May 5, 2008
By Joan Brunwasser

Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, edited by Mark Crispin Miller

Warning: This book will make you uncomfortable. Mark Crispin Miller pulls no punches. He's happy to spread the blame around – politicians, the Religious Right, corporate interests, election officials, the corporate media, voting machine vendors, fanatics for whom victory is all that matters – all (and more) come in for legitimate criticism. The biggest villains of the piece are those in the GOP who seek nothing less than a permanent power grab and have a grand plan in place to pull it off. Miller described the plan in his previous book:

CONTACT: Judy Barnes 503-232-1911; jbarnes@hevanet.com

**** Press Event Saturday, May 3, 2008 ****

Who: Democratic Candidates for Secretary of State Kate Brown, Rick Metzger and Vicki Walker, Election Integrity Advocates and Portland area voters

When: Saturday, May 3, 2008 from 10 am – 1 pm

10 AM – 12 N: Election Integrity Forum with Democratic candidates for Secretary of State

12 N - 1 PM: Reception. Meet Candidates and Election Integrity Advocates

Where: First Unitarian Church at 1211 SW Main

** PORTLAND AREA VOTERS TO QUIZ CANDIDATES FOR SECRETARY OF STATE ON ELECTION INTEGRITY ISSUES **

[Portland, OR] As May 20th primary ballots hit mailboxes, Portland area voters and citizen activists will raise election integrity issues with Democratic candidates for Secretary of State. Contenders for what many call the “second most important elected office in Oregon” will be asked their views on issues including big money in elections, how to increase voter choice, and the reliability of corporate-owned ballot counting software and hardware. A reception for candidates will follow the forum, with booths by over a dozen election advocacy organizations that are already grappling with these issues.

Study after study reveals that Oregonians are concerned about the health of our democracy and the election process in particular.

“I’m tired of having to vote for the lesser of two evils”, said David Delk of the Alliance for Democracy. “People want real choice, they want elections that focus on issues and elected officials who do what we elect them to do”.

Recent revelations about electronic voting software and hardware being decertified in other states, and hostile takeover bids in the voting machine industry, only add to voter concerns.

“In Oregon our mail-in ballots are counted by optical scanners run with corporate-owned software so secret even the Secretary of State can’t see it. How can I be sure my vote is counted as cast? Am I just supposed to take it on faith?”, asked Linda Schmoldt, a member of First Unitarian’s Democracy Action Group.

Oregon’s next Secretary of State could play a vital role in making elections fairer, more transparent and more reliable, but Oregon’s democracy will only flourish so long as citizens do the work of keeping it healthy.
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Hosted by: Democracy Action Group of Portland’s First Unitarian Church and Portland Chapter of Alliance for Democracy
For more information contact: Judy Barnes at 503-232-1911 or visit www.afd-pdx.org/SOS.htm

**** Excellent visuals: all three Democratic Secretary of State candidates, just in time for the mail-out of primary ballots; booths by over a dozen election advocacy groups; participants voting in a “mock” election, using an Instant Runoff ballot.

The Oregon Secretary of State is in charge of Oregon's elections, making this an extremely important position for citizens concerned about election integrity.

Sen. Kate Brown and Sen. Vicki Walker are the SOS candidates who responded to our Survey. Their responses are posted below. We invite readers to share their opinions about these responses by writing to info at OregonVRC dot org.

Senator Walker's response

1. Do you feel any urgency that Oregon’s election system is not as secure as it should be? Do you believe that Oregon’s election results could be compromised (and potentially changed) by faulty, or hackable, software provided by private, for-profit vendors?

Senator Brown's response

Senator Walker's response

2. How would you, as Secretary of State, propose to oversee and verify the accuracy of the machine vote counting given the secrecy that prevents citizens and officials from actually observing the vote count?

Senator Brown's response

Senator Walker's response

3. Do you find it acceptable that Oregon election outcomes can have a 39% chance of being incorrect and placing the wrong person in office? If not, would you support election verification protocols that provide a 99% level of confidence that the votes cast by Oregonians are accurately reflected in the outcome?

