Jesus, too much to read

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Why must I walk this wicked path?

quote:

Originally posted by ResonantDrag passports handy?

Actually we just sent the completed forms for the passports. Now I just gotta wait a month or so I think...

depending on the time of year.. i got mine in two weeks

It just kinda smells a little fishy, doesn't it?

quote:

July 28, 2004 Lost Record '02 Florida Vote Raises '04 Concern By ABBY GOODNOUGH IAMI, July 27 - Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election. A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times. "This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the coalition. After the disputed 2000 presidential election eroded confidence in voting machines nationwide, and in South Florida in particular, the state moved quickly to adopt new technology, and in many places touch-screen machines. Voters in 15 Florida counties - covering more than half the state's electorate - will use the machines in November, but reports of mishaps and lost votes in smaller elections over the last two years have cast doubt on their reliability. Like "black boxes" on airplanes, the electronic voting records on touch-screen machines list everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast. The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. Elections officials have said that using this data for recounts is unnecessary because touch-screen machines do not allow human error. But several studies have suggested the machines themselves might err - for instance, by failing to record some votes. After the 2002 primary, between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County. The group considered that rate of what it called "lost votes" unusually high. Voting problems plagued Miami-Dade and Broward Counties on that day, when touch-screen machines took much longer than expected to boot up, dozens of polling places opened late and poorly trained poll workers turned on and shut down the machines incorrectly. A final vote tally - which narrowed the margin first reported between the two candidates by more than 3,000 votes - was delayed for a week. Ms. Reno, who ultimately lost to Mr. McBride by just 4,794 votes statewide, considered requesting a recount at the time but decided against it. Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections division, said on Tuesday that the office had put in place a daily backup procedure so that computer crashes would not wipe out audit records in the future. The news of the lost data comes two months after Miami-Dade elections officials acknowledged a malfunction in the audit logs of touch-screen machines. The elections office first noticed the problem in spring 2003, but did not publicly discuss it until this past May. The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines. One flaw occurred when the machines' batteries ran low and an error in the program that reported the problem caused corruption in the machine's event log, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa whom Miami-Dade County hired to help solve the problem. In a second flaw, the county's election system software was misreading the serial numbers of the voting machines whose batteries had run low, he said. The flaws would not have affected vote counts, he said - only the backup data used for audits after an election. And because a new state rule prohibits manual recounts in counties that use touch-screen voting machines except in the event of a natural disaster, there would likely be no use for the data anyway. State officials have said that they created the rule because under state law, the only reason for a manual recount is to determine "voter intent" in close races when, for example, a voter appears to choose two presidential candidates or none. Touch-screen machines, officials say, are programmed not to record two votes, and if no vote is recorded, they say, it means the voter did not cast one. But The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, in a recent analysis of the March presidential primary, reported that voters in counties using touch-screen machines were six times as likely to record no vote as were voters in counties using optical-scan machines, which read markings on paper ballots. The A.C.L.U. of Florida and several other voting rights groups have sued to overturn the recount rule, saying it creates unequal treatment of voters. Counties that use optical-scan machines can conduct recounts, though only in extremely close races. Mr. Kaplan says that the system crashes had erased data from other elections besides Ms. Reno's, the most recent being municipal elections in November 2003. Under Florida law, ballot records from elections for state and local office need be kept for only a year. For federal races, the records must be kept for 22 months after an election is certified. It was not immediately clear what the consequences might be of breaching that law. Mr. Kaplan said the backup system was added last December. An August 2002 report from Miami-Dade County auditors to David Leahy, then the county elections supervisor, recommended that all data from touch-screen machines be backed up on CD's or elsewhere. Professor Jones said it was an obvious practice long considered essential in the corporate world. "Any naïve observer who knows about computer system management and who knows there is a requirement that all the records be stored for a period of months," Professor Jones said, "would say you should obviously do that with computerized voting systems." Buddy Johnson, the elections supervisor in Hillsborough County, which is one of the state's largest counties and which also uses touch-screen machines, said his office still had its data from the 2002 elections on separate hard drives. Mr. Kaplan of the Miami-Dade elections office could not immediately explain on Tuesday afternoon the system crashes in 2003. Martha Mahoney, a University of Miami law professor and member of the election reform group, said she requested the 2002 audit data because she had never heard an explanation of the supposedly lost votes that the A.C.L.U. documented after the Reno-McBride election. "People can never be sure their vote was recorded the way it was cast, but these are the best records we've got," she said. "And now they're not there." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/28/p...cffb7fd8dd10fcb

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

They knew about it before it was sent to election officials. In case you wish not to put 2 and 2 together, this entails that they knew the list was riddled with problems from the get go (the Florida election officials), yet they sent it out regardless.

