Vote Watch 2004
Vote/Election fraud, vote suppression, voting irregularities, voter intimidation in Election 2004

Acknowledgements

OTHER VOTING IRREGULARITIES/FRAUD

12/14/04 [Permalink]
U. S. voting procedures found to be deficient by international observers

Here is a snippet from this International Herald Tribune article published on 11/3/04:

The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.

The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.

"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

"They have one national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any other system," Olszewski said.

Olszewski, whose democratic experience began with Poland's first free election in 1989, was one of 92 observers brought in by the Vienna-based organization, which was founded to maintain military security in Europe at the height of the cold war.

Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states and included citizens of 36 countries, ranging from Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia and Belarus.

Formation of the U.S. election mission came after the State Department issued a standard letter on June 9 inviting the group to monitor the election. All 55 states in the organization have, since 1990, agreed to invite observation teams to their national elections. The decision to observe a U.S. presidential election for the first time was made because of changes prompted by controversy over the U.S. elections in 2000, involving George W. Bush and Al Gore.

"Our presence is not meant as a criticism," said Ron Gould, Olszewski's team partner and the former assistant chief electoral officer for Elections Canada. "We mainly want to assess changes taken since the 2000 election."

Speaking as voting began at 7 a.m. in the Firefighter's Memorial Hall for precincts 401 and 446 of Miami-Dade County, the observers drew sharp distinctions between U.S.-style elections and those conducted elsewhere around the world.

"Unlike almost every other country in the world, there is not one national election today," said Gould, who has been involved in 90 election missions in 70 countries. "The decentralized system means that rules vary widely county by county, so there are actually more than 13,000 elections today."

Variations in local election law not only make it difficult for election monitors to generalize on a national basis, but also prohibit the observers from entering polling stations at all in some states and counties. Such laws mean that no election observers from the organization are in Ohio, a swing state fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other polling issues.

As for electronic voting, Gould said he preferred Venezuela's system to the calculator-sized touchpads in Miami.

"Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box," Gould said. "Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive fraud."

Venezuela had trouble implementing the system, Gould added, because the ticket printers kept breaking down.

The United States is also nearly unique in lacking a unified voter registration system or national identity card, Gould said, adding that he would ideally require U.S. voters to dip a finger in an ink bowl or have a cuticle stained black after voting.

"In El Salvador, Namibia and so many other elections, the ink was extremely important in preventing challenges to multiple voting," Gould said. "In Afghanistan it didn't work so well, because they used the dipping ink for the cuticles, so it wiped right off."
...

More here, via reader LV:

Russia’s Central Electoral Commission, headed by Alexander Veshnyakov who monitored the U.S. elections in California, cited numerous flaws in the U.S. electoral system, including equipment breakdown, unreliable protection of the electronic system, and the fact that some states refused to let OSCE observers into polling stations.

“Had we had that kind of figure in Russia, many serious political statements would probably have been issued, and so on. But it did happen there, and no one can deny it,” Veshnyakov said in a Channel One television broadcast.

The complaints were voiced at a round table on the U.S. electoral system held Tuesday in the State Duma, where representatives of the commission together with parliamentarians shared their impressions from the recent presidential election they had attended as international observers, Channel One television reported.

This report formalizes OSCE's preliminary comments on the U.S. election. While the report does have good things to say about the democratic process in the U.S, it raises concerns as well, concerns that should never have existed in a country like the United States.

12/7/04 [Permalink]
Chicago Tribune investigation shows thousands of dead people remained on voter rolls in key swing states

BradBlog has a summary:

The Chicago Tribune has published today a provocative, and well-researched article about a number of Election 2004 concerns. All without a single mention of the word "blog", "leftwing" or "conspiracy theory"!

A detailed analysis by the Tribune of voter rolls in a number of states has revealed several notable concerns. (NOTE TO NY TIMES, BOSTON GLOBE and NEWSWEEK: An "analysis" is what investigative reporters sometimes do prior to announcing there is nothing worth investigating. NOTE TO BRAD BLOG READERS: Click on any of those links to find out how you can help encourage those outlets to do their job!)

Among the concerns revealed by the Tribune report published today:

FLORIDA: 64,889 dead people remained on the voters rolls on Election Day despite being listed in a database of Social Security Administration death claims.

MICHIGAN: 50,051 dead people remained on the voters rolls on Election Day.

NEW MEXICO: 5,000 dead people remained on the voter rolls on Election Day. The presidential election there was decided by 6,000 votes.

IOWA: 4,900 dead people were on Iowa's voter rolls on Election Day. Bush won Iowa by 10,000 votes.

More than 181,000 dead people in total were listed on the voter rolls in the six swing states of Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico.

Thousands more voters were registered to vote in two different places, which could have allowed them to cast more than one ballot.

OHIO: More than 90,000 ballots were discarded for including no valid choice for President either because no candidate was chosen, the counting machine failed to register their choice or they voted mistakenly for more than one candidate. Bush's "official" margin of victory in Ohio now stands at 119,000 after provisional and overseas ballots have been added to Election Night numbers which originally showed a margin of 136,000 votes.

The FBI has confirmed they are investigating the complaints made by Florida congressional candidate Jeff Fisher (partially discussed in this previous BRAD BLOG article) concerning vote-rigging in the state of Florida and elsewhere.

The BRAD BLOG congratulates the Chicago Tribune's Geoff Dougherty, Sarah Frank and the other "Tribune staff reporters" who contributed to this investigative analysis of America's democratic voting system. All are to be commended for doing the job for which they are paid, and for which so many in this country and the world desperately rely upon to provide a check and balance to those in the unchecked and corrupt corridors of power.

11/15/04 [Permalink]
Diebold Voting Machines source code analyzed by Computer Science professor used encryption key that was hacked in 1997 and no longer used elsewhere!

Via BradBlog, we have this outrage reported by the Washington Times:

Diebold was one of three companies -- including Election Systems & Software and Sequoia -- that provided updated technology for the 2004 election.

Computer Science Professor Avi Rubin of John Hopkins University analyzed Diebold's 47,609 lines of code and found it uses an encryption key that was hacked in 1997 and no longer is used in secure programs.

Rubin said Diebold has said it repaired the security flaws in subsequent programs, but that the company has not produced the code for analysis.

Diebold did return a call for comment.

The Digital Encryption Standard 56-bit encryption key used can be unlocked by a key embedded in all the source code, meaning all Diebold machines would respond to the same key.

Rubin, his graduate students and a colleague from Rice University found other bugs, that the administrator's PIN code was "1111" and that one programmer had inserted, "This is just a hack for now."

The implication is that by hacking one machine you could have access to all Diebold machines.

11/11/04 [Permalink]
Around 1,100 problems reported with electronic voting machines; numerous reports of people voting for Kerry and seeing the machine show Bush as their choice in the checkout screen

Via reader radtimes, an AP report:

Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.

The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.

But there were also several dozen voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida - who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.

In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said.

