Got a text formatting/database question - the political backstory

[keith smith]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Jim March <1.jim.march at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Got a text formatting/database question - the political backstory
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>, "Main PLUG discussion list" <plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
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
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