IF the media news outlets and other politicians hadn't done their job in seeking a FOIA for seeing the names on that list, who the hell knows what would have happened come election time. Nice to see the media actually being on top of things, for a change.

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Posted on Sun, Aug. 01, 2004 ELECTIONS Florida knew of voter list problems BY DAVID KIDWELL [email protected] TALLAHASSEE - Well before they abruptly discarded it, Florida election officials knew they had significant problems with a database of felons they planned to use in removing voters from the rolls. Just a week before they directed local election chiefs to begin purging ineligible voters from the list of 48,000 convicted felons, state officials documented two years of failures and breakdowns with the $2.7 million contract with database vendor Accenture. A May 2 internal memo, ordered personally by Secretary of State Glenda Hood, details a half dozen missed deadlines and broken promises, failed software programs, repeated miscues and personnel problems. Two months after the memo, with newspapers including The Herald detailing major flaws with the felon database that could have disenfranchised thousands, the state reversed course and told election chiefs not to use the felon list. The problems outlined in the five-page memo do not directly foreshadow the exact glitches that forced the state to abandon the list. But the memo makes clear that the state was hitting constant hurdles in its quest to rush out a list of voters who could be deleted from the rolls. Critics who have closely monitored Florida's voting process say the chronology shows that the state was negligent. ''This memo is striking,'' said Howard Simon, Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ``After two years of constant failures and fixes . . . they rushed this out the door. ``We are talking about one of our most fundamental rights, the right to vote. Maybe they should have considered the possibility that accuracy was more important than speed.'' State officials say their intentions were merely to remove ineligible voters. In Florida, convicted felons cannot vote unless the right is restored. MOVING SWIFTLY Yet a former official involved in the process acknowledged that the state was moving rapidly. 'We were quickly approaching the `drop dead' date, when we knew it would be too late to put it out there for the election,'' Ed Kast, the former director of the Division of Elections, who retired in June, said in an interview. ''Of course we were frustrated. We all wanted to know why it couldn't get done faster,'' he said. Executives at Accenture, one of the world's largest technology consulting firms, were caught unaware by the memo when contacted by The Herald. The newspaper obtained it in a public records request. ''We've never seen this document before,'' said Jim McAvoy, spokesman for Accenture. He acknowledged some ``technical and staffing issues, which resulted in a delay of approximately five months.'' But he said the state asked for many changes that helped exacerbate delays. He declined to discuss specific details of the memo, saying the company intends to discuss them first with state auditors looking into the problems. The memo came just days before state officials were going to order local election chiefs to use the database to remove thousands of ineligible voters. The Herald obtained the list and, on July 2, reported that it contained more than 2,100 felons whose voting rights had been restored through the state's clemency process. Most were Democrats, and many were black. As The Herald was preparing its report, a Tallahassee judge ordered the Division of Elections to make the database public. Less than a week later, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune and The New York Times reported that Hispanics -- who tend to vote Republican -- were largely excluded from the list because a criminal records database the state was using to find ineligible voters doesn't use Hispanic as a race. Thus, many Hispanic voters with criminal records were excluded from the list given to local election chiefs, a striking lapse. The flaws prompted Hood to pull back the list on July 10. PROBLEMS DOCUMENTED Yet well before then, the state documented a morass. Many of the problems involved computer runs that failed, programming flaws or miscommunications among the state, contractor and subcontractor. Among them: • Rapid turnover and inexperience. Three different project managers were assigned by Accenture in the final year alone. One database administrator sent in February ''had no prior experience with this application,'' the memo says. • Missed deadlines, the first coming on June 30, 2003. One of the reasons: A technical representative suddenly left the company and didn't transfer her work to anyone else, the memo said. As late as April, state overseers found a series of yet ''more errors'' by Accenture, a $13.4 billion Bermuda-based consulting firm with 94,000 employees in 48 countries. Dawn Roberts, who replaced Kast in June, said the memo was generated on the orders of her boss, Hood. ''I think she was getting a lot of questions from reporters and from critics,'' Roberts said. ``She asked for the answers in writing.'' `COMPLEX PROBLEM' Both Kast and Roberts say that despite the frustrations, the division was confident of the final product. ''This was a very complex project,'' Roberts said. ``Our staff was intricately involved all along, checking and double-checking. It wasn't like we just got it one day and put it out there.'' Roberts also said election supervisors were told to first investigate names on the list before removing anyone. Yet many local supervisors found the last-minute list burdensome and feared that it included voters who should not be removed from the rolls. Several refused to use it. Citing two ongoing internal investigations, the Elections Division refused to allow The Herald to interview other key people. Nor has the state fully responded to a Herald request for the documents used to compile the memo. http://www.miami.com

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

Anyone still believe in the integrity of Florida conservatives with these voting stints?:

quote:

Harris, Hood gave state flawed felon voter list By Palm Beach Post Editorial Wednesday, August 04, 2004 When it came to lost election data in Miami-Dade County — information that was nearly two years old — Secretary of State Glenda Hood sent in a team to make sure that local errors didn't make the state look bad. If only she had worried as much about the actions of her own Division of Elections. Ms. Hood oversaw distribution of a faulty list meant to block felons who had not obtained clemency from voting. She wasted $150,000 trying to keep the list from being made public. Within weeks of its release, newspapers documented errors that made the state look as if it was trying to keep blacks, but not Hispanics, from voting. Ms. Hood dumped the list. How did it get that far? Ms. Hood has asked her inspector general to investigate. The audit will have to start in 2001, when Ms. Hood's predecessor, Katherine Harris, thwarted the Legislature's will to assure that her office would control the list. The 2001 election reform law called for the list to be compiled by the Florida Association of Court Clerks, which had experience conducting similar database analysis. Then-Division of Elections chief Clay Roberts told legislators that the clerks wanted too much money, but memos published by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune showed that the clerks had agreed to do the work for the amount spelled out by the Legislature, $525,000 a year. Mr. Roberts' impossible-to-document explanation to the newspaper — that the group later made a verbal demand for more money — was denied by the clerks association. But the Legislature bought it. Mr. Roberts hired Accenture, a Bermuda-based company that used to be called Andersen Consulting, a subsidiary of Arthur Andersen. It changed its name after the accounting firm became caught up in the Enron scandal. Accenture's lobbyists included former Jeb Bush aide Brian Yablonski and the law firm of Van Poole, a former state Republican chairman. Accenture gave $300,000 in campaign contributions, favoring Republicans two-to-one, the Herald-Tribune reported. Mr. Roberts also decided to use race to match felons on one list with voters on another list, even though the felons list didn't offer Hispanic as a choice. The move guaranteed that Hispanics wouldn't make the list. This week, The Miami Herald reported that a state memo that Ms. Hood had ordered said, "It becomes apparent... that Accenture's Fayetteville office does not understand the relationship between the matching tables." Even though some state workers recognized the problems, Ms. Hood moved blithely forward, distributed the flawed list to county election officials in May and retracted it only after public scrutiny in July. The state paid Accenture $1.8 million to compile the list. Katherine Harris told legislators that an audit of the list, costing $300,000, would be a waste of money. It turns out she was right. The newspapers did it for free. Find this article at: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinio...aedit_0804.html

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

Another article about the inaccuracies of touch-screen voting, this one from the Florida 2002 Governor election:

quote:

