turnout in those precincts compared to 2000 is extremely damning. For third party candidates to go from 8 votes to over 250...

It's not even clear to me that the glitches here favored Kerry -- Bush's totals in those precincts look small even for extremely Democratic precincts. But that's not the point. The point is, something clearly went wrong in those precincts. And a hand recount is the only way to discern what exactly happened.

Great job by Gonzalez. I look forward to his next column...

Diebold giving it away

Journalists giving money to Presidential candidates has long been frowned upon. I understand why -- they work in the public trust, they're supposed to be objective (well, they're supposed to be), and their work should be as unaffected by their own biases as possible, however difficult that may be.

I think similar expectations should be made of those those whose business it is to create the technology with which we conduct our elections. There's a similar role that the men and women running those companies play in working in the public trust, and it smells more than a little funny for them to be giving money to political candidates.

Especially when they're giving them to just one party.

I never took that seriously the Diebold quote about "giving Ohio to George W. Bush" as an actual promise to commit fraud through the voting machines. Thought that was a little bit of a reach from my lefty breatheren.

But I will say that I had no idea how extensive Diebold's giving to George W. Bush was until I looked here. (There's another list of them here, too, in a Google cache.)

It wasn't just Wally O'Dell, the President and Chairman. Who did give $4,000 to George W. Bush's re-election campaign.

It was Bart Frazzita, Vice President of the Security Division, who gave $2,000.

It was Gregory Geswein, Chief Financial Officier, who gave $4,000 to George W. Bush.

It was Michael Hillock, President of the International operations of Diebold, who gave $2,000.

It was Larry Ingram, Vice President in charge of Global Procurement, who gave $2,000.

It was Chuck Scheurer, Vice President of Corporate Human Resources, who gave $2,000.

It was Thomas Swidarski, Senior Vice President of Strategic Development and Global Marketing, who gave $2,000.

It was Jeffrey Van Cleve, Vice President of the Diebold Credit Corporation, who showed a little restraint, and only gave $1,500. C'mon, Jeff, you're never going to rise in this company if you're cheap.

And that's not even going into soft money, where Robert Mahoney, the Chair Emeritus, gave $15,000 to the RNC in 2,000, and where Wally O'Dell gave $3,950 to the RNC in 2001 and $2,015 to the RNC's Republican National State Elections Committee.

I don't hold it against people for giving money and supporting a political candidate of their choice. That's our system, flawed as it can be sometimes. (Just look at the Millionaire's Club the Senate has turned into, Democrats and Republicans alike.)

But the fact that the support of George W. Bush was so extensive in the leadership and management of one of the two or three top companies responsible for election technology in this country ... doesn't it just feel a little, y'know, weird to you?


Wheeeee!!!

Senator DeWine: "End Frivolous Efforts at Costly Recount"

I can't help but note the irony that all the Republicans who are complaining about the costs of a recount were the same Republicans who didn't think twice about millions of dollars of citizen's money being used for something as constructive for the American future as, y'know, the Starr Report.

Case in point: GOP Senator Mike Dewine, who has issued this press release on the Ohio GOP website.

(Columbus) – U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine issued the following statement today regarding the results of Ohio’s presidential election and efforts to pursue a recount:

"Most Ohio counties have now certified their elections results, and it's mathematically impossible for John Kerry to win Ohio. 

That's probably true, if there were no other irregularities or glitches in the counting process. Unfortunately, the fact that there were some creates a question if there were others.

That`s why Im now urging all parties to end their frivolous efforts to force a costly and divisive recount. Such a recount could never change the election outcome but it could stretch the budgets of many Ohio counties that are already financially hurting.  It's been estimated that this unnecessary recount will cost 1.5 million dollars or more.  Those funds could go to many more important uses, such as improving local schools, funding vital human services or rebuilding our state economy.

The absurd attempts by a few groups who are desperately trying to cast doubt on the outcome and the legitimacy of Ohio`s election results damage the very foundation of our democracy.

The day after the election, my colleague Senator Kerry nobly recognized the reality in Ohio and conceded.  His actions proved that he wants to see America move forward to address the many challenges we face. 

In the spirit of Senator Kerry`s eloquent concession speech, I call on all Americans to accept Ohio's election results and begin working together for our future."

Cute tactic, using Kerry's concession speech against his own best interests. Except Kerry also was speaking a) before the evidence of irregularities and glitches and questions had emerged and b) Kerry has been consistently 100% on message that every vote should and must be counted.

It also bears pointing out that the entire reason that a recount would be costly is because the Ohio State Legislature had never adjusted the law from 1956 that made recounts cost $10 per precinct to adjust for today's costs. That's their fault, their mistake. (And a GOP-dominated state legislature at that.) Again, we live in a culture where sports teams don't think twice of cities paying many more millions of dollars for sports stadiums. 1.5 million in the grand scheme of a state budget is not an enormous amount of money. And certainly not when it ensures the sanctity, trust, and confidence of the American people in the vote.