After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection. Election officials in several Florida counties where voters complained about such problems did not return calls Tuesday night.

11/2/04_2 [Permalink]
GOP falsely accuses Democratic Party of making robo-calls claiming Schwarzkopf supports Kerry; DNC says GOP doctored call from Kerry supporter Gen. McPeak to include fake endorsement. 

Here is the news report:

Lifelong Republican Richard Bonnet pays attention to politics, so when he found a message on his answering machine from Norman Schwarzkopf saying he was voting for John Kerry this year, he was momentarily stunned.

"I thought I saw Bush down in Florida, with Schwarzkopf standing on the stage next to him," Bonnet, 69, of Howell Township, said Monday. "So I called up the Monmouth County Republican headquarters and they said he was a Bush supporter."

On Sunday, the retired general gave Bush a strong endorsement in Tampa, Fla. Schwarzkopf released a statement Monday saying that the Democratic National Committee was making fraudulent phone calls and demanded that they stop.

"I am supporting President Bush for re-election because he is the candidate who has demonstrated the conviction needed to defeat terrorism," Schwarzkopf said.

The taped phone call ends with a voice saying the ad was paid for by the DNC. DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera said Republicans spliced an ad taped by Gen. Merrill McPeak to make it sound as if Schwarzkopf was speaking so they could accuse Democrats of dirty tricks. State Republicans denied being involved.

"Purposefully misleading the voters to believe that New Jersey native Gen. Schwarzkopf has endorsed Sen. Kerry is disgraceful," said Sen. Joseph Kyrillos, chairman of the New Jersey Republican State Committee. "We demand that this matter be fully investigated and the DNC should immediately halt such calls."

The taped message, which Republicans provided to The Associated Press, begins with a man identifying himself as Schwarzkopf.

"In 2000, I voted for George W. Bush, but this year I'm voting for John Kerry." The man goes on to say that Bush took his eye off the ball when it came to finding the people responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 700 New Jersey residents.

"John Kerry has a real plan to make our military stronger and to go after terrorists wherever they hide," the man says on the tape. "We need a vote for change, a vote for John Kerry."

According to Cabrera, the DNC did release an ad by McPeak, who was the Air Force commander during the Gulf War. In the ad, McPeak says he worked closely with Schwarzkopf. Also in the ad, McPeak says: "In 2000, I voted for George W. Bush and this year I'm voting for John Kerry."

McPeak's ad ends with "On Nov. 2, we need to vote for a change and vote for John Kerry."

Cabrera said he could not explain why this "dirty chicanery" was taking place, and that Democrats have dozens and dozens of military veterans, including former Gen. Wesley Clark, who support Kerry.

Bonnet said he was disgusted by the tape.

"Schwarzkopf is such a great American and a great general, and this defames him," said Bonnet. "He's one of our proud citizens of New Jersey."

The DNC issued this press release in response summarizing what happened:

Washington DC - Today, the Republican National Committee tried to falsely accuse the Democratic National Committee of claiming the endorsement of General Schwarzkopf. In fact, the RNC spliced a DNC recorded telephone call by General Merrill "Tony" McPeak, urging voters to vote for John Kerry, and attempted to peddle the doctored audio file to the press.

In response, DNC Communications Director Jano Cabrera issued the following statement:

"This is a desperate, pathetic, 11th hour dirty trick by the Republicans. In an effort to gin up a last minute media controversy and smear the Democrats, the Republicans intentionally spliced a recorded call by Four Star General 'Tony' McPeak and tried to peddle it to the press. This type of dishonesty is a fitting end to George W. Bush's failed Presidency, a Presidency that unfortunately for the American people, was also defined by deceit and deception."

General McPeak's recorded telephone call is available for download here.

Transcript of General McPeak's call:

Hi, I'm General Tony McPeak and as Chief of the Air Force during the first Gulf War, I worked closely with Colin Powell and Norm Schwarzkopf. In 2000, I voted for George W. Bush. This year I'm voting for John Kerry. George Bush took his eye off the ball and the war on terror and took us into a poorly planned war in Iraq, letting Al Qaeda, the people responsible for September 11th attack on us, regroup. John Kerry has a real plan to make the military stronger and to go after the terrorists wherever they hide. On November 2 we need to vote for change, a vote for John Kerry.

11/2/04_1 [Permalink]
Voting machine malfunctions reported in many states - impact unknown but hopefully not major

Voters Unite has a running tally.

11/1/04_2 [Permalink]
Fake email claiming to be from Joe Lockhart in John Kerry's campaign [with a johnkerry.com address] asks readers to vote for Bush

Atrios reports:

Someone has been sending out this email, from a spoofed @johnkerry.com email address claiming to be Joe Lockhart:

To all Amercans:

We as Democrats owe it to our great country to vote for the most qualified and honest man for the job of Chief of Staffand President of the United States.

With that in mind we the Democrats of Washington D.C. ask that you, the American people vote for George W. Bush for President of the United States.

Why? Because The Encumbent President has pulled this great country together in times of war, terrorist attacks and recession.

After many years of loyal service to Mr. John Kerry and one of his closest aides, I can’t in good consciousness support him any longers.

Vote Republican on November 2nd …. Vote Bush.

Thank you,

Joe Lockhart

11/1/04 [Permalink]
Voters in different states report incidents where absentee ballots were not received (in time or not at all)

Reader JT writes in from Virginia:

Last week, I took a call from a man from Darlington County, SC.  He said he works in DC now so he requested an absentee ballot from his county in SC.  A long time ago.  It hadn't arrived by last week so he called.  They told him they'd mailed it on 10/4.  He said it hadn't arrived.  They said they weren't surprised b/c lots of people are calling telling them their absentee ballots have not arrived.  He requested a replacement.  They refused to provide one.  He offered to pay the FedEx charges.  They still said it was not feasible.

Ohio Vote Suppression News notes this:

Yesterday the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition sent a letter to Cuyahoga County BofE Director Michael Vu, warning that "there is the potential for many thousands of absentee voters to be disenfranchised because they have not received their absentee ballot".

The letter was released to the media but no coverage has appeared as yet.

The letter contines: "With very minimal checking we were able to locate the names and addresses of over 100 voters who stated that as of yesterday [Thursday, October 28 -- ed.] they have still not received the absentee ballot for which they applied. Many of these voters are seniors whose application requests were copied by volunteer organizations before they were submitted to the Board."

The letter, co-signed by CASE Ohio, asked the the BofE to call all voters who submitted absentee ballot requests to let them know they can ask for a substitute by overnight mail, and to honor such requests through Saturday. As of 1:25 pm Saturday, no response had been received from Vu to this request, according to GCVRC staffer Judy Gallo.

Late absentee ballots have been documented in numerous other states by Votersunite. 

PFAW/NAACP have documented some incidents as well:

Absentee Ballots

Allowing voters to cast absentee ballots is another way to relieve pressure on the election system on Election Day, as well as to accommodate voters who have difficulty traveling to a polling site or whose schedule will have them away from home on Election Day.  Absentee ballots have also been the source of errors and disputes.  

