Have you thought of putting up a blog? It amazes me what goes on in this county. --- On Tue, 4/14/09, Jim March <1.jim.march@gmail.com> wrote: From: Jim March <1.jim.march@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Got a text formatting/database question - the political backstory To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" , "Main PLUG discussion list" Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 7:58 PM 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 --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss