Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Humboldt Dems May Consider HCPB Resolution
While everyone is talking about the improbable outcome of yesterday's NH primary, I've barely had a chance to read about it. Voter Confidence Committee work for hand-counting paper ballots has kept me very busy, including making a presentation earlier tonight to the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee. I forgot to bring my voice recorder. But I was brief and it went more or less like this:Thank you for inviting me here tonight. I know I have to be brief so I won't go into detail about things we all know about, like the successful hack tests and the academic reports that conclude no "procedural mitigations," or new security precautions, can completely secure the machines we use here in Humboldt. The VCC spent 8 months studying the local situation and we've put out a 20-page report as well as a flier, a fact sheet, a diagram and more. These things are being passed around the room.
Milt Boyd, the Committee Chair, then told me of their subcommittee structure and I thanked everyone and sat down. I left before the end of the meeting.
Among the many recommendations we make, there is one that is clearly most important. We have to get rid of these secret counting machines and get the community together to count the ballots by hand. The big resistance to this comes from unfounded opinions that usually say it will take too long or require too many people.
Our Feb. 5 primary ballot has 8 contests. In NH, where they have a long history of hand-counting, they say it takes six seconds to count each contest on each ballot. That would mean 48 seconds per ballot for us in Feb. Let's figure as newbies we might be a little slower, say one minute per ballot. Our last federal election was November 2006 when we averaged 266 ballots cast per precinct. If it took one minute to count each of those ballots, it would take just under 4.5 hours to count all the ballots on election night in the precincts using teams of four people.
We had 109 poll sites in Nov. 2006. That means we'd need 436 counters. That is about one-half of one percent (0.5%) of all registered voters in Humboldt. That's not a high bar to reach. We've already collected over 200 names of willing hand-counters. The sign-up sheet is going around the room.
So I'm here to talk to you all as individuals who can choose to support this and of course if the group as a whole wants to get behind this I'll leave it to you all to determine what that would look like.
Around 8:30pm, Larry Hourany, longtime member of both the Dems and the VCC, called to say it went very well. He was very helpful in figuring out the approach for tonight, which I stuck with exactly as planned. Hourany said that near the end of the meeting he attempted to make a motion but the Chair steered it to one of the subcommittees. That means that now we (Larry, me, VCC) are going to get to write a resolution that this subcommittee will consider and potentially send to the full group with a recommendation. I've been listening to a lot of Rage Against the Machine lately, so excuse me when I say this is fucking excellent.
Now, to this New Hampshire situation, where it appears Obama beat Clinton in towns with hand-counting but Clinton won the state on the strength of her victories in towns counted by Diebold optical scanners, identical to those used here in Humboldt. Because I haven't been able to fully read up on this yet, I'm going to give you the links of what I'm about to dig into. But first, I have to say one more thing and it really harkens back to the essay I wrote on the GuvWurld blog called Why Old Election Numbers No Longer Matter.
See, we don't really learn anything from holding the so-called election that we didn't know before. The votes will be/were counted in secret. The expected result and the actual result are inherently uncertain. Nobody should be trying to convince anybody that fraud did or did not happen on the basis of data from what passed for an election yesterday. Hand count all the ballots, then we can first have a serious conversation about an election that occurred.
Read Rady Ananda's piece at OpEdNews. She has picked up my inherent uncertainty frame and run with it. She's got good quotes from several people including me.
BradBlog has several stories, of course.
Black Box Voting has a thread I was referred to by Tom Courbat of SAV-R-VOTE in Riverside County. Hi Tom, thanks. This one has charts and graphs.
The great Bob Koehler has a column for Tribune News Services called Primary Concerns.
Feel free to post more links in the comments for this post. And a reminder that Thursday between 6-7pm PT you can tune into KHUM.com and I'll be on the air during the KHUM Review program.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/humboldt-dems-may-consider-hcpb.html
Labels: Black Box Voting, Bob Koehler, BradBlog.com, hand-counting paper ballots, Humboldt Dems, inherent uncertainty, Larry Hourany, NH Primary, OpEdNews.com, Rady Ananda, Report on Election Conditions, VCC
Monday, January 07, 2008
VCC Ramping Up Outreach For HCPB Campaign
Following last Thursday's My Word column I wrote in the Eureka Times-Standard, we've had several people hit the sign-up form on the Voter Confidence Committee (VCC) home page, letting us know they are willing to hand-count paper ballots on election night, and will help us get more people signed up. I was also asked to submit an essay for the Hope Coalition Newsletter. I chose Confidence in election counting?, which I wrote for the Eureka Reporter toward the end of November.
Larry Hourany has arranged for me to make a presentation to the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee on Wednesday night. It is not clear whether he'll be able to make a motion or if any proposal would be referred to a committee first. Naturally I'll be asking people to declare their willingness to hand-count on election night, whether signed up as an individual or in fantasyland where the group as a whole endorses it and the entire campaign changes overnight.
I've previously mentioned my recent meetings with the Redwood chapter of the ACLU. That group has been circulating a draft of a position statement it may make on election issues. The group has solicited input from the VCC and we're excited about the common ground, and also the interesting challenge of building some bridges. The VCC will be finalizing our suggestions tomorrow and meeting with the RACLU on 1/17.