Senator Brown's response

Senator Walker's response

4. Could development of an open-source election system be a Win-Win situation for Oregon, providing transparency to and producing greater confidence in Oregon’s elections while also contributing to the burgeoning local open-source industry, and lowering costs by removing for-profit corporations from our elections? As SOS, would you pursue open-source options for counting our votes?

Senator Brown's response

Senator Walker's response

5. What is Oregon’s current process for testing the election systems provided by corporate vendors? Do you feel it is sufficient? Would you conduct a “top to bottom” review of Oregon’s voting technology (including voter databases and tabulating software) if you become SOS?

Senator Brown's response

January 30, 2008
By Mark Crispin Miller
Op Ed News: Click here for original article

Certainly the outlook for democracy seems pretty bleak-and how could it be otherwise? The surest way to make a problem worse is to pretend it isn't there, which is exactly what our press and politicians have been doing; and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

But history can be changed, as We the People have continually learned, from our refusal of colonial subjection, to our (partial) establishment as a democratic republic, to the abolition of slavery, to the enfranchisement of women, to the end of formal segregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After that, our progress seemed to stop, and it must now resume: for history can be changed, and for the better, but only through our own unbreakable commitment to, and action for, enlightened policies for the renewal of our democracy. Based squarely on America's first principles, such policies would not be wholly new, however revolutionary they must sound in these bad, backward times. As it was certain policies that got us into this horrific situation, certain other policies can get us out.

The fact is that We the People are in lousy shape, and must get straight as soon as possible. For we are all addicted to the horse race-and we can't win, because it's fixed. And so, before we end up losing everything, we need to pull ourselves together, face the music, and then take all necessary steps to change the tune.

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn't just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don't have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner when we don't yet even know if the election was legitimate, they delegitimize all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of "sore losers."

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

Interview with David Earnhardt, Director of Uncounted
BuzzFlash 1/28/2008

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

For me, it's quite simple. I was appalled at what I'd seen in the 2004 election ... David Earnhardt

First of all, BuzzFlash wants to commend all those Americans who are working to ensure that every citizen can vote -- and that every vote is properly counted.

Since the debacle of the Florida vote in 2000, there has been a growing movement to ensure voting rights. It involves the unacceptable role of proprietary electronic voting machines (owned in large part by Republican affiliated corporations); the suppression of voting rights (think "Jim Crow" voter "identification cards"); and equal access to voting precincts, among other issues.

It's a complicated and long-term challenge to ensure that the legal right of "one person/one vote" is enforced -- and that a vote count accurately reflects the votes cast. Given the large number of issues involved, the voter advocacy community has, at times, disagreed about some of the potential solutions, particularly when it comes to electronic voting machines.

As for BuzzFlash, we believe that if there is not a count of paper ballots to audit any electronic total, then there is no possibility of ensuring an accurate vote count. We also believe that no private corporations should own any proprietary software that is not completely transparent. Unless one can count paper ballot "receipts," there is always room for monkey business. (In fact, having publicly owned electronic voting machines that produce printed ballots that can be reviewed and checked for accuracy by the voter allows for cross-matching totals to ensure a correct count. Remember that paper ballots alone can also be abused. That's how the term "stuffing the ballot box" came into being.)

All of this leads us into recommending Uncounted, an excellent, informative documentary about the broad range of voter integrity issues that confront us as a nation. Uncounted distills the most important problems confronting advocates for allowing every eligible voter to cast a ballot -- and then making sure that the ballots are accurately counted.

We were delighted to interview David Earnhardt, who produced, directed and wrote Uncounted.

BuzzFlash: We've seen your film, Uncounted, The New Math of American Elections. Your film is exceptional in how it presents a narrative about what is really quite a complex issue to follow. What motivated you to undertake a film like this on the voting issue, let alone distribute it on your own, show it around the country on your own?

David Earnhardt: For me, it's quite simple. I was appalled at what I'd seen in the 2004 election, and then, coupled that with, after the election was over and after Kerry conceded, watching the media just go away. From a mainstream media standpoint, there was no looking into many of the problems that had been observed on Election Day.

There was lots of great work going on on the Internet. There was great investigating going on in Ohio and New Mexico, from the legal standpoint, from the alternative journalistic standpoint. But in terms of the mainstream media, it did not exist. I was just naïve enough to be shocked. I just could not believe it. I thought we'd sort of fallen into a parallel universe.