It also bears pointing out that according to this search, Mike DeWine received $1000 in 1999 from Diebold Chair Emeritus Bob Mahoney and $500 in 2000 from Bob Mahoney. In fairness to Senator DeWine, Ohio's other GOP Senator, George Voinovich, who was up for re-election this past year, received even more Diebold-related donations to his campaign efforts.

Olbermann interviews Blackwell

Great, meaty post on Bloggermann today -- oh, okay, from the 29th, I had just missed it. The highlights:

* OH Sec of State Blackwell joined Keith on Monday night. (Jesse Jackson apparently joined Keith last night. I've been bad and haven't put Countdown on a Tivo seasonpass. Must do!) Keith: "It struck me as not quite coincidental that [Blackwell] finally joined us the same day the Ohio GOP issued what might be the first Republican recognition of any kind that there are questions about the vote - a news release with the gaudy headline “Democrats Struggle to Justify Unnecessary Recount / (Jesse) Jackson swoops in to fuel conspiracy theories even Kerry lawyers admit are baseless.” Apparently, Jesse Jackson's involvement has pushed the GOP out of silence. And as Keith said, Blackwell's reaction to Jesse -- “I think what happened is that Jesse Jackson ran around the block and tried to get out in front of a parade that was already on the march" -- is more than a little strange, in that his making reference to "a parade that was already on the march" kinda, well, legitimizes the recount effort in ways that even a Democrat couldn't hope to do. (But only Nixon could go to China...) Or as Keith writes, "Suddenly the recount itself seems like an old pal to Ohio’s top election official."

* Olbermann did get Blackwell on the record to claim that his office would not stand in the way of recount efforts. "Once they ask for a recount, we will provide them with a recount… we will regard this as yet another audit of the voting process.”

* Blackwell also claimed this: Badnarik and Cobb “have a standing, not Jesse Jackson, and because Senator Kerry has conceded and has not asked for a recount he has no standing, and so I would anticipate that the Electoral College will be held on the 13th of December and 20 votes will go to the certified winner.”

* Keith then says that he had limited time, and chose not to ask Blackwell about the "inexplicable" Warren County lockdown of vote-counting. He explained that choice because he figured Blackwell would evade that question with "Ohio has a delicately balanced bi-partisan system that counts votes at the local level. I have nothing to do with counting the votes." So instead, Keith asked whether or not Blackwell had met with President Bush, in Ohio, on election day. “That’s just hogwash, absolutely zero, not true. And it’s the sort of mythology that grows out of, you know, a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands and the imaginations of Jonathan Swift.” Well, there's a gauntlet thrown down: anyone see that meeting take place?

* Keith then notes that "the salient point seems to be that -- as was meekly forecast here some time ago -- as the prospect of the actual recount loomed, the story would be driven into the mainstream medi. Why, even CNN’s Inside Politics interviewed Jackson briefly Monday - and the Reverend’s use of the new F-word (fraud) seemingly motivated Blackwell to go on the record (and bring up Jackson’s presence in Ohio eight times after I stopped asking him about Jackson)." Apparently, Keith says, Jackson did not repeat in his CNN interview his "strong weekend comments about Kerry supporting the Ohio investigations, which to me implies again that the only people more sensitive to the prospect of Kerry participation in the recount than the Republican Party, is the Democratic Party. This eludes my capability for analysis beyond what I have written here previously about the pulling back of last week’s news release by the Ohio Dems because it read the Kerry/Edwards campaign “joins” the recount, and its replacement a few hours later by an otherwise identical statement saying the Kerry/Edwards campaign “participates in” the process."

Washington Governor's recount update

There might be absolutely nothing on the DNC webpage about the 2004 presidential election irregularities -- well, okay, there is this press release applauding the GAO investigation and this November 18th press release about the DNC continuing a commitment to promoting and protecting voting rights post-2004 election -- but the DNC is not being namby-pamby in supporting a fundraising effort to pay for a hand recount in Washington State, where a machine recount mandated by law cut Dino Rossi's lead over Attorney General Chris Gregoire in the Governor's race from 260 to 42 votes. 42 votes separating the two candidates, out of the millions of voters in the entire state of Washington.

Hit that link, give money to the effort, make every vote count. The DNC site says they need to raise $750,000 to pay for the recount.

Now, I know that some readers might think, okay, so the Democrats just want to keep recounting and recounting until they get a result they'd like. But there's a big difference between a machine recount and a hand recount, in terms of hand recounts picking up the differences in the undervote, the cards that haven't been punched or marked well enough for machines to pick up on them but reflect a clear preference of candidate, anyway.

BREAKING: WashingtonPost: "Kerry Team Seeks to Join Fight to Get Ohio County to Recount"

If you doubted the Green Party website, then try to doubt the Washington Post.

Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign asked an Ohio judge yesterday to allow it to join a legal fight there over whether election officials in one county may sit out the state's impending recount.

A pair of third-party presidential candidates, who said that reports of problems at the polls on Election Day are not being addressed, are forcing the Buckeye State to recount its entire presidential vote. But David A. Yost, a lawyer for Delaware County, just outside Columbus, won a temporary restraining order last week blocking any recount there. He told the Columbus Dispatch that a second count would be a poor use of county resources. President Bush won the mostly Republican area handily, unofficial results show.

