Yesterday I attended a court hearing that in my opinion, directly
relates to this thread.  Let me tell you about it.

At issue was the proposed destruction of paper ballots from a 2006
Pima County bond election that "smells fishy".  I won't go into all of
the details but...it doesn't look right.  The state attorney general
had recently grabbed these same ballots and hauled them up to Phoenix
to be hand counted.  In my opinion, that hand count was flawed in a
bunch of ways...I can even make a pretty good case that the hand count
was deliberately bungled.

So now the ballots are back under the control of the Pima County
treasurer's office, "sentenced to death" by a state law requiring
destruction of old ballots.

Lawyers for the Republican party took the lead in arguing in favor of
their destruction, stating that the legislature wanted to make sure
elections are not challenged outside of the sole challenge structure -
a five-day window after each election during which candidates or
parties can file challenges if they have reason to think the election
was flawed or fraudulent.

Lawyers for the Democratic and Libertarian parties argued otherwise.
They (and I) believe that despite the destruction law, basic fairness
says that at a minimum, political parties should be able to look at
those ballots.  Political parties in AZ are the independent oversight
for elections - not the public as in some states including California,
and not the candidates as in Tennessee and elsewhere.

The problem with the five-day challenge window is that in electronic
voting, it's not possible to do the analysis that quickly.  In fact,
the Democratic party filed suit in 2007 for electronic copies of the
raw data files in MS-Access format from that same 2006 election and
others.  We (despite being Libertarian I was the tech consultant on
the case) didn't get them until a year and a half later and when we
did, there was fishy-as-hell stuff in there.  No "smoking gun" but a
lot of suspicious stuff - like repeatedly reloading memory cards days
after the election, and a failure to make daily snapshots of the data
on election night and several days after.

So, the Democrats argued before Judge Harrington that their role in
election oversight found in AZ law means they need to have the ability
to really check out even old elections, especially when the same
election officials and staff from that election are in charge now.

The Republicans (and of course Pima County) claim that casting doubt
on past elections "undermines the public's perception of the system" -
they seriously argue that it's BETTER NOT TO KNOW about election
fraud.

So I'm in a situation where, in open court, my county's government is
saying that data found on my laptop, and on the server at the
Democratic party's attorney Bill Risner (which I'm sysop for) contains
data about election issues that it's better people not know about.

Now ask me again if you think I want the gov't poking around MY data.
Ask me why I'm using whole-disk-encryption, or why Bill Risner's law
office is protected by a heavy-duty hardware firewall I installed?

Some people DO criticize the government, with damned good reason.
When we do, we have to be able to protect our data from the government
or we're just not going to be effective.

Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors, http://blackboxvoting.org
Member, Pima County Election Integrity Commission approved by the Pima
County Board of Supervisors (Libertarian party appointee)
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