Steven, Welcome to the Lake.

looseheadprop, Thank you for Hosting the Book Salon today.

Hi. Glad to be here. Let’s talk, so to speak.

You said you were in Ohio today, how is the voting looking there?

Glad to have you Steve.

I am in Columbus. Today early voting begins. There also are 5 days left until voter registration closes. So that is a window where people can show up and register and then fill out an absentee ballot. There was a steady trickle of people doing that, plus vans bringing students and homeless people to vote.

lhp, one problem is that they can say ‘Well, you have the right to vote, btu there’s nothing in the constitution about actually counting those votes.’ Which is, strictly speaking, true, but voting implies counting votes … and we ought to be able to nail them on the implications and the GOP’s cheerfully spouted ‘implied rights don’t exist’ line.

Steve in the course of your reporting and work for this book, what do you think has been the most effective response to dirty tricks that might disenfranchise voters?

Steven, thank you for being here and writing this important book.

looseheadprop, thank you for hosting.

Bev, thank you again for bringing such great topics to us.

Steven, how do we make sure the low info voters see what the Republicans are trying to do to disenfranchise them? And how do we stop the Rs short of criminal prosecutions and throwing them all in jail (Hello Alan Raymond!)

Well, you are correct, we have to count the votes. Or make sure the votes are counted accurately. And then of course we are voting for presidential electors not the candidates directly. But, in a first things first world, we have to ensure as many people vote as possible and then focus on an accurate count.

I don’t think I have ever heard anyone have the chutzpa to actually make that “don’t have to count ‘em” argument.

Do you know of anyone who has?

Welcome Steven,

Thank you for this excellent resource. There are a lot of people who would work to improve their local voting systems if they only had some practical suggestions. Your work is a terrific addition.

BTW, and it’s not off topic. If you want to help protect the vote you can sign up with the Obama campaign’s election protection effort here

let’s talk about disenfranchisement. the simplest answer and solution is voters must know their registrations are current, which means they have their current address on it. Then they need to know where to vote, what ID to bring, and be patient with the process. If they check their registration info is all accurate, not GOP challenge or voter suppression effort will work.

All the voter suppression stuff created by the GOP is designed to slow down the voting process for individuals and others in line by alleging that people are not properly registered. That’s their ballot security rhetoric. But the solution is making sure your voter reg info is correct BEFORE registration closes in your state. In have the states that’s this Sunday.

People should telephone their local election boards to check their info before then, especially if they haven’t voted in a few years or if they registered this summer with an outside group. You want to be sure you’re in the registration database.

Steve, are you seeing more voter suppression activities on college campuses this year?

It’s funny you say you never heard the we don’t have to count ‘em argument.

I heard a version of that argument JUST TODAY in Franklin County, Ohio, where the capital Columbus is. The Board of Election deputy director said there were 5,000 registration forms that could not be processed because people left out information or they couldn’t read their writing. Local activists said the number was 9,000. Anyway, I asked how they were correcting those forms.

The reply was they’d send out post cards, but if nobody replied then by Monday the deadline would pass and those people would get to vote. He didn’t seem too concerned, saying 5,000 botched registration forms out of 200,000 new registrations this year was a low error rate.

I wouldn’t want to be among the 5,000 people who will discover on Election Day they cannot vote. Would you?

Steve,
I have recently been asked to contribute to a memo for the DNC about how to respond to campaign dirty tricks which aim to thwart a voter’s chance to vote.

disinformation
blocked access to voting places
voter intimidation
excessive challenges at the pools
etc.

It is my observation that in prior cycles candidates have been somewhat myopically focussed on countering such stunts with more vigorous GOTV, rather than focusing any attention of collection and preservation of evidence to make for winnable cases after election day. That leads to repeats of the behavior cycle after cycle.

I am advocating that the DNC prepare for these stunts by educating campaign managers to collect and preserve the evidence, so that subsequent litgation or prosecutions can be brought to bear.

Feel free to disagree with me, but I’m wondering what YOU think is the most signifigant step Democrats can take to stop being victimized by these tactics.

The voter suppression on college campuses is an issue this year, notably in Virginia and Colorado, where local election officials have told students they will lose student aid (because they’d be changing their addresses, etc) if they registered to vote there, instead of in their parents’ state. That is classic voter suppression of student.

LooseHeadProp, we have a lot to talk about on your point.

My book was written to help people empower themselves in the part of the voting process they can control as individual voters: their registration and voter credentials.

