Got a text formatting/database question - the political backstory

[Eric Cope]

If you get me more details, I'll put it on my blog, and forward it to a few
of my blog-friends.

Eric

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Jim March <1.jim.march at gmail.com> wrote:

> It appears that I've got what I need among the various answers :).
> Thanks guys, I'll report back in a bit on how it went technically.
>
> Politically/legally, here's the backstory:
>
> The 2006 RTA election (dated 5/16/06) was fishy from the beginning.
> It involved a $2bil transportation bond.  It smelled bad right from
> the get-go, then various things happened over the next two years(!)
> that made it stink even worse.  I could go on for days but some
> snippets would include:
>
> * On election night, observers spotted an MS-Access manual being
> referred to by the lead operator.  MS-Access is banned from voting
> systems (ain't approved) and the Diebold central tabulator database is
> in MS-Access format.  If you get to it with Diebold's front-end, it
> looks secure enough.  Get to it in Access and all security falls apart
> completely...you can do anydamnthing you want.
>
> * When we got the audit logs in December 2006, there was what appeared
> to be data manipulation plus they had peeked into who was winning and
> losing based on the mail-in vote five days *before* election day.
> This was illegal as hell, and they did this consistently across most
> elections - not just the RTA.
>
> * We fought a public records suit, won, and found yet more rotten
> stuff including a lot of memory card re-uploads, more than any normal
> election ever.  I'll go into details if anybody wants but let's just
> say, it looked bad.
>
> * The same attorney for the Pima Democratic Party who fought the
> public records suit went back to court to get the end-of-day printouts
> from the voting systems and the pollworker's end-of-day reports.
> These were stashed with the actual paper ballots.  A judge ruled that
> we couldn't get access to the actual ballots but the end-of-day audit
> stuff was public records.  It was obvious we would soon get access to
> those.
>
> * A week after the judge says we'll get it (in Feb. 2009), the Arizona
> Attorney General's office grabs the ballots from Pima County (where
> they were stored at a private document storage place called Iron
> Mountain) and hauls them to Phoenix to an undisclosed location.  April
> first they moved them to the Maricopa County election department and
> investigators from the AZ AG's office monitored the Maricopa elections
> office as they did a 100% hand-count.  I was the designated observer
> for the Libertarian Party, there were also observers for the Dems and
> GOP.  The AG's office did their damnedest to prevent us from getting
> totals as to how many ballots were processed or what the outcome was.
> Despite their best efforts, were were able to determine that there are
> WAY fewer ballots present than there should be.  Our best guess is,
> they're 15,000 ballots short and it could be higher.
>
> Upshot: the AG's office has acted improperly in being secretive about
> this whole mess.  They've decided to reserve the right to mis-report
> what's going on.  They blew an earlier round of investigation in 2007,
> blew it bigtime, and it's possible they're going to blow off this
> round.  The observers have a duty to make sure the AG's office can't
> cheat by doing our own counts and checking their work.
>
> The GOP observer reported to Pima Board of Supervisors member Ray
> Carrol what he saw in terms of missing ballots, and Carrol went on the
> John C. Scott radio show.  So the cat's out of the bag and it wasn't
> my doing...which is why I'm fine reporting this level of detail here
> on these lists.
>
> Meanwhile, we have reports in .CSV format from the Pima Recorder's
> office (who are separate from the Pima Elections office and the
> Recorder's office has *always* acted honestly) so we can trust that
> data as to how many people voted.  We'll then cross-reference that
> against our estimates of ballots present and the number of ballots the
> Pima Elections office says are present.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Jim March
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