Touch-screens dealt a blow BY GARY FINEOUT [email protected] TALLAHASSEE - While state election officials publicly proclaim their faith in touch-screen voting machines in the midst of criticism, their own reports may have been the first to highlight potential shortcomings in the technology more than 18 months ago. In January 2003, state election officials reported that there was a higher rate of so-called undervotes among voters using the ATM-style equipment than those voters who mark paper ballots and feed them into an optical scanner. At the time, the Florida Division of Elections compiled a detailed report that looked at how each county's voting equipment performed during the 2002 general election, when Gov. Jeb Bush defeated Democratic challenger Bill McBride. Bush received 2.85 million votes to McBride's 2.2 million votes. The report shows that more than 44,000 votes weren't counted in the governor's race because of undervotes, overvotes and problems with absentee ballots. Of that total, about 34,000 were undervotes -- in which voters apparently failed to make a choice at all. Many election officials maintain that there is no way to tell for sure why someone chooses not to vote in a particular race or election contest. But the state report, which was sent to Bush and the Florida Legislature, shows that counties that used touch-screen machines reported a higher percentage of undervotes than counties that rely on optical scanner machines. The undervote rate for the 52 counties that used optical scanners was 0.33 percent of all votes cast, compared to 0.92 percent for the 15 counties that use touch-screen machines. More than 4,600 Miami-Dade voters, or 0.91 percent of those who voted, did not cast a ballot in the governor's race. In Broward the number was about 4,000, or 0.90 percent. For touch-screen critics, the numbers reinforce their suspicions about the machines, since touch-screen machines warn voters if they have failed to vote in any race, while optical scanner machines don't warn when there is more than one race on the ballot. 'The fact that our undervote report is three times lower, which is without a warning, just adds to the question of, `What's going on here?' '' said Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, which uses optical scan machines. But state officials point out that the report also shows that in 2002, Florida achieved a dramatic reduction in the number of votes that weren't counted compared to the 2000 presidential election. The overall percentage of votes that weren't counted -- which includes overvotes and undervotes -- went from nearly 3 percent in 2000 to less than 1 percent two years later. The report also shows that touch-screen machines allowed zero overvotes, where a voter accidentally selects more than one candidate in a race. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood contended the undervote difference between touch-screen machines and optical scanners was insignificant. ''Historically, the rates are at an all-time low,'' Jenny Nash said. ``The rates may be different but it's still less than 1 percent.'' For weeks, critics of touch-screen machines have seized on reports of glitches and lost data as a reason why Hood or Bush should demand a statewide audit of voting systems in Florida. They have also cited a recent report that showed that, in the March 2004 presidential primary, there was a higher percentage of undervotes in counties that use touch-screen machines compared to those that rely on optical scanners. Some of the most constant critics have been Democratic politicians, which has prompted Bush to complain that those attacking the machines are partisans bent on motivating voters to defeat his brother, President Bush. Today in Tallahassee, Senate Democratic Leader Ron Klein and House Democratic Leader Doug Wiles plan to discuss ways to ``restore voter confidence.'' Klein said Wednesday that he was unaware of the 2003 report, but the Boca Raton Democrat said it reinforces the concerns that he has about voting systems in Florida. ''It seems unlikely that there would be a 3-1 margin between a community that has optical scan versus one with a touch-screen,'' said Klein. Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan, said Wednesday that Kaplan was unfamiliar with the report since it was compiled months before she took over the elections office in the summer of 2003. Indian River Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem, whose county is one of those that use touch-screen machines, downplayed the significance of the state report. She pointed out that the 2002 election was the first time that many voters first saw the machines. She predicted that as voters become more comfortable with touch-screen voting, the amount of undervotes will decline. ''It was the first time that many of these people have used this equipment,'' Clem said. ``I think we will see a dramatic improvement in undervotes as we go through more elections.'' http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral.../printstory.jsp

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

I'm not going to quote the entire thing because it's far too large, but here's another article about for potential for fraud in the upcoming election:

quote:

On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes. The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17]. The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire. About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since, as a government expert says, "the ballot is embedded in the voting equipment," there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official "can't watch the bits inside," says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks. The four major election corporations count votes with voting-system source codes. These are kept strictly secret by contract with the local jurisdictions and states using the machines. That secrecy makes it next to impossible for a candidate to examine the source code used to tabulate his or her own contest. In computer jargon a "trapdoor" is an opening in the code through which the program can be corrupted. David Stutsman, an Indiana lawyer whose suits in the 1980s exposed a trapdoor that was being used by the nation's largest election company at that time, puts it well: "The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the secrecy of the vote count."

More:

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.m...040816&s=dugger

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