But that’s only half the process. What they can’t control is the election machinery and the accuracy of the vote count. That’s where election protection comes in. I have been talking to people who really know what the points of vulnerability are, and who have been trying to get the DNC to pay attention, and the DNC is NOT taking them seriously. I can elaborate.

It amazes sometimes that this is still being fought over. I remember when I was in college (mumble mumble) years ago, that the issue was taken I believe to SCOTUS that students could register and vote at the college town with no impact on aid or other deals.

That’s different than a “we don’t have to count ‘em” argument, at lest as I was thinking of it. I don’t think there has never been an error free election in the history of this country. It makes me sad to type that.

However, I was taking the “we don’t have to count them” to mean literally that. That the results of an election are meaningless. Bush v. Gore had at least a fig leaf claim that there was some deference to the will of the voters.

After 9-11 Guliani suggested postponing the NYC mayoral election–or at least postponing swearing in his successor which would lead him as a holdover mayor without authority from the voters.

It’s THAT kind of thing that I was referring to. Not errors in counting.

interesting that those two are battleground states this cycle . . .

Steven,

Welcome to the Lake and thank you so much for this incredibly effective tool!

have you read How To Rig An Election by Republic Operative Allen Raymond ?

Please do eleaborate cause the DNC has been asking our little committee to propose a plan. I want to make it the BEST plan that is feasible with the (always limited) resources available

Teh Repubs have just gone to a Federal Appeals court to overturn OH’s register and vote the same day efforts(which have previously been upheld by the Federal courts; again the issue of ‘voter fraud’ is being raised by them when all the data indicates such isn’t a problem at all.

And while we can take the steps suggested, I would ask everyone to consider the following:

GOP Computer Expert Spoonamore Predicts The 2008 Election Will Be Stolen

VR conducted an explosive new interview with GOP cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore last week in which he predicted that the 2008 presidential electi on will be stolen in favor of McCain/Palin with a win at 51.2 percent, unless the people involved are exposed and brought to justice. He also states that the optical scan voting systems at the tabulator level constitute a national security threat because now the “genie is out of the bottle” and foreign countries can compete on the best election hack in order to decide who is the next U.S. president. You can watch this extraordinary interview on http://www.rovecybergate.com and http://www.velvetrevolution.us

If anyone watched the recent elections in Ecuador, voters there used hand-marked, paper ballots that were manually counted; yes, there are problems associated with such but not near the issues raised by electronic voting.

Here’s the crux of election protection problem. There will be a handful of swing counties in swing states where we can only, at best, guard against electronic vote count theft.

Here’s what we can do and CANNOT do. We can record, if we put the people on the ground, the actual number of voters who cast ballots in every precinct. These are posted at the end of the day. Then we can create our own county totals and COMPARE them to the Election Night countywide count. That will tell us whether there has been padding of the turnout and margins in swing counties. Right now I am not convinced the DNC is prepared to do this. Certainly, they have people who are trying to convince their election protection team to do this.

Here’s another thing we can do. We can create maps of precincts by voting machine type AND by the contractors who program the central tabulators. That way, if there is a problem in one precinct, or several – any kind of voting machinery issue – we can quarantine that so there is not a cascading impact on the vote count. I know this has been suggested but I do not know if it is being taken seriously.

On your question of the affidavits. Yes, the campaign has great communication networks and can text message up and down the election protection chains of command. The question is what messages and training are people being given. That pertains to preparing affidavits and going to court, because that’s where things are headed if there are big problems.

What we cannot control is internal hacking that changes the percentage allocation of votes. So, say a GOP-majority county is 35-65 McCain-Obama, whe we cannot stop is a hacker (usually a partisan with access inside boards of elections) from changing that to 15-85 for McCain-Obama, thus shifting thousands of votes to McCain in that already GOP-majority county.

P.S. looseheadprop, Bev knows me and what efforts I have taken in the past about election integrity.

BTW–and we don’t often bring up the cost of a book at Book Salon–at $9.95 a EVERY VOTER should consider grabbing this handy reference.

It’s written for you guys. Voters, not for heads in the bookshelves lawyer types who write white papers.

It’s really easy to follow the steps EVERY VOTER needs to take to safeguard their own right to vote.

Where else you gonna get all that for the price of a couple of Starbucks Ventis

A few responses.

The Ohio GOP lost in the OH Supreme Court yesterday in its effort to force those who register to vote in the next 5 days to wait another 30 days before casting a ballot. Kudos to OH SOS Jennifer Brunner, a Dem, and many progressive law groups that submitted amicus briefs.

