November 7th, 2006
The Hotline 1-888-DEM-VOTE (1-888-336-8683)
By calling 1-888-DEM-VOTE, voters can learn more about their rights, find their polling location, and report problems and get answers on Election Day.
This is your democracy. Know your rights.
Know Your Voting Rights
- If You have problems, you are still entitled to cast a provisional ballot.
- If you are in line before the poll’s closing time, you are entitled to vote.
- You are entitled to view a sample ballot at the polling place before voting.
Source: The Democratic Party Voting Rights Institute
Update:
Election Protection’s 1-866-OUR-VOTE has live operators who can address some problems over the phone and dispatch lawyers on the ground, if necessary.
Common Cause’s 1-866-MYVOTE-1 can help people find their polling place.
Hat tip: Firedoglake
Tags: vote, voting irregularities
June 16th, 2006
Here are a few posts written elsewhere that I thought worth passing on:
- Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat) — Dark Wraith is one of those Veterans who received a letter from the Veterans Administration about last month’s Fubar with the laptop and all of that personal data that might or might not have gotten hijacked. He’s not just upset about the Fubar; he’s upset that that they were able to find him at all after he spent ages carefully not alerting them to address changes…
This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they’ve concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they’ve got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn’t theirs—our privacy—and they can’t have the decency to ensure even that they’re the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they’ve expropriated.
To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.
To everyone else, I say this: if you’re not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.
Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they’ll find you when they want to, anyway. It’s all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.
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Tags: Veterans Administration, Identity Theft, Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, insurgents, American soldiers, amnesty, Florida, voter fraud, Voting Irregularities, Greg Palast, sexual harrassment, inhumanity, humanity
May 3rd, 2006
Well, I’m absolutely fascinated by the fact that the Main Stream Media doesn’t appear to be reporting anything about the fact that Ohio’s Primaries yesterday had major issues with the voting machines.
Akron’s NewsNet5.com reported that a judge ordered the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections to keep the Garden Valley Neighborhood House polling location open until 9:30 p.m. when poll workers had trouble setting up equipment in the morning, which meant that that the polling place didn’t actually open until 1:30 p.m for voting. (Remember, Cuyahoga’s Board of Elections is under investigation for voting fraud from the 2004 elections.)
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Tags: Ohio, Voting Irregularities, vote, politics
April 11th, 2006
Can you believe that it’s 2006 and we are still talking about voting irregularities in 2004?In fact, can you believe that it’s 2006, and three Ohio election officials are just now being indicted for their participation in “fudging” the Ohio 2004 recount?
Let’s talk about some facts in the case, shall we?
- Michael Vu, executive director of the Cuyahoga County elections board, said workers followed procedures that had been in place for 23 years.
- There is no evidence of voter fruad.
- The election officials’ efforts were aimed at avoiding an expensive and very public hand recount of all votes cast.
- Candidates for president from the Green and Libertarian parties requested the Ohio recount.
- Election workers in each county are supposed to count 3 percent of the ballots by hand and by machine, randomly choosing precincts for that count. If the hand and machine counts match, the other 97 percent of the votes are recounted by machine. If the numbers don’t match, workers repeat the effort. If they still don’t match exactly, the workers must complete the recount by hand, a tedious process that could take weeks and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Precincts with 550 votes or fewer were not used.
- Nor were precincts counted where the number of ballots handed out on Election Day failed to match the number of ballots cast.
- Then days before the Dec. 16 recount, outside of any witnesses and without anyone’s knowledge except for the Board of Elections, workers opened the ballots and hand-counted enough votes to identify precincts where the machine count matched. If it didn’t balance, those precincts were excluded.
- On the official recount day, employees pretended to pick precincts randomly. Cuyahoga County election workers sat at 20 folding tables in front of witnesses and reporters. They did the hand and machine count of 3 percent of the votes 34 of the 1,436 precincts and when the totals matched, the recount was completed by machines.
- The recount gave Kerry 17 extra votes and took six away from Bush.
- But observers suspected that the precincts were not randomly chosen and asked a board worker about it, said Toledo attorney Richard Kerger. The worker acknowledged that there had been a precount.
- Kerger wrote a letter to Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, complaining and asking for an investigation. Mason recused himself, and Baxter was appointed special prosecutor. He brought elections workers before a grand jury to find out what happened.
“They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full countywide hand count,” Baxter said.Everyone expected the recount to “be conducted in accordance of the law,” he said.