• In California, a variety of problems beset the absentee ballot period. In San Diego County, duplicate absentee ballot packets were sent to over 1000 voters, requiring the county to call the voters and ask them to destroy one of the packets.  The county offered assurances that the processing system is set up to reject one of the ballots if both are used to vote.[i]  A number of San Diego County voters also received the wrong absentee ballot due to an error by the printing company.  The county mailed letters to 36,000 voters to alert all possible voters of possible errors.[ii] In San Bernadino County, 60,000 corrected ballots were mailed to voters after it was discovered that party affiliations were left off of a State Senate race.  Voters were allowed to use either ballot.[iii]

• In Colorado, a printer miscommunication further delayed the delivery of 13,000 absentee ballots to Denver voters.  The schedule was already tight, as election officials had to wait for a legal ruling on the ballot status of presidential candidate Ralph Nader.  An earlier batch of ballots made it from the printer into the mail, but some included faulty instructions stating that ballots needed to be returned by August 6, a reference to the primary election deadline.[iv]

• In Palm Beach County, Florida, both local Republican and Democratic officials reported voter complaints of delays and errors in their absentee ballots.  The head of the county Democratic Executive Committee said her office was inundated with calls from voters who requested their ballots months ago, but haven’t yet received them. Reported ballot errors concern missing pages that include proposed state constitutional amendments.   Many voters also complained of not being able to report this to the county elections office due to busy phone lines.  The elections office, which has 100 phone lines, reports that phones are ringing off the hook and they are fielding 7000 to 8000 calls a day.[v]

• In Indiana, a Marion County judge ordered hundreds of absentee votes thrown out in a state legislative district because of a legal dispute over which Republican candidate was to be included on the ballot. One candidate won the May primary but then suddenly moved out of the district, creating a vacancy on the ballot.  The GOP is seeking to replace the candidate but Democrats charge the first candidate didn't really move, and that Republicans want the switch because they were losing.  The state House is currently controlled by Democrats 51-49.  If the ruling stands, it could possibly affect hundreds of votes in the district, which includes Terre Haute.  It would also nullify votes in other races, including the close gubernatorial race.[vi]

• In Iowa, at least six counties have had problems with absentee voting.  Over 1000 mailed absentee ballots in Kossuth County gave incorrect voter instructions for a county agricultural race.  In Plymouth County, ballots failed to list Iowa’s 5^th Congressional District candidates.  Finally, in Des Moines, Henry, Lee and Louis counties, a judge’s name was left off of 60,000 ballots, prompting the Secretary of State to temporarily stop absentee voting in the four counties.[vii]

• In Pennsylvania, a court challenge over whether candidate Ralph Nader’s name would appear on the state’s ballot caused problems with overseas mailing of absentee ballots.  The shifting status of Nader’s listing as a presidential candidate resulted in some ballots being sent with his name and some without.  The U.S. Justice Department sought an emergency order seeking to force the state to send corrected ballots to overseas voters and extend the period for ballot returns by two weeks.[viii]  A federal judge denied the request, saying it could do more harm than good.[ix]
  In Lancaster County, election officials defied state election officials and voted along party lines to mail thousands of absentee ballots including presidential candidate Ralph Nader, even though his appearance on the ballot was the subject of court challenge and a decision was imminent.  A court threw Nader off the ballot the same day that county officials mailed ballots including his name.[x] 

• In Ohio, many counties saw absentee ballot errors.  In Hamilton County, 17,500 absentee ballots were canceled after it was discovered that they contained an error that switched the positions of a county candidate with one of the state Supreme Court candidates. Elsewhere, Hamilton and other Ohio counties were in the middle of absentee ballot distribution when a ruling came down that presidential candidate Ralph Nader had been disqualified from appearing on the ballot.  As a result, many voters will receive ballots including the candidate’s name, though the votes will not be counted.[xi]

---

[i] Helen Gao, “Duplicate absentee ballots sent,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 10/17/04.

[ii] Daniel J. Chacon, “More incorrect absentee ballots surface,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 10/12/04.

[iii] Michael P. Neufeld, “Corrected Ballots in Mail,” Mountain News, 10/11/04.

[iv] Gabrielle Crist, “Absentee ballots ‘lost’ at printer,” Rocky Mountain News, 10/20/04.

[v] Jennifer Sorentrue, “Democrats call absentee ballots wrong, or absent,” Palm Beach Post, 10/20/04.

[vi] Michele McNeil, “Legal ruling may mean vote tumult,” Indianapolis Star, 10/22/04

[vii] Jesse Folk, “Absentee Ballot Requests Break State Record,” TheIowaChannel.com, 10/13/04

[viii] Mike Bucsko, “Absentee ballots object of dispute,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10/14/04.

[ix] Mario F. Cattabiani, “Election offices don't have to send new ballots abroad,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/21/04

[x] Helen Colwell-Adams, “Demos threaten to sue over absentee ballots,” Lancaster Sunday News, 10/16/04

[xi] Bill Sloat, “Defective absentee ballots mailed out,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 10/1/04.

10/31/04 [Permalink] UPDATED 11/1/04
Charges and counter-charges between Republicans and Democrats on campaign related violence, vandalism, and theft

There are some sites/articles that are documenting this and I am merely providing links because there is too much content in these to reproduce and I don't have time to sift through the large number of alleged incidents and sort out what is a valid claim and what is an invalid claim. Clearly, some of the charges are nonsensical - e.g., Republicans blaming non-violent but confrontational protestors. Incidents of theft (which should be prosecuted) may or may not be campaign related unless campaign specific materials were stolen. Other incidents such as vandalism of campaign offices or violence against campaign offices/staff are egregious and unacceptable.

Anyway, here are some links.

Republicans Claim Democrats Are Behind Office Attacks, by David D. Kirkpatrick (New York Times)

Roundup: Levels of Violence in the Run-up to Election 2004 by No Tinfoil Hats Allowed

Thug Watch : Election 2004 (a response to Republican charges and a thug watch as well) by David Neiwert at Orcinus

10/30/04 [Permalink]
Bush Justice Department participates in unprecedented legal action to take away the rights of voters to file lawsuits to redress vote fraud or suppression

Via Buzzflash, here's a report in the Los Angeles Times:

Bush administration lawyers argued in three closely contested states last week that only the Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act, which was passed in the aftermath of the disputed 2000 election.

Veteran voting-rights lawyers expressed surprise at the government's action, saying that closing the courthouse door to aspiring voters would reverse decades of precedent.

Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, individuals have gone to federal court to enforce their right to vote, often with the support of groups such as the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters or the state parties. And until now, the Justice Department and the Supreme Court had taken the view that individual voters could sue to enforce federal election law.

But in legal briefs filed in connection with cases in Ohio, Michigan and Florida, the administration's lawyers argue that the new law gives Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft the exclusive power to bring lawsuits to enforce its provisions. These include a requirement that states provide "uniform and nondiscriminatory" voting systems, and give provisional ballots to those who say they have registered but whose names do not appear on the rolls.