And for me, like a lot of people, the 2004 election felt like a very important election. It felt like the stakes were very high. We closed down our office that day. Many of us wanted to go out and get involved, door to door, to encourage people to vote. My wife and I did that kind of thing for the first time. And I was struck by several interactions I had in a neighborhood that we were in.

It was a fairly low economic neighborhood. When I knocked on the door -- and this happened on three or four different occasions -- I would encourage people to get out and vote. The sentiment was something to the effect -- different forms of this - look, I'm not going to vote. This is not for me. This is not anything that has to do with me. They've already decided who's going to win. It's that kind of language. I'm saying, no, no, no, that's what they want you to do -- not go out and vote. You've got to get out there. You've got to. It was that kind of interaction.

I realized later that I was the naïve one. There was a certain truth in there that I was missing, and it upset me. I thought: my gosh, we really don't take this right very seriously. So I went to work. I went to work immediately and started studying everything I could. I decided, I'm going to find everything I can, and at least consider doing a documentary. Eventually I had enough material to where we could pull the trigger and say let's keep going. Let's do something on this. Let's try to get this issue out there.

By Steven Freeman, MIT
http://groups.google.com/group/ElectionIntegrity/web/faq-exit-polls

About Exit Polls

Why should we care about exit poll results? When properly conducted, exit polls should predict election results with a high degree of reliability. Unlike telephone opinion polls that ask people which candidate they intend to vote for several days before the election, exit polls are surveys of voters conducted after they have cast their votes at their polling places. In other words, rather than a prediction of a hypothetical future action, they constitute a record of an action that was just completed. Around the world, exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections. The United States has funded exit polls in Eastern Europe to detect fraud. Discrepancies between exit polls and the official vote count have been used to successfully overturn election results in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia.

Are exit polls data better than other polling data? Exit polls, properly conducted, can remove most sources of polling error. Unlike telephone polls, an exit poll will not be skewed by the fact that some groups of people tend not to be home in the evening or don’t own a landline telephone. Exit polls are not confounded by speculation about who will actually show up to vote, or by voters who decide to change their mind in the final moments. Rather, they identify the entire voting population in representative precincts and survey respondents immediately upon leaving the polling place about their votes. Moreover, exit polls can obtain very large samples in a cost-effective manner, thus providing even greater degrees of reliability.

The difference between conducting a pre-election telephone poll and conducting an Election Day exit poll is like the difference between predicting snowfall in a region several days in advance of a snowstorm and estimating the region’s overall snowfall based on observed measures taken at representative sites. In the first case, you’re forced to predict future performance on present indicators, to rely on ambiguous historical data, and to make many assumptions about what may happen. In the latter, you simply need to choose your representative sites well. So long as your methodology is good and you read your measures correctly, your results will be highly accurate.

How do exit polls work?

By Michael Collins / Scoop News
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0801/S00057.htm
1/8/2008

It's primary season. Why not start it off right in this most important election in our lives with a bogus election. 81% of the voting machines in NH are Diebold Optical Scans, purchased from a Mass. distributor. The votes are counted in Mass by another firm, in secret. Sorry, no verification. It's faith-based elections. Didn't this all get fixed? What an amazing series of non events we've had in election reform. Now we'll pay the price. Almost every primary will be characterized by secret vote counting. Some democracy, some primary. The citizens of the country deserve so much more than this cynicism. We are paying attention.

"1st in the Nation" with Corporate Controlled, Secret Vote Counting
By Nancy Tobi, Democracy for New Hampshire
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0801/S00057.htm

Introduction. The more things stay the same, the worse they smell
By Michael Collins - "Scoop" Independent News - Washington, D.C.

Tomorrow's New Hampshire primary represents a major turning point in the presidential primaries. We've got the rising star of Obama, the stunned Clinton camp, and the populist efforts of the fast moving Democrat, John Edwards, just off a 9% increase in the national polls. At this juncture, the Republican race is less compelling unless you happen to be John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Does Obama's highly favorable corporate media image stack up against reality? Is this the end of Hillary, or at least the beginning of the end? Can Edwards kick in the door with a strong showing and demand coverage? Will Ron Paul embarrass Giuliani by edging him out for fourth?