Now let me talk about Spoonemore and let me advise some caution there. He is a renowned bank cyber security specialist. He is a Republican who has been very upset his party has been stealing elections. He has explained how the e-voting systems are like bank ATMs, and how they can be controlled remotely to “force balance” an account, which in voting means adding and subtracting votes to arrive at a pre-determined total.

He says the Rapp family in Ohio, which operate several voting machine firms and are fundamentalist Christians, programmed the county tabulators in 41 Ohio counties in 2004 and were able to shift votes so Bush could win. He said they did the same thing with Max Cleland in Georgia a few years before.

Lots of lefties want to believe him and take his word as gospel. He provides insight but no evidence. Also some question whether he is too good to be true. Moreover, the landscape in 2008 is not the same as 2004.

The Rapp family is not programming tabulators in OH in 2008. They are doing county voter databases – still a worry, but a different one. Bev Harris in the past day or so says there are GOP-connected firms programming voting machines in Kentucky, Illinois and Colorado. Are these concerns? Yes!!!

Is the DNC aware of this, in so far as their election protection planning goes? I don’t think so. But my point is whatever Spoonamore says is useful, however he is the Oracle of Delphi. Whatever will happen is not exactly as he suggests. He points to vulnerabilities, and methods, not evidence.

I meant to say he is NOT the Oracle of Delphi… And also, Triad didn’t program the GA machines. Another first did in Cleland’s race. That’s my sloppiness for typing fast.

Steve- Is it true that EVERYONE has the right to cast a Provisional Ballot, regardless of challenge. Thus if someone is denied the right to cast a PB that’s indicative of fraud (or egregious misinformation) by the local officials.

And would it be more likely that absentee or “by mail” ballots would be counted accurately since these would be checked for change of address and duplication prior to the election? Also the issue of hacking would, I hope, be done further down the food chain, one would hope. Mail in ballots would likely be hand counted and a hard copy exists that would deter fudging those figures. Too easy to be caught.

Steve, looseheadprop, thanks

Any comment on the neocon Attorney General of Wisconsin who launched this law suit:
Observers fear Van Hollen’s election lawsuit will cause problems

OT. Wisconsin Republicans have invested millions in trying to stack the state supreme court.

Thanks.

robert kennedy did a piece on this the past week, eye opening to say the least

caging is far more sophisticated and they will do it in all democratic precincts in swing states

one new method according to kennedy, a new law passed in the “help america vote” act” (yes, another contradicition of terms the republicans are famous for)

if they have proof you have gone by an alias and your drivers license says anything but that alias, they will challenge your right to vote

he makes the point, if they have mail that says “robert f kennedy” and his license says “robert francis kennedy” they can challenge is right.

this is gonna be ugly

A few responses. On Allen Raymond’s book. I have read it, talked to him, and it’s interesting – perhaps more so as a glimpse into the RNC culture than specific dirty tricks.

On voting by mail, I have very mixed feelings.

Both campaigns, D & R, are promoting it as a way to avoid polling place hassels. There are fewer voter ID requirements with voting by mail, generally. Those who do it tend to be more middle-class, middle-aged, settled, married with kids, elderly, so says lots of people. That’s important, but this means it’s not for everyone or a real choice for more transient member of society, such as young people, the poor, etc.

The biggest problem I have is these ballots are not always counted before the television networks declare winners and candidates concede. I may be old-fashion, but I’d like my vote to be counted in the part of the night before the networks declare the winners and the country goes along…

The cadging based on forclosure lists idea made me so mad

Spoonamore is involved in the case which erupted this summer when the AG of the State of OH requested protection for Mike Connel, another GOP tech-guru, claiming that Rove had threatened him. From Bradblog:
“A recent flurry of activity in the long-standing King Lincoln v. OH Sec. of State lawsuit concerning voting rights violations in the state during the 2004 election has resulted in the judge lifting the stay to allow depositions to be taken of key GOP tech-guru Mike Connell, and potentially others, such as Karl Rove…The lifting of the stay comes on the heels of a troubling declaration filed with the court by Republican cyber-security expert and Connell colleague, Stephen Spoonamore who testified that he’s concerned a classic “Man in the Middle” cyber hack may have occurred on Election Night in 2004 as Connell’s Republican firm handled results reporting for Ohio’s Presidential election.

According to Spoonamore, control of Ohio’s election system by Connell’s firm, may have allowed for the compromise of election results as they were being reported. The structure of the system, as results were allowed to be first diverted to Connell’s servers that night, would have been “cause to launch an immediate fraud investigation” in the banking industry, charges Spoonamore, who ferrets out such problems in the financial services industry.”
And, additional details from Rawstory:
“Since early this decade, top Internet ‘gurus’ in Ohio have been coordinating web services with their GOP counterparts in Chattanooga, wiring up a major hub that in 2004, first served as a conduit for Ohio’s live election night results,” researchers at ePluribus Media wrote.