"Congress clearly did not intend to create a right enforceable" in court by individual voters, the Justice Department briefs said.

In one case the Sandusky County Democratic Party sued Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, arguing that the county's voters should be permitted to file provisional ballots even if they go to the wrong polling place on election day.

The Justice Department intervened as a friend of the court on Blackwell's side.

Saturday's decision in that case, and in other recent cases from Michigan and Florida, gave the department a partial victory. On the one hand, the courts agreed with state officials who said voters may not obtain a provisional ballot if they go to the wrong polling place.

However, all three courts that ruled on the matter rejected the administration's broader view that voters may not sue state election officials in federal court.

Still, the issue may resurface and prove significant next week if disputes arise over voter qualifications. Some election-law experts believe the administration has set the stage for arguing that the federal courts may not second-guess decisions of state election officials in Ohio, Florida or elsewhere.

J. Gerald Hebert, a former chief of the department's voting-rights section, said he was dismayed that the government was seeking to weaken a measure designed to protect voters.

"This is the first time in history the Justice Department has gone to court to side against voters who are trying to enforce their right to vote. I think this law will mean very little if the rights of American voters have to depend on this Justice Department," said Hebert, who worked in the voting-rights section from 1973 to 1994.

In a statement, the Justice Department said it was simply trying to implement what it considered to be the clear intent of Congress. Other voting-rights laws, including the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which required states to allow citizens a chance to register to vote while applying for or renewing driver's licenses, have been more explicit in allowing for private enforcement, it noted.

In contrast, the Help America Vote Act says in its enforcement section that "the attorney general may bring a civil action" in federal court to challenge the actions of states that fail to follow the law.

"Where Congress expressly decided to trust judicial enforcement of a statute to the Department of Justice, as it did in HAVA, the Department has a practice of defending its jurisdiction in court," the department's statement said. The department said that, on occasion, it had opposed private enforcement in other voting-rights cases.

But some former Justice voting-rights officials and some election law and civil rights experts said the department's latest position represented a marked philosophical shift. Historically, they said, the department had been aggressive in supporting the idea of private suits as an important tool in fighting discrimination and other ills, even where such rights were not clearly spelled out by legislation.

"Before this administration, I would say that almost uniformly, the Department of Justice would argue in favor of private rights of action … to enforce statutes that regulate state and local government," said Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford University's Law School.

She said the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not originally include a private right to sue state officials who discriminated against aspiring black voters. The Justice Department backed the idea of private suits, nonetheless, in a test case that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969.

In their ruling, the justices said "the achievement of the act's laudable goal would be severely hampered … if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the attorney general."

More recently, the Justice Department also sided with private plaintiffs in a 1996 case challenging a registration fee that had been instituted by the Virginia Republican Party as a racially motivated poll tax under Section 10 of the Voting Rights Act.

The section did not expressly mention private actions but the Supreme Court, at the urging of the Justice Department, found an "implied" right to sue, said Steven J. Mulroy, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis Law School and a former lawyer in the department's voting-rights section.

"It is pretty rare for the Department of Justice to take a position that there is no private right of action to enforce a federal statute guaranteeing voting rights," he added.

10/28/04 [Permalink] UPDATED 10/31/04
College Republican National Committee (CRNC) bilks elderly Republican donors of millions of dollars through massive campaign of deception in which donors thought they were donating to the Republican election campaign; CRNC chair now runs Bush-Cheney '04 campaign in Nevada 

Via Brown University Democrats/Atrios, here's the report from the Seattle Times:

The College Republican National Committee has raised $6.3 million this year through an aggressive and misleading fund-raising campaign that collected money from senior citizens who thought they were giving to the election efforts of President Bush and other top Republicans.

Many of the top donors were in their 80s and 90s. The donors wrote checks — sometimes hundreds and, in at least one case, totaling more than $100,000 — to groups with official sounding-names such as "Republican Headquarters 2004," "Republican Elections Committee" and the "National Republican Campaign Fund."

But all of those groups, according to the small print on the letters, were simply projects of the College Republicans, who collected all of the checks.

And little of the money went to election efforts.

Of the money spent by the group this year, nearly 90 percent went to direct-mail vendors and postage expenses, according to records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Some of the elderly donors, meanwhile, wound up bouncing checks and emptying their bank accounts.

"I don't have any more money," said Cecilia Barbier, a 90-year-old retired church council worker in New York City. "I'm stopping giving to everybody. That was all my savings that they got."

Barbier said she "wised up." But not before she made more than 300 donations totaling nearly $100,000 this year, the group's fund-raising records show.

Now, she said, "I'm really scrounging."

In Van Buren, Ark., Monda Jo Millsap, 68, said she emptied her savings account by writing checks to College Republicans, then got a bank loan of $5,000 and sent that, too, before totaling her donations at more than $59,000.

College Republicans serve as the party's outreach organization on college campuses. The group has been a starting place for many prominent conservatives, including Bush adviser Karl Rove, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed.

Once a part of the Republican National Committee, the group is now independent. It is set to help get out the vote for Tuesday's election.

Officers of the College Republican National Committee did not respond to questions about their fund raising.

"I think the College Republican National Committee is an amazing organization which is getting a lot of young people involved in the political process," said Paul Gourley, the group's treasurer, who signed many of the fund-raising letters.
...
But since at least 2001, some leaders of College Republicans have objected to the tone and targeting of the fund raising done by Response Dynamics, the Virginia company that handles the direct-mail campaign.

Response Dynamics officials could not be reached for comment.

"We felt their fund-raising practices were deceptive, to say the least," said George Gunning, former treasurer of the College Republicans.

Gunning said he and two other board members fought to cut ties with Response Dynamics but were blocked by other leaders led by Scott Stewart, the chairman of the College Republicans from 1999 to 2003. As chairman, Stewart was the paid, full-time manager of the organization. Gunning said he was assured that fund-raising tactics would change.

The board debated the fund-raising practices after the family of an elderly Indiana woman with Alzheimer's disease demanded that her donations be returned. The woman's family said it had sent a registered letter asking that she be taken off the mailing list, but the solicitations continued.

Only after a newspaper reported on the story did the College Republicans refund $40,000 to the family, according to Jackie Boyle, one of the woman's nieces.

"I think this is a nationwide scam," Boyle said on hearing of recent complaints. "They're covering the whole country ... they need to be investigated."

Stewart is the director of Bush's Nevada campaign operation, and campaign officials said he would not be available to comment for this story.

The Washington State Attorney General's Office received at least six complaints about the College Republicans fund-raising letters from 2000 to 2002, but has no record of any complaints since then. The complaints cited "fund raising representations" and "senior exploitation." The Attorney General's Office wrote letters to the College Republicans, but a spokeswoman could not determine the outcome of the complaints yesterday.
...
This year, as millions of dollars flowed in, College Republicans falsely claimed in letters that checks were only trickling in and that the group was in a constant budget crisis.

