Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org
Most states rely on national certification/qualification of voting systems. They tend to tout the fact that voting systems have been inspected and tested by some Independent Test Authority, though they ignore the fact that the tests are bought and paid for by the vendors. Then they point with steadfastness to the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED) who reviews the ITA findings and gives a voting system its final ‘stamp of approval’. Now we learn that the people applying that ‘stamp of approval’ are not even qualified to put ink on the stamp, let alone review the paperwork and give their approval. Imagine how the states will feel about this information. On the other hand, don’t waste your time because the truth is inconvenient so they will just ignore it….
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Here are a few “issues” we have with Riverside County, CA Registrar of Voters Ms. Barbara Dunmore:
1. Refusal to post precinct results at the precincts, as required by Fed, State and Certification documents. She claimed they might “blow away” and that posting could be a safety hazzard for the students (yeah, all those 9 p.m. students who are hanging around the campus just waiting to see election results!).
2. Claim that she HAD to spend $15 million in February ’06 to buy new Sequoia Edge II machines b/c the existing Edge I’s could not be retrofitted to accommodate the new VVPAT requirements. Unfortunately for her, three counties in CA were perfectly able to do so with no problems: Shasta (a county I formerly worked in!), Tehama and Napa. And the Sequoia Web site even touts the fact you don’t have to upgrade to retrofit.
3. She told the Board of Supervisors that the Edge IIs were the ONLY approved system in CA at that time. DFA-Temecula Valley showed the Board at that same meeting that the Secretary of State’s Web site illustrated that, indeed, only ONE system was approved at that time. Again, unfortunately for Ms. Dunmore, it was the ES&S Mark a Vote, NOT the Sequoia Edge II.
4. During the time between the closing of the polls at 8 p.m. and 1:30 the next morning, 17 memory cards went “missing”. They were unaccounted for at the time she issued the preliminary tally at 1:30 on June 7th.
5. Last week (week of June 19th), she reported another 20 precincts’ information somehow did not get entered into the canvass and had to then be entered.
6. She has prohibited any “meaningful observation” of the process at the central tabulator location, or at the 1% mandatory manual 1% audit (she calls it a “tally”), or at the counting of the absentee ballots. Election Observer Panel (EOP) members, nominated by the political party central committees and by community based organizations (CBO) and appointed by Ms. Dunmore were relegated to areas where we could not see nor hear the tallying and thus not able to verify/validate that the counts were conducted appropriately.
7. From time to time, she has prohibited video taping, claiming it could violate voter privacy (yet see what she did with the paper ballots in Art Cassel’s Op Ed piece). In all instances we assured her there would be no taping of voter identifiable information, PARTICULARLY in the case of absentee ballots, when they had already been separated from their envelopes. Still she refused.
8. She has alternately allowed and disallowed the use of tripods! Obviously the tripods allow us to steady the camera and zoom in on something meaningful. Her first excuse was “it makes the workers nervous”; the other day it was “it’s a safety hazzard – people could trip on it”.
9. She has waited until an hour before an observable event (the 1% tally of the absentee ballots) to notify EOP members of the event, knowing some live an hour or more away. This was after she instructed us to make repeated calls to her office at 8 am, 10 am, 12 noon and 2 pm to finally learn they would start at 3 pm.
10. It would appear from the attached document from the NASED that she violated items #1 and #4 and therefore, the federal qualification of the Riverside County, CA system is effectively revoked.
Is the election therefore null and void, per the NASED directive?
I don’t know, it kind of looks that way. Opinions…?
LeftIsBest #1
An election is illegal when a court of last resort says it is.
Until then it is a political football … meaning that democracy itself is a political football much of the time.
The Supreme Court of the US does not have a handle on it. They have not found a way, for instance, to determine if gerrymandering is illegal because they do not know how to make it “justiciable”, and up until now for the most part it is a “political question”, not a question for the judiciary. That is a crock.
Several cases are expected to come down soon … and observers hope that Justice Kennedy will be able to fashion some mechanism to keep gerrymandering in its ugly cage.
The case 05-204, and three companion cases, is League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.
The validity of Texas congressional redistricting plan (gerrymandering) is the subject of the lawsuit.