A few months after this revelation, when a scandal erupted surrounding the firing of US Attorneys for reasons of White House policy, other researchers found that the gwb43 domain used by members of the White House staff to evade freedom of information laws by sending emails outside of official White House channels was hosted on those same SmarTech servers….“Any time all information is directed to a single computer for consolidation, it is possible, and in fact likely, that single computer will exploit the information for some purpose,” he (Connell)adds. “In the case of Ohio 2004, the only purpose I can conceive for sending all county vote tabulations to a GOP managed Man-in-the-Middle site in Chattanooga before sending the results onward to the Sec. of State, would be to hack the vote at the MIM.”
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/….._0929.html

Steve, is there any last words of wisdom for us?

Why is the word caging used to describe this type of activity. I know what it is, I’m not sure why they picked that word.

Another couple of questions. Can people take video footage of people in the public areas of polls. I’ve seen lots of photos and video on News Programs, so I suspect it’s perfectly legal. But documentation of challenges that may be based upon bogus rationales should be on video as evidence for subsequent challenges.

Also do you know if the DNC has thought about providing transportation or other aid to people who have their votes challenged so they can get to the County Registrar of Voters by the next day…to establish identity or address? Seems someone should be at every polling place with information for the challenged voter about their rights, responsibilities and resources.

ooops..my error — the ‘he’ in that paragraph at the end is Spoonamore, not Connell.

We in Kentucky are also facing some of the bureaucratic bs that comes along with voter registration, the deadline is this upcoming Monday. I know that throughout Louisville scores of students are having to face the fact that they are going to have to drive home on election day just to cast a vote. another thing that I have noticed is the reduction of people in campuses nationwide that are registering people to vote, it’s a damn shame.

On another note you all you pundit wannabes should check this out: http://www.perituspundit.com. The Pundit gives you the opportunity to compete against a national audience of political enthusiasts in picking the next President of the United States. Predict the winner and Peritus will donate $1,000 to the charity of your choice. It’s that easy. The excitement reminds me of bracket time in March.

Cheers,
Tejas

The Dems have vote protection operations in a number of states. Ironically, NYS has one of the most mature and extensive of such operaations. I’m not going to detail which states do and don’t b/c I don’t want to give the GOP a roadmap, but anybody who want to volunteer to protect the vote go http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/vpcvol2
and sign up.

The Obama campaign will hook you up in your state

Steve, Thank you for stopping by the Lake today and discussing your new book.

looseheadprop, Thank you very much for Hosting this important Book Salon.

Everyone, this is a book you need to read and pass around, if you haven’t bought one yet, there is a link above.

Thanks all.

We are also putting together a kit of model litagtion documents. Fill in the blank versions for some of the most common like requests for Injunctions or to impound the machines.

I contributed a couple adapted from some litgations a buddy of mine did (with his permission). In a perfect worls–er–we will have the kit finished in the next couple of weeks

Ironically, NYS has one of the most mature and extensive of such operaations.

Um, the Ds don’t really need to waste resources protecting their vote in NYS. Why are they bothering?

The Wisconsin suit is part of a bigger trend. The issue is known by the slang ‘no match, no vote.’ Basically the Help America Voter Act said every state has to have statewide voter databases, not records kept only at the county level. Various states have been cross-checking voter registration info with either drivers’ license or Social Security records to verify voter registration info.

There are several problems with this. First, the data entry in all these state and federal databases could have typos, forcing voters to get purged. In FL, the state and election lawyers have been in court for 2 years because the state purged something like 14- or 16-thousand Haitian-American voters in 2006, and still hasn’t restored them – plus is using the same standard in 2008. To compound it, FL doesn’t have a grace period for fixing mistakes after registration closes. So a govt temporary employee makes a typo when entering a registration and it’s up to voter to fix it.

Beyond that, states that do not have Election Day registration – here Wisconsin is exempt – are suppose to follow the National Voter Registration Act to purge voters. That involves send post cards over two federal election cycles. If the voter doesn’t vote or update their info, they are purged. The new HAVA databases have allowed states to ignore the NVRA and given them tools to illegally purge voters, though the Justice Dept is not prosecuting this. Michigan, Louisiana and Kansas are doing this. New Jersey also may have done this in 2008.