And the elderly continued to be a major source of donations.

There are far more retired people giving to College Republicans than to any other IRS-regulated independent political committee, IRS records indicate.
...
Donors interviewed this week frequently expressed disbelief when they were told how much they gave to the College Republicans.

"That can't be true," said Francis Lehar, a 91-year-old retired music publisher, when he was told records showed he gave the College Republicans nearly $23,000. "I have donated to dozens of Republican causes. Some of them might be the Republican Party organizations."

From January through September, the Massachusetts man wrote 90 checks to the group, records show.

"It surprises me that it goes to them and not to the other names that they had," he said. "I admire their skill in writing letters." [eRiposte note: Looks like this guy wants to join them!]
...
[Another person] grew concerned when repeated letters came earlier this year asking for donations for a "Republican Headquarters 2004 Membership Card."

The card was merely a block of text inside a dotted line on the back of the letter. The holder was supposed to cut it out and carry it with her.

But the letter was infused with urgency.

"If I do not have your completed RH membership renewal form within the next ten days, your membership will be put on suspension," one letter said.

"President Bush cannot afford your membership and involvement in the Republican Party to be wavering at this crucial time."

The group wanted a donation of $25 to $500 for the card. If the donor declined, he or she was urged to send at least $5 "to cover the cost of having the card printed for you."

"You had to pay something for the membership card," the retired bookkeeper said. "I sent in four different checks to him and every time he said he didn't receive them."

The four checks totaled $1,105.

"He kept saying he was going to cancel me. He was constantly asking for money."

For her and other donors, the mail was part nuisance, part companion. Several spoke of sorting the mail and writing checks almost as their job this campaign year. And many thought their work alone would make the difference in a Bush victory.

"And they kept telling me I've got to do this or we can't win," the retired bookkeeper said. "You see, I was the only one. They said the others had quit. I was the only one they were writing to, I thought."

Where the money goes

The College Republicans had another warning in September 2003, when the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, issued a report on the explosive fund-raising growth by the College Republicans. The report noted that several elderly donors who were contacted did not appear to know to whom they had given money.

...About $9 million of the College Republicans' reported spending this year appeared to go into fund-raising expenses, according to a Times analysis of reports filed with the IRS.

About $313,000, roughly 3 percent, went for travel, convention expenses and "hospitality." About $210,000 went to payroll expenses, helping pay for campus organizers who have been drumming up support for the GOP ticket among young people.

The large amount of money devoted to fund raising, and the small amount for political activities, is unusual among the top ranks of the burgeoning field of so-called 527 independent political groups.

Of the $20 million the anti-Bush group MoveOn.org spent, according to its filings, 93 percent went to media, advertising, marketing and polling.

Of the $13.7 million spent by the anti-John Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 90 percent went to media, advertising and media consulting.
...
Most donors interviewed said they get up to 50 solicitations in the mail each day. That pile can include four or more from the College Republicans.

"My house looks like a post office, and I'm not exaggerating," said Anne Kravic, a retired school-district employee in Parma, Ohio.

Kravic rubber-bands each day's mail and marks the top of the pile with the date. As the bundles take over the house, she has stopped inviting people over.

"I wouldn't say that a single week passed I didn't send something and sometimes twice a week, depending on how serious the situation was according to them," she said.

Her small monthly pension cannot keep up with the life of a political financier.

"I'm tired of it. I'm quitting. It is too much for me. My bank account has been overdrawn already," she said.

Elliot Baines is an 84-year-old Florida retiree who says he has a hard time just carrying the mail he gets each day now.

"It's almost too much for me to handle," he said.

Baines was surprised to hear he had given more than $63,000 and that it had all gone to College Republicans. He said he was swayed to give, sometimes against his better instincts, by the power of the letters.

"I thought if I paid them off once it would send them away, but it just encourages them to send more," he said. "It is just a rat race in this house to pay off these people and hope that they quit.

"But they don't. They keep sending."

Josh Marshall of Talkingpointsmemo adds:

The guy at the center of all this seems to be Scott Stewart, chairman of the CRNC from 1999 until last year.

He left to run the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign in Nevada.

10/27/04_2 [Permalink]
Demos Report: "Democracy at Risk - Challenges to Election Integrity"

Via Votelaw, I came across this Demos report which is in my must-read list (which I will hopefully get to after this election). Here's the table of contents:

1. Provisional Balloting
Placebo Ballots: Will "Fail-Safe" Voting Fail?
2. Purging Voter Rolls
Purged!: How a patchwork of flawed and inconsistent voting systems could deprive millions of Americans of the right to vote
3. Felony Disenfranchisement
Democracy Denied: The Racial History and Impact of Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States
4. Election Fraud
Securing the Vote: An Analysis of Election Fraud
5. National Voter Registration Act
Demos project helps states implement the 1993 election law, also known as the "motor voter" law.
6. Biographies - Democracy Experts
7. Appendix

10/27/04 [Permalink]
A likely explanation for the GOP's minority-vote suppression efforts (other than the fact that it is easier to suppress than White votes): RNC poll shows Bush will lose otherwise. More details on GOP vote suppression plan become clear. 

Kevin Drum of Political Animal points this out:

THE MINORITY VOTE....Hmmm. Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio has just finished a survey of 12 battleground states and finds Bush and Kerry tied with 47% of the vote apiece. But when he weights for minority turnout based on the 2000 exit polls, Kerry is ahead 49.2%-45.7%. And when he further updates the weighting to take into account the most recent census results, Kerry is ahead 49.9%-44.7%.

As Fabrizio blandly puts it, "It is clear that minority turnout is a wildcard in this race and represents a huge upside for Sen. Kerry and a considerable challenge for the President's campaign." More accurately, if Fabrizio is right — that Kerry is ahead by 5% overall in the battleground states — Kerry is a sure winner on November 2.

Suddenly the Bush campaign's obsession with challenging voters in minority neighborhoods makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Their own internal polling is probably telling them the same thing that Fabrizio's poll says: unless they somehow manage to keep the minority vote down, they're doomed.

NOTE: The press release with the poll results is here. However, it's a PDF file that blew up my computer when I tried to open it. I eventually had to download it to my hard drive and reboot my PC in order to read it. Fair warning.

Via Josh Marshall, New Donkey has this to say:

While this scheme has been best documented in Ohio, I'll bet you a fist full of buckeyes that similar plans are under way in other battleground states with large minority populations. Hence the "voter fraud" cries from the GOP. "You know how these people are," is the implicit message. It is highly reminiscent of the Bush-Cheney campaign's successful strategy in 2000 of preemptively claiming victory in Florida and then depicting any effort to actually get the votes counted as an election-stealing enterprise.

I don't know exactly who the "volunteers" are who are planning to flood African-American polling places in Ohio to gum up the works and mess with the minds and ballots of voters. But given the rather limited number of black Republicans available, I have a clear mental image of some pasty-faced, bow-tie clad Federalist Society dweeb from Case-Western Law School showing up at an inner-city Cleveland precinct spouting 1953 case law at angry voters who know how often this sort of crap was pulled on African-Americans in the Deep South.