Lawyers for the Kerry campaign asked to join Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and the National Voting Rights Institute in the fight to force the county to participate in the recount. "If there's going to be a recount in Ohio, we don't want it to exclude Delaware County or any other county that might decide to follow Delaware County's lead," Kerry lawyer Dan Hoffheimer said. "It should be a full, fair and accurate recount."

Bush won the critical battleground state by approximately 136,000 votes, a victory that also won him a second term.

Cobb's lawyers filed papers yesterday asking a federal court to take over the case, which is scheduled for state court.

The Ohio Supremes

Here's today's Guardian on today's soon-to-be-news, as today a group of Democratic voters will allege widespread fraud and challenge Bush's victory in Ohio's Supreme Court.

BREAKING NEWS: Recounts in Nevada and New Mexico Being Sought!

And even the Washington Post is covering it. The recount effort is being paid by a 527 organization called the Help America Recount Fund, but being done in the name, again, of Badnarik and Cobb.

Now, I have not heard of many stories of irregularities in Nevada and New Mexico.

In fact, from much of what I've read, Nevada had one of the better run/conducted elections in the country, a model for other states.

That said, the totals/margins in both of those states were slim -- a slimmer 6,000 or so in New Mexico (a difference of .8 percent of the total vote, well within many states' percentage threshold for an automatic recount) than a 21,500 margin or so in Nevada.

I have yet to see case made for a recount in Nevada. I'd be interested in what the rationale of the Cobb and Badnarik people for a Nevada recount is, given that there were states that Bush eeked out a win with a smaller margin, namely Iowa where the margin of victory was less than 1% with a margin of 10,059.

Update: I'm wrong -- Nevada was the site of one of the "Republican groups caught destroying Democratic registration documents" situations.

SF Chronicle on voting reform

Excellent overview piece by Wyatt Buchanan in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle on the push for Ohio recount and voting reform.

Jesse opines about Ohio

Here's Jesse Jackson's op-ed piece from today's Chicago Sun-Times. He adroitly starts with describing the dire situation... in the Ukraine. Highlights:

Ohio is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S. citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in. Consider:

In Ohio, a court just ruled there can't be a recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It's three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn't counted the votes and certified the election. Some 93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted; 155,000 provisional ballots are only now being counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior to the election haven't been counted.

Ohio determines the election, but the state has not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds -- like Katherine Harris of Florida's fiasco in 2000 -- a dual role: secretary of state with control over voting procedures and co-chair of George Bush's Ohio campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio's vote can be made.

Blackwell reversed rules on provisional ballots in place in the spring primaries. These allowed voters to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their county, even if they were in the wrong precinct, reflecting the chief rationale for provisional ballots: to ensure that those who went to the wrong place by mistake could have their votes counted. The result of this decision -- why does this not surprise? -- was to disqualify disproportionately ballots cast in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County.

Blackwell also permitted the use of electronic machines that provided no paper record. The maker of many of these machines, the head of Diebold Co., promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. In one precinct in Franklin County, an electric voting system gave Bush 3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast.

Blackwell also presided over a voting system that resulted in quick, short lines in the dominantly Republican suburbs, and four-hour and longer waiting lines in the inner cities. Wealthy precincts received ample numbers of voting machines and numerous voting places. Democratic precincts received inadequate numbers of machines in too few polling places that were often hard to locate; this caused daylong waits for the very working people who could least afford the time.

In Ohio, as in Florida and Pennsylvania, there was a stark disconnect between the exit polls and the tabulated results, with the former favoring John Kerry and the latter George Bush. The chance of this occurring in these three states, according to Professor Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, is about 250 million to 1.

In one of dozens of examples, Ellen Connally, an African-American Supreme Court candidate running an underfunded race at the bottom of the ticket, received over 257,000 more votes than Kerry in 37 counties. She ran better than Kerry in the areas of the state where she wasn't known and didn't campaign than she did where she was known and did campaign.

There should be a federal investigation of the vote count in Ohio, with the partisan secretary of state removing himself from the scene.

In Cleveland, as in Kiev, Ukraine, citizens have the right to know that the election is run fairly and every vote counted honestly. Citizens have the right to nonpartisan election officials. Citizens have the right to voting machines that keep a paper record and allow for an independent audit and recount.

This country needs no more Floridas and Ohios. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. We call for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote for all U.S. citizens and to empower Congress to establish federal standards and nonpartisan administration of elections. Harris and Blackwell are insults to the people they represent, and stains upon the president whose election they sought to ensure. Democracy should not be for export only.

One problem: I was under the impression that Blackwell tabled the use of electronic voting machines until 2008, that Ohio will have the punchcard ballots and optical scan ballots. (The machines made to scan the optican scan ballots are made by Diebold, but I think Jesse got the facts about the touchscreen machines wrong here.) And I think Jackson makes a mistake in lending much faith in exit poll discrepancies or the Freeman report.

But give this to Jesse -- the guy does know how to write. That last paragraph is a doozie.