We'll never know for sure.

Why? It's been nearly eight years since the debacle of Florida and nearly six since the miracle Chambliss win against Cleland. Surely we have reliable, verifiable voting systems in place? It's been almost four years since the nationwide disaster of the 2004 election with irregularities still emerging.

Hasn't all this been fixed?

As the Oregon Legislature was working diligently to wrap up its 2007 session in late June, 2007, the Senate passed HB 3270 over the strong objection of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition. The bill was then signed into law by Governor Kulongoski.

HB 3270 employs an "audit of precincts" method to hand count the ballots processed by a small percentage of optical scan machines after an election. Oregon's Director of Elections, John Lindback, sponsored this approach under the supervision of Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, after Lindback had been given carte blanche authority by the bill's original sponsor, Rep. Mitch Greenlick, to rewrite the bill.

Oregon VRC supported that original version of the bill, which provided a statistically designed "sample of ballots" method, and advocated for its passage in an "In My Opinion" published in the Oregonian. After the bill had been turned over to Director Lindback Oregon VRC continued to advocate for a "sample of ballots" approach and provided the House rules committee a new version of the bill.

Here is the comparison of the two methods we provided to the Senate Rules Committee. (Also, see below for an "At a Glance" fact sheet on the two methods.) We also provided a fiscal summary demonstrating the lower cost of the sample of ballots method compared to the audit of precincts method.

The version of HB 3270 that actually passed was the result of a last minute "gut and stuff" effort by Director of Elections, John Lindback, who favored the "audit of precincts" method loosely based on the federal "Holt" bill then under consideration in Congress

After the last minute change, our rushed efforts to stop the bill included a press release and an urgent memo to Legislators in both the House and Senate. We also gave testimony to the Senate Rules Committee (Senator Kate Brown, Chair) and lobbied members of the Senate to amend the bill. Neverthless, the bill passed with the "audit of precincts" method without the changes needed to make this an effective law.

Therefore, Oregon now has an election audit law that does nothing more than spot check a small percentage of machines and which gives a roughly 60% level of confidence that the outcome wouldn't change if a hand count were conducted. Given the marginal benefits of such a poorly designed audit, the mandate of HB 3270 now looms as a waste of time and resources for future elections.

We as Oregonians must make clear to our election officials and our next Secretary of State that this audit is not acceptable for Oregon. Unfortunately, vote counting is conducted by secret software in our State. We must therefore have a verification by a statistically designed sample hand-count in order to provide confidence in the outcomes. Otherwise, citizens can have no basis for confidence that the votes are counted accurately.

After the calamitous events of the 2007 Oregon Legislative Session involving HB 3270, the election audit bill, Oregon VRC attempted to re-establish a dialog with John Lindback, Director of Elections, concerning the "placebo" audit law that had just been passed over the strong objections of the Oregon VRC.

In our recent dialog, we shared articles covering the ongoing crisis in American elections that can be traced to corporate trade secrecy protection --- secrecy that is totally unacceptable in fair and open democractic elections. In Oregon today, large corporate vendors of election equipment, primarily ES&S, wield exclusive control over the counting of our votes because it is their secret software (not clerks or other officials) that actually counts our paper ballots.

Our dialog with John Lindback is posted below. For every email we sent to John Lindback, we sent a copy to other individuals who need to be part of the solution to the secret vote counting problem in Oregon: our current SOS Bill Bradbury, as well as all the current candidates for Secretary of State (Vicki Walker, Brad Avakian, Rick Metzger and Kate Brown.)

For a long stretch in 2007 before and after the end of the legislative session, we heard nothing back from John Lindback despite numerous call and emails. Finally, we began to send pertinent articles concerning the serious problems with ES&S software and equipment in other states. At last his silence ended when we received a reply from him on Dec. 6, 2007.

We hope that John Lindback and all the SOS Candidates will take steps to engage in this dialog. This is a matter that is at the very core of Oregon's elections.

We hope that this public dialog will move Oregon away from the former situation, where it currently stands, and toward the latter, where it must go in order to become an open, democratic process.

Click here to see the Oregon VRC letters to John Lindback and his replies.