Now I have no particular reason to doubt the physical courage of conservative activists, and absolutely no reason to doubt their willingness to engage in bully-boy tactics. A good precedent was provided by the famous Brooks Brothers Riot of November 22, 2000, when a gang of Republican operatives, including quite a few GOP congressional staff down from Washington, succeeded in intimidating the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board into abandoning a hand recount of presidential ballots. But if this year's Republican intimidation tactics are half as bad as I suspect they will be, they may simply fortify the determination of their targets to get out and get in their votes.

Today the DLC called on President Bush to personally condemn any wholesale challenges to minority voters on or before Election Day. He's about as likely to do that as he is to suddenly admit he's made a bunch of mistakes over the last four years. But at a minimum, he should have the decency to warn his campaign's "volunteers" that they may experience more than a $100 worth of unpleasantness if they spend November 2 randomly hassling minority voters.

Via New Donkey, we have this note from TAPPED:

First, the GOP, using what appear to qualify as illegal methods, has attempted to mislead thousands of Democratic-leaning voters in Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, into thinking they'd be registered but are not. (And Ed Gillespie, whose own outfit is funding these efforts via Sproul & Associates and God knows what other firms and consultants, is alleging Democratic fraud in precisely those states! Black is white. Up is down.) Consequently, those thousands of people are going to show up at polls and probably run into a lot of confusion and paperwork and problems. At the same time, Republican secretaries of state and election officials in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere are pushing interpretations of election statutes that further muddy the waters for those who do get to vote.

Having done as much as possible to create the conditions for a confusing election, the GOP is getting ready to cast the inevitable results of that confusion -- people turning up in the wrong precincts, people who've moved from the neighborhood they originally registered and are trying to vote wherever they live now, and so forth -- as symptoms of outright election fraud. On Election Day, the GOP will challenge as many votes as they can at the polls, on whatever pretext is handy. They've already said they will. And then, if they're behind at the end of the day, GOP officials will start alleging massive voter fraud in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere, whatever the facts on the ground are. That will give them a rhetorical advantage in the short-term -- if, say, John Kerry is far enough ahead that he declares victory, but there are still some votes to be counted or re-counted. And it's important for the long-term, too. If Kerry does win, but only narrowly, the GOP will allege that the Democrats stole the election, which will set the stage for later Republican efforts to shut down Kerry's ability to govern and deny him legitimacy.

Look, I don't want any illegitimate ballots counted. Elections should be free and fair; I'm glad we have rules and those rules should be followed. But it's worth noting that, at this point in our political history, one party has an institutional interest in keeping as many Americans as possible from voting. And that is an interest they appear determined to pursue by whatever methods they can get away with.

UPDATE: Don't forget media bias! James Wolcott notes another pre-spin, courtesy of Fox -- liberal media bias could swing the election against Bush by as much as five points. Five points!

I have a feeling there is almost no permutation of a close Kerry victory the GOP will be willing to accept as legitimate.

10/26/04 [Permalink] UPDATED 10/30/04
Republican officials across the country try to suppress votes by willfully misrepresenting Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to demand IDs when they are not required; other HAVA implementations disenfranchising voters reported by the Century Foundation.

Here's a relevant extract from Alec Applebaum's article in The New Republic:

The main purpose of HAVA was to require states to create voter databases that would help them screen out mistaken or ineligible ballots by January of this year. Though they could have gotten federal money to create these computerized registries, 41 legislatures took waivers, allowing them to put the databases on hold until 2006. Nonetheless, the Help America Vote Act will affect this November's elections--just not in the way its name implies. Instead of building comprehensive voting systems, Republican officials in several states are exploiting HAVA's voter-identification requirements to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. 
...
The ID rules in HAVA have their roots in the Ford-Carter Commission, a bipartisan effort that, in 2001, recommended changes to voting procedures in the wake of the 2000 Florida election debacle. Many of the Commission's recommendations were eventually adopted by Congress--as part of HAVA. But so was the Commission's ambiguity about using ID rules to protect voters' rights and diminish the risk of fraud. Tova Andrea Wang, who staffed the 2001 Commission, says, "ID was the most controversial provision when this whole thing was being hashed out." 

The question of how to verify that a voter belongs at a polling place provokes strong partisan sentiments, because small errors have decided dozens of races. John Mark Hansen, a University of Chicago scholar who researched voter identification for the 2001 Commission, found that, since 1948, 32 senators, 41 governors, and 31 electoral college slates prevailed by less than a 1 percent margin. Hansen also found that roughly 5 percent of Americans have no photo identification. And these Americans tend to be poorer, less educated, and more urban. Since Democrats historically have outnumbered Republicans in this demographic, each party suspects the other of manipulating voter rolls. "Republicans are convinced that Democrats pack a lot of noncitizens [onto the rolls], and Democrats are convinced that Republicans pile on unnecessary restrictions," says Hansen. 
...
The Republicans had another, implicit argument: A law that demands physical documents makes things easier on local officials. "Signature validation imposes significant costs on election administrators," noted Hansen's 2001 report. "Proof of identity places burdens on voters, especially voters who are poor and urban." 

HAVA struck a compromise between these burdens. It requires identification only from people who register for the first time by mail. The identification can be a bank statement, utility bill, driver's license, or another government document. And, even if a voter never provides identification, a poll worker must give the voter a provisional ballot. By requiring identification only from newcomers who haven't visited the county clerk's office, HAVA entrusts local election officials to decide whether voters are who they claim to be. And it ultimately protects voters by telling states to set up rules for counting provisional ballots. "HAVA does not require identification in order to have a vote counted," says Wendy Weiser, a lawyer with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. But many Republican election officials are conducting this year's vote as if it does. 

Around the country, GOP officials are downplaying or ignoring HAVA's voter protections. South Carolina's election workers' manual--authorized by the state elections commission, which is chaired by a Republican--contradicts HAVA's provisional ballot requirements. "If a person presents himself ... without a valid [photo ID or registration certificate]," it says, "he/she should not be allowed to vote." In Colorado, where the chief election officer is also a Republican, the new voter registration form lists a driver's license or state-issued ID number as "required," even though the law allows other documents. And, in Bond's home state of Missouri, the law lets partisan poll workers waive ID requirements. It requires documents from "some government agency" or a post-secondary school at the polling place. (Poorer people are less likely to attend college.) But, if Ashcroft leaves his wallet in the car, he'll have no hassle. "Personal knowledge of the voter by two supervisory election judges is acceptable voter identification," says the law. Hypothetically, partisan election judges could waive in voters from their own party whom they "recognize," while barring others from the polling place. 