John Matthews called this afternoon, he of the KSLG morning show and also producer for the KHUM Review. I was previously a guest on this show on August 30, 2007. Apparently the Review is being broadcast this Thursday from the California Welcome Center in Arcata and I have been asked to be part of a discussion about elections. I'm a little unclear on the details so I'll be checking in with Matthews again tomorrow.
By the way, I posted my Saturday commentary on the NYTimes e-voting article at DU and OpEdNews.com. It appears Nancy Tobi also posted it at the Democracy For New Hampshire website.
Tobi has a few new ones herself I'm trying to get to: Back to the Future: Democracy that Works, which is actually written for publication in Mark Crispin Miller's forthcoming book; and also NH: "First in the nation" (with corporate controlled secret vote counting), a side of the New Hampshire voting situation we hand-counted paper ballot admirers don't hear much of. They are fighting the good fight there against the same Diebold optical scanners used here in Humboldt. Tobi links to a newly posted You Tube video from Black Box Voting. It is the footage of the Hursti hack being done in Leon County, FL as well as footage of Hursti testifying to NH legislators. See it, and pass it on.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/vcc-ramping-up-outreach-for-hcpb.html
Labels: ACLU, Black Box Voting, Democratic Central Committee, DU, Eureka Reporter, hand-counting paper ballots, Harri Hursti, hcpb, Hope Coalition, Mark Crispin Miller, Nancy Tobi, OpEdNews.com, VCC
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Others Criticize Humboldt's So-Called "Transparency Project"
In my last post, I took apart a December 24 Eureka Times-Standard article (archive). As promised, I have submitted to the paper a My Word opinion column that reflects and expands upon what I posted here a few days ago. I think the T-S has a policy of allowing writers a My Word column every six months. In that case, there may be a problem getting my full essay in the paper right now (previous column 8/16/07, (archive)). However, since it is a critique of such egregious problems with their article, I would hope the paper would open itself up to such criticism. If not, I strongly suspect one of Humboldt's other newspapers will be glad to shine the light.
This morning on the T-S website I found a letter to the editor dated 12/30. It is from S. Franke in McKinleyville, and I've posted it in full at the bottom of this post to show who else besides the Voter Confidence Committee is criticizing the so-called Humboldt Transparency Project.
Before I get to that, however, I want to offer one of the ways that the new My Word column expands on my last blog post. I originally pointed out that the T-S article cited Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org as a Project supporter. What I did not realize at the time was that Harris was about to release a statement saying she was misquoted and actually opposes the Project (full statement follows, italics emphasis added to indicate what I quoted in the My Word column):Black Box Voting has been misquoted twice in a week, first in an AP article that said Brunner had consulted us before developing her recommendations (she hadn't, and we disagree with her recommendations) and now saying we are behind the latest voter confidence / read: voter con idea.
Permalink:
The concept of providing ballot images to the public after running them through an intermediary program developed by David Dill (or anyone else!) is absurd and misses the point entirely. What is it about these guys that they just cannot RESIST inserting "An Expert" in between "The People" and "Our Ballots"?
At this point the only place to try ballot images would be in contests like the primaries, just days or weeks away, and only in situations where there is no other alternative but a high volume of centrally counted ballots, like in Los Angeles where there will be nearly two million mail-in ballots to count on Feb. 5, just five weeks from now. And then, the only point in it would be if it was done in public, on video, with a separate non-counting off the shelf scanner, and the CDs were released instantly.
So along comes Dill. "Hey, just stick my handy dandy overlay over the ballot images before you give them to the public, it will manipulate --- strike -- "remove stray marks" -- from the ballot images.
One more concept bites the dust. Amazing how easy it is to take people's eye off the ball, which is CITIZEN oversight, not "Dill's oversight."
http://www.times-standard.com/letters/ci_7841283
(archive)
Dealing with vote accuracy
Letters to the editor
Article Launched: 12/30/2007 01:15:19 AM PST
Regarding your recent story about County Elections offices ("As primary approaches, election offices are in turmoil," Dec. 24), I don't see the significance of scanning and posting voted ballots on the Internet.
First of all, the idea is getting old and with no funding, probably dead. Second, it does not address fraud because the scanned images will only be the sanitized end result of the process. Third, we could not be sure that all the ballots were there and that the software to sort them was accurate.
While playing with the ballots might be fun, it certainly would not add to the accuracy and security of our elections and would be a frivolous waste of money. It will only add another layer of complexity, opportunity for hacking, and falsely assure the public.
I would like to hear more about the new auditing procedures that should have been instituted -- statistical analysis, security measures, etc., as directed by the secretary of state. Most election offices already have internal auditing procedures and trained employees in place.
I don't believe one thing will confirm the accuracy of all the points of possible errors or fraud that can take place. We need to independently check every step of the voting process carefully and not just depend on a vague promise of some future fix.
S. Franke
McKinleyville
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/others-criticize-humboldts-so-called.html
Labels: Bev Harris, Black Box Voting, Eureka Times-Standard, Humboldt Transparency Project, S. Franke, Voter Confidence Committee