- Kathleen Dreamer was manager of the board’s ballot department. Rosie Grier was assistant manager. Jacqueline Maiden was Elections Division director and its third-highest-ranking employee.
- All have been charged with misdemeanor and felony counts of failing to follow the state elections law.
- All continue to work at the election office.
Very disturbing.
I don’t even think this is part of a big conspiracy so much as a royal fuck up that obviously needs to be cleaned up. I’m sorry but that kind of manipulation behind the scenes is just too suspicious. I’m sorry if they didn’t want to do a hand count, if I lived in Cuyahoga County, and I have relatives who do, I’d be pretty pissed. I want to make sure my vote counts and matters. Men and women have suffered and died so that I have a voice so that when I cast my vote it means something and when I pay my taxes it’s funding someone’s salary to make sure that I get the government I want and voted for — well, that someone voted for.
Source: “Worker’s accused of fudging ‘04 recount” (The Plain Dealer)
Tags: Ohio, Voting Irregularities, vote
February 27th, 2006
Remember all those complaints about voting irregularities in Florida? Seems like there might have been something to it. Of course, no one in the government is doing anything about it still. I suspect neither party wants to clear up all the voting irregularities and calling attention to it will only call attention to their own participation here and there.
The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.
After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.
Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.
You can find the complete set of raw voting machine event logs for Palm Beach County here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/6628.html
Note that some items were not provided to us and are ommitted from the logs.
The logs rule out the possibility that these were Logic & Accuracy (L&A) test results, and verified that these results did appear in the final totals. In addition to the date discrepancies, most had incorrect polling times, with votes appearing throughout the wee hours of the night. These machines were L&A tested, and the L&A test activities appeared in the logs with the correct date and time.
According to the voting machine assignment log, these machines were not assigned to early voting locations. The number of votes on each machine also corresponds with the numbers typical of polling place machines rather than early voting.
Many of these machines showed unexplained log activity after the L&A test but before Election Day. In addition, many more machines without date anomalies showed this log activity, which revealed someone powering up the machine, opening the program, then powering it down again. In one instance, the date discrepancy appeared when someone accessed the machine two minutes after the L&A test was completed. [“Someone accessed 40 Palm Beach voting machines November 2004″]
Hat tip to Yellow Swordfish.
Tags: Black Box Voting, Voting Irregularities, Florida, 2004 election, politics
August 11th, 2005
The Republican Party has repeatedly and pointedly disavowed any tactics aimed at keeping citizens from voting since allegations of voter suppression surfaced during the Florida recount in 2000 that tipped the presidential race to Bush.
Interestingly, while denying any conspiracy to keep possible Democrat voters from casting their ballots in both Ohio and Florida, a top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant have pleaded guilty in conspiring with James Tobin, the president’s 2004 campaign chairman for New England, to interferre with the Democratic campaign. Apparently Tobin called the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in a scheme to tie up the phone lines in New Hampshire to prevent Democrat campaigners from calling voters to encourage them to get out and vote on Election Day 2002. At the time Tobin was the RNC’s New England Regional Director.
Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a “zero-tolerance policy” for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.
“The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position,” Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.
But then again, didn’t Bush promise to fire anyone involved in leaking Plame to the press? Hard to believe the Republicans will actually follow through on such a statement when their king has set the precident to say it and not do it.
Paul Twomey, a volunteer lawyer for New Hampshire Democrats who are pursuing a separate lawsuit involving the phone scheme, said he was surprised the RNC was willing to pay Tobin’s legal bills and that it suggested more people may be involved.
“It originally appeared to us that there were just certain rogue elements of the Republican Party who were willing to do anything to win control of the U.S. Senate, including depriving Americans of their ability to vote,” Twomey said.
“But now that the RNC actually is bankrolling Mr. Tobin’s defense, coupled with the fact that it has refused some discovery in the civil case, really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this,” Twomey said.
Yes, how high does it go? Where does the buck stop? It does seem rather suspicious, but maybe I just love a good conspiracy story too much. Sounds to me like the tip of the iceberg. Maybe my crazy co-worker, who goes on and on about how the Ohio election was fixed and how the technology was used to do it, is right on the money. There’s a thin line between genius and insanity sometimes.
Read the rest of the story.
Tags: Republicans, vote, Democrats, Florida, Ohio, Voting Irregularities