In South Carolina's coastal Georgetown County, the list of acceptable identifications excludes entitlement cards, such as Social Security and Medicare cards. Fearing that these rules would make it too difficult for many poor people to register, a Democratic activist named Carol Winans decided to conduct a door-to-door registration drive. But, when she went to collect blank registration forms for this effort, county election commission Chairman Herb Bailey, a Republican, refused to let her have them. Bailey told me that the state election commission advised him to cut off volunteer registration efforts, on the grounds that voters can register themselves easily enough: "It might not be my personal preference, but it's the law." But Winans smells partisan trickery. "They saw Democrats volunteering and said, 'Carol, why would you want all these uninformed voters who don't take the trouble to register themselves?'" she says. 

...it is poll workers, not judges, who will largely determine what happens on Election Day, and a case in South Dakota suggests that Republicans can exploit legal confusion. A 2003 law in that state allows signed affidavits as identification, but voters on or near Indian reservations testified that officials barred them from a June 1 primary for not carrying documents. Bret Healy, a former head of the South Dakota Democratic Party, runs a voter-access organization called the Four Directions Committee. He mounted a campaign to get postings at each polling place to explain that affidavits were legit--a vital point for Native Americans who often don't carry government-issued cards. Healy's campaign succeeded in time for November 2. But he still expects trouble. "The message that you don't need an ID never sunk in with election workers," he says. 

The basic problem is that Congress has legislated rational voting processes but not obliged states to act rationally. "Under HAVA, every state is supposed to have an administrative complaint procedure," Wang says. "This has been completely ignored." So poll workers referring to state interpretations of HAVA will determine who gets to vote on November 2. 

Via reader radtimes, here is a report by the Century Foundation.

This report reveals that in many jurisdictions around the country, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is being implemented in ways that will disenfranchise voters rather than ensure that every eligible citizen can vote and that every vote is counted. Provides detailed state-by state coverage of the obstacles and lawsuits happening now, and discusses what effect they could have on November 2nd.

10/25/04 [Permalink] UPDATED 10/30/04
E-voting - the nightmare in the making

I had postponed coverage on this topic because of the vast amount of material that I need to cover. I finally decided it's time to cover what I can.

For almost everything you want to know about the promises and major perils of unchecked e-voting (without paper backups) go to Bev Harris' Black Box Voting. 

This article in the WSJ [via reader Radtimes] covers one of the e-voting machine vendors Diebold:

A leading maker of automated-teller machines and vaults, Diebold rushed into the U.S. electronic-voting market just six days after the November 2000 election. With Congress promising billions of dollars in funds for voting modernization nationwide, Diebold looked like the prime winner. Its stock rose 27% between the Nov. 7 election and the Supreme Court's Dec. 13 decision that made George W. Bush the winner.

Today, Diebold is the biggest provider of electronic-voting machines, with some 48,000 to be used this election in 10 states. But its effort to break into the market has proved to be what the company's chairman and chief executive, Walden O'Dell, has called "a minefield."

Some of the mines:

• Diebold's secret software for its computerized voting-management system mistakenly ended up on the Internet, where it was found to have numerous security flaws.

• Mr. O'Dell, a major Republican fund-raiser, committed a highly publicized gaffe by sending a letter to fellow Bush supporters committing to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to the president this year. Ohio is considered a critical state to win in this election and could determine the winner in a close race.
 
• In California, the company is the subject of civil fraud charges over its newest voting equipment, the AccuVote TSx, whose battery and software problems during the March primaries caused 55% of San Diego polling places to open at least one hour late. The company had told California officials that one version of its voting machine was within days of federal certification, and it wasn't.
 
Many states, including Ohio, where Diebold is based in North Canton, have delayed purchases to see how well the machines fare in this election.
...
About 29% of registered voters, or more than 50 million Americans, are expected to use touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold or one of its rivals this November, according to Election Data Services, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm focused on election issues. That's up from 12.6% in 2000.

The touch-screen technology in electronic-voting machines is very similar to ATMs...
...
With Diebold's rivals -- Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software -- making inroads in Florida, the company moved quickly to target other states. And in March 2002, just two months after Diebold completed the Global Election purchase, Maryland ordered $17 million of Diebold electronic-voting equipment for four counties. Two months later, Georgia signed a $54 million contract to buy 22,000 Diebold machines for the state's 159 counties.

But by 2003, as attention turned to the bitterly partisan presidential election, the security of the machines started to be questioned. Bev Harris, an author researching a book on electronic-ballot tampering, had discovered a cache of files on the Internet written by Diebold's computer-programming staff in Vancouver. Among the files Ms. Harris says she found was the source code, or base layer of software, that enables Diebold's voter-management system to work. Employees were using the Internet site "as an online filing cabinet," says Ms. Harris.

In July 2003, an intermediary passed the source-code file to Aviel Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who asked a few graduate students to review the code. Within an hour, they had discovered that the software's encryption system was one "everyone knew was broken since 1998," Mr. Rubin says. That same day, they found the key used to open all the machines was the same -- 1-1-1. Mr. Rubin's verdict: "Diebold's code was absolutely atrocious."

The report set off a firestorm. Only two days earlier, Maryland had awarded Diebold a nearly $56 million contract to provide approximately 11,000 touch-screen voting machines. A week later, the company issued a 27-page retort, asserting that the "alleged scenarios could not occur with an actual election process due to the checks and balances" in the equipment and in accepted election procedures.

Two weeks later, the letter by Mr. O'Dell promising to deliver Ohio to President Bush became public when Democrats in the Ohio state legislature got a copy of it. Even election officials who had awarded the company business were taken aback. "When the chief executive of a company that manufactures voting equipment writes a letter like that it adds not just fuel to the fire but causes an explosion," says Chris Riggall, press secretary for Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox.

It took Diebold a month to finally address the issue. In an interview with the Plain Dealer newspaper of Cleveland on Sept. 16, 2003, Mr. O'Dell admitted to being "a real novice on the political side." In June 2004, the company amended its ethics policy to forbid top corporate executives and employees of its election-systems companies from making donations or taking part in other political activities, except for voting.

Still, the bad news for Diebold continued. Two more reports commissioned by Maryland officials found securities risks in the AccuVote system. Its machines experienced a number of problems in California during the March primaries other than those in San Diego that led California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to decertify all electronic-voting machines, including Diebold's, the next month. In September, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said he would join a lawsuit filed by Ms. Harris, the author who found Diebold's source code on the Internet, on behalf of the state government alleging Diebold had fraudulently said its equipment had been federally certified when it hadn't. If Diebold settles the case or Ms. Harris wins in court, she stands to get a share of the penalties. A company spokesman said Diebold is working diligently to resolve its issues in California and to rebuild trust in its products.

This article in Time [via reader radtimes] also covers the perils of e-voting machines, but also points out how the Bush administration and the Republican Congress didn't bother to set up unified national standards for new voting machines. 

Creating another election ripe for dispute was hardly the intent when our elected legislators passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, earmarking some $4 billion to streamline voting standards and allow states to modernize their voting systems. Although they passed the act, Congress and the White House were slow, perhaps recklessly so, in setting up the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to implement it. So while states helped themselves to funding for new voting machines, the EAC developed no national standards for using them. Likewise, HAVA mandated provisional voting so that nobody would be refused a ballot for the wrong reason. But the law was ambiguous in some key areas, opening the door for states to create different rules and inviting lawsuits. 