Wisconsin is an Election Day registration state, where people can show up and register and vote. So it us exempt from the NVRA. So the state’s GOP attorney general knows exactly what he is doing. He is creating bureaucratic barrier to processing voter registrations that will likely result in people being purged. Those people can show up, re-register and vote. But the delays will cause lines at the polls. That will prompt some people to leave without voting because they are in a hurry.

Here’s another thing we can do. We can create maps of precincts by voting machine type AND by the contractors who program the central tabulators. That way, if there is a problem in one precinct, or several – any kind of voting machinery issue – we can quarantine that so there is not a cascading impact on the vote count. I know this has been suggested but I do not know if it is being taken seriously.

Not sure I understand. How would this cascade happen?

I’ll try to answer these questions and then I will go. Hang on.

cadge not cage.

caging is used because the GOP does data mining and mass mailings to try bto find people whose registrations are out of date. It’s easier than a fish net metaphor.

Um, the Ds don’t really need to waste resources protecting their vote in NYS. Why are they bothering?

Because maybe not all the Rs in charge in places like Long Island or various counties in upstate are quite as honest as we might like them to be?

Can people take video footage of people in the public areas of polls. I’ve seen lots of photos and video on News Programs, so I suspect it’s perfectly legal. But documentation of challenges that may be based upon bogus rationales should be on video as evidence for subsequent challenges.

IN NYS you can and we train/encourage our poll monitors to do just that

Video-taping in polling places is tricky. The media is often let in for a few minutes at a time, but if you did that for long stretches, people from either party might complain about harassment. That’s my understanding.

I don’t know if the DNC has thought about assisting people who get provisional ballots to return to county election offices after election day to validate their registration info so their vote is counted. I suspect they would not plan for that unless it was a very tight race.

cadge, wordweb

Obtain or seek to obtain by cadging or wheedling

NYDLC is a permanent infrastructure. The idea, as part of the 50 state strategy is to try to have a Democratic Lawyers Council in every state. To do monitoring work on every election, fedral state and local.

And in between to lobby for better laws, and to provide a knowledge bank for legislators and others on protect the vote and clean elections issues

On the Spoonamore story, I can only point to my above post. I know you saw the Raw Story report today. But I broke this basic story, in a piece co-written with Bob Fitrakis in May 2007 — about how the Ohio SOS election night web site was hosted on the RNC’s servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Spoonamore is being used to get Mike Connell, the GOP guy, to be deposed under oath. This is all about finding out what happened in 2004 and how the GOP was involved. It is a high stakes legal fishing expedition that has yet to prove anything. His usefulness is understanding how these systems are vulnerable to vote count fraud.

On the model litigation, the Campaign Legal Center in DC, a non-profit is also creating legal templates for Election Day litigation.

NYDLC and organizations in other states were born out of the ashes of the Kerry campaign. Back when everybody thought Hillary would be the nominee and maybe against Guliani. Then NY would have been THE battleground state.

Also, NY has one of the biggest concentration of lawyers on the planet–and is Dem dominated (at least in the City), so it all made sense 4 years ago when we started. But the goal is to have this in all 50 states, and we had a confence last novemebr at the DNC and I was happily surprised at how many states had Democratic lawyers councils up and running

It would be overkill to try to video the whole day. But videoing a particular incident is gold

I got a mailer from them about that. As a not-for-profit theycan’t interface with th DNC.

Relates to”cadger” which is of Scottish derivation and refers to a homeless person who panhandles

It is odd that that terminolgy stuck, though. it’s pretty obscure

What do I mean by cascade in electronic vote counting systems. Computer scientists have shown that software viruses that can alter results can travel with precinct memory cards or move up the vote-count pyramid, so to speak. Thus, the magnitude of errors with paperless voting is larger than with paper-based systems in some ways.

What you want to avoid are several things: having local precinct totals be inflated to boost a county count, which will obscure whatever was altered at the local level; or software that comes from local precincts that directs county tabulators to alter the overall countywide count.

This is why CA SOS Debra Bowen went back to a paper-ballot based system, where there are controls or intentional separation of the various voting machines as the cumulative totals are counted. That way there is more control against someone gaming the count.

Thank you all for participating. If you have more questions you can e-mail me at steven@alternet.org.

If you are doing voter registration and GOTV work this fall, check out the book. It gives you a sense of the landscape and lessons from the primary season.

Of course the beauty of a paper based system is that you can recount by hand

Steve,
thank you for spending time with us and thank you double for putting together such a handy guidebook

Ian a couple of flights upstairs