Democrats and Republicans may well continue legal dueling over the fine points of election law even as the votes are being counted and beyond. Here is a guide to the issues that may arise on Election Day and after:

WILL THE MACHINERY WORK? 
Electronic voting machines were supposed to have provided a seamless voting process this time, but they have only fed concerns about snafus on Election Day. The touch-screen machines, which will be used by about 30% of voters, have been shown to be vulnerable to tampering, to break down and to lose votes or record none at all. Worse, in every state where they are used except Nevada, the machines produce no paper trail of votes. And e-voting machines can't do recounts. On a second go-round, they simply repeat the outcome they offered the first time. 

Diebold, the leading manufacturer of e-voting machines, suffered the indignity of having its home state of Ohio disqualify its machines because of suspect technology. A December 2003 report by Compuware Corp., a widely respected software and computer-services firm, found at least four security weaknesses in Diebold's AccuVote-TS. Most distressing: anyone who lays his hands on a voting supervisor's card could access the system and tamper with results. A 2003 Johns Hopkins University study found that hackers could devise their own smart cards and vote multiple times or alter voting results. A Diebold spokesman insists that the company has addressed the problems of AccuVote-TS, but neither Ohio nor California is buying it. California decertified 14,000 Diebold machines earlier this year. 

Any voting system is vulnerable to imperfection, abuse and human error. And it should not be forgotten that 12% of voters nationwide (and more than 70% in dead-heat Ohio) will be using the punch-card ballots that caused such havoc in Florida in 2000. But the lack of transparency in electronic voting may be particularly problematic. 

"The reason people trust elections is that they can see what's going on," says David Dill, a computer-science professor at Stanford University and founder of the Verified Voting Foundation. "With electronic voting, the handling of the ballots, putting ballots in the ballot box and counting of votes—all of that is hidden inside computers where nobody can see what's happening. [That] leaves you really at the mercy of the machine."

More here in The Nation (via reader PT).

UPDATE 10/30/04

Reader radtimes sends this in:

The issues of electronic voting system security and reliability first gained public attention in July 2003, when researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore published a detailed study of the software code used in the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. The report's charges of a startling number of security vulnerabilities and a complete lack of adherence to industry-standard software design and testing methodologies put Diebold Election Systems and its direct recording electronic, or DRE, systems at the center of the debate about e-voting security and reliability.

Working under the direction of professor Aviel Rubin, computer science graduate students found the following:

• No encryption protection for dial-up modem connections used to upload unofficial polling-station results.
• A lack of encryption protection on the smart cards that voters used to cast their votes and poll workers used to gain administrative access to the systems.
• A complete disregard for disciplined software change-control and testing processes.
• A questionable choice in the decision to use the programming language C++. Most experts agree that it's easier for inexperienced programmers to introduce glitches and security holes using C++ than it would be if they were using other languages, such as Java.

Although denounced as inaccurate and unrealistic by Diebold and IT industry lobbying groups that favor the use of electronic voting systems, the Johns Hopkins study was followed by two other independent studies, by Science Applications International Corp. and RABA Technologies LLC, that confirmed many of Rubin's findings and uncovered additional concerns.

In fact, the January 2004 study by the RABA Innovative Solutions Cell outlined how researchers were able to guess the passwords for the smart cards used by poll supervisors, allowing them to reinitialize voter cards and vote multiple times.

The team also exploited a 6-month-old unpatched vulnerability in the Microsoft Corp. software used on the back-end Dell Inc. server, that allowed them to upload, download or execute code on the back-end vote tabulation server. That server used an unencrypted modem connection to report local poll results at the end of an election.

RABA also found gaping holes in the procedure by which precincts uploaded votes to their local election boards. As a result of an incomplete implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, the team was able to conduct a "man in the middle" attack and use a remote laptop to receive the election results. An attacker who did that would "be able to acquire the name and password to access the server," the report concluded. "With this name and password in hand, the attacker could upload modified results to the server -- all in real time."

Also see this useful report by Voters Unite.

10/21/04_2 [Permalink] UPDATED 11/2/04
PFAW Report: "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow - Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today"
and
Republican Ballot Security Programs: Vote Protection or Minority Vote Suppression- or Both?: A Report to The Center for Voting Rights and Protection by C. Davidson et al.

This PFAW report is another good one worth reading. Some extracts:

In a nation where children are taught in grade school that every citizen has the right to vote, it would be comforting to think that the last vestiges of voter intimidation, oppression and suppression were swept away by the passage and subsequent enforcement of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. It would be good to know that voters are no longer turned away from the polls based on their race, never knowingly misdirected, misinformed, deceived or threatened.

Unfortunately, it would be a grave mistake to believe it.

In every national American election since Reconstruction, every election since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, voters – particularly African American voters and other minorities – have faced calculated and determined efforts at intimidation and suppression. The bloody days of violence and retribution following the Civil War and Reconstruction are gone. The poll taxes, literacy tests and physical violence of the Jim Crow era have disappeared. Today, more subtle, cynical and creative tactics have taken their place.
...
As this report details, voter intimidation and suppression is not a problem limited to the southern United States. It takes place from California to New York, Texas to Illinois. It is not the province of a single political party, although patterns of intimidation have changed as the party allegiances of minority communities have changed over the years.

In recent years, many minority communities have tended to align with the Democratic Party. Over the past two decades, the Republican Party has launched a series of “ballot security” and “voter integrity” initiatives which have targeted minority communities. At least three times, these initiatives were successfully challenged in federal courts as illegal attempts to suppress voter participation based on race.

The first was a 1981 case in New Jersey which protested the use of armed guards to challenge Hispanic and African-American voters, and exposed a scheme to disqualify voters using mass mailings of outdated voter lists. The case resulted in a consent decree prohibiting efforts to target voters by race.

Six years later, similar “ballot security” efforts were launched against minority voters in Louisiana, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana. Republican National Committee documents said the Louisiana program alone would “eliminate at least 60- 80,000 folks from the rolls,” again drawing a court settlement.

And just three years later in North Carolina, the state Republican Party, the Helms for Senate Committee and others sent postcards to 125,000 voters, 97 percent of whom were African American, giving them false information about voter eligibility and warning of criminal penalties for voter fraud – again resulting in a decree against the use of race to target voters.

Historical Perspective

This report includes detailed accounts of the recent incidents listed above, and additional incidents from the past few decades. The report also lays out a historical review of more than a hundred years of efforts to suppress and intimidate minority voters following emancipation, through Reconstruction and the “Second Reconstruction,” the years immediately following the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
...
Voter Intimidation in Recent Years

The Historical Roots of Voter Intimidation and Suppression

Conclusion

End notes

This other report is another good one.

10/21/04_1 [