An instructional web page, explaining the ES&S touch-screen electronic voting machines in use during Florida’s disputed FL-13 U.S. House Election gives faulty information to voters about the way the county’s paperless voting systems works, The BRAD BLOG has learned.
The information offered on the county’s election website, concerning the crucial process during which voters might choose to adjust any “undervotes” found on their electronic “ballots” at the end of the voting process, is misleading and incorrect. According to several sources, the systems in use during the contested November 7th U.S. House race between Vern Buchanan (R) and Christine Jennings (D) did not operate as advertised by the Sarasota County website.
The county web page in question is described as “a technical look at how the ES&S iVotronic touch screen system works.” Yet, Sarasota’s ES&S iVotronic systems, apparently, didn’t work as described on the site.
The “VOTE button” on the iVotronic, as explained by the text on the website, will cast the vote only after the summary page is given to the voters, allowing them to explicitly approve or disapprove of any undervotes found on their “ballots.”
“The iVotronic will review the ballot for any races for which the voter did not cast a vote (undervote), and asks if this is the intent of the voter,” according to the webpage. The voter is then said to receive a YES or NO option to confirm their intention of undervoting in the particular race(s).
(The webpage is here. Click the #5 option to see how the “VOTE button” on the system is supposed to work. A screenshot of the page follows at the end of this article.)
Lowell Finley, however, an attorney for VoterAction.org — one of several non-partisan organizations leading a voter lawsuit demanding a revote in the election — tells The BRAD BLOG that “the statement on the Sarasota website is false” and that voters were not given such an option on November 7th.
We also inquired about the matter on Friday afternoon with the office of “the Honorable” Kathy Dent, Sarasota County’s Supervisor of Elections…
Someone who answered the phone in the Administrative Office, but subsequently refused to either give her name or allow herself to be quoted even off the record, confirmed that there is no explicit “YES or NO” confirmation concerning undervotes at the end of the voting process before the “ballot” is finally cast.
(As a side note, the same person at the Sarasota Elections office said that Supervisor Dent — who has still yet to resign, but should — had just left to go on a week’s vacation. Seems rather ill-advised timing, given the important ongoing events unfolding down there at this moment, but what do we know.)
The contested election now stands with just 369 votes between Republican Buchanan and Jennings according to the state certified results. But some 18,000 votes were lost from “ballots” which failed to register any vote at all for either candidate in Jennings’s strongest areas. That undervote rate, approximately 15%, is far higher than any other county in the same district for the same race. The paper Absentee Ballot undervote rate in the same county for that same race was just 2.6%, which would seem to counter the disingenuous claims of Buchanan and his supporters who claim that voters purposely chose not to vote in that particular race for some reason.
Many voters have given statements to the Jennings campaign, to local newspapers, and to attorneys who are challenging the election claiming they were disenfranchised after they had tried several times to vote for Jennings, but the machine failed to register their vote.
The complete misleading text from the Sarasota County web page — which both Finley and the official from the Sarasota County Supervisors of elections office confirmed is inaccurate — follows below, along with Finley’s explanation of how the confirmation page on the voting machines actually worked and a screenshot of the inaccurate information on the Sarasota County Elections website…
The VOTE button finalizes the voter’s selections and casts his/her vote, then clears the screen in preparation for the next voter.
Upon proper selection of choices, the voter is brought to a summary screen which displays those choices on each item on the ballot. At this time, the voter can make changes by touching the ballot item on the summary screen, whereby they will go back to that item to review or change a choice. When finished, the review screen reflects the updated selections. The iVotronic will review the ballot for any races for which the voter did not cast a vote (undervote), and asks if this is the intent of the voter. Upon selection of “YES”, the VOTE button will illuminate and the voter will be prompted to press the button to cast the ballot. If the undervote question is answered “NO”, then the voter will have the opportunity to return to the ballot and make a choice. At this time the voter can review the summary screen and press the VOTE button to cast the ballot.
Finley explained to The BRAD BLOG in a brief Email late last week how the so-called confirmation process on the voting machines actually worked (or didn’t) on November 7th in Sarasota’s FL-13 race…
UPDATE 1/23/07: Political Cortex moves the ball forward in noting that Florida statute “covering the ‘electronic voter interface’ (video display ballot for a typical voter, audio ballot for a sight-impaired voter)” would seem to indicate that Sarasota County is in violation of the law by not asking for explicit voter approval concerning undervotes. Here’s the relevant passage from the Florida Election Code [appendix definitions and pp. 20-22]…
The system must communicate to the voter the fact that the voter has failed to vote in a race (under vote) or has failed to vote the number of allowable candidates in any race (under vote) and require the voter to confirm his intent to undervote before casting the ballot.(Hat-tip Jim Soper for the heads up to the incorrect info on the Sarasota website!)
If this isn’t grounds for a recount, whatever would be? 18,000 (that’s THOUSAND!!) votes NOT cast for that office but that were cast for those above and below on the ballot. I don’t THINK so!
Why is it that 99+% of election officials (exceptions would be folks like Ion Sancho, Bruce Fink, and Freddie Oakley) are so damn defensive and refuse to acknowledge that computer systems actually CAN fail or be compromised?
This is pretty black and white, and the stonewalling going on here is galling. And then the Voting Supv goes on a week’s vacation!!
These guys are competing to be a close second to Riverside County in CA for secrecy and uncooperativeness.
Death to the machines! When i hear “paper trail”…i reach for my gun.
PAPER BALLOTS!!!!!
is that ambiguous? unclear? Sure, they were tampered with in the past. Now we can have a video camera or 3 constantly on all boxes, ballots, counting and transportation. Put live feeds on the web. Rural Chinese can watch Topeka do democracy, in real time. We have the technology to not have to use technology to freakin’ vote. Just mark an X, count em up….humans, eyeballs, lots and lots of eyeballs.
Also, read Opednews piece about AT&T merger deal and how it will kill the internet, dependent again on katie couric etc. (general electric)for ALL of our information.
Throw in 9/11 truth. Its all related, just like ancient mystics and quantum physicists say……..we r all one, no bullshit, and we do CREATE reality. So, what will it take to get millions of pissed off AMERICANS marching in the street?
Not a recount, LeftIsBest, but a RE-VOTE is needed now for the folks in FL-13. A “recount” will only reiterate what the machines recorded — and since the machines mysteriously dumped 18K votes, those votes were never counted in the first place, so they can’t be REcounted, even if they could be found.
Without a paper ballot, there is nothing to verify what happened to those votes, and no way to even check if the unprecedented number undervotes was intentional, as the Buchanan camp lamely claims. because there is nothing to see.
Luckily, the citizens of Sarasota wisely repudiated the opinions of their “professional” elections officials and voted to require a paper record for their elections, ensuring this won’t happen to them again.
hmmm… I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you! really…
Note: Your link URL to the page in question is
http://www.srqelections.com/ivo...ivotronic.htm/
…which should work but returns a “404” error in browsers that sane people use.
http://www.srqelections.com/ivo.../ivotronic.htm
will work though.
Guess who’s using proprietary Micro$haft BS for housing their “public” documenmts? But this should forestall premature “They took it down” complaints.
Until they really do take it down 🙂
ZapKitty – Gracias. I’ve corrected that one broken link (I think the other links I had to the page in the same story were/are working fine…until they take the page down, as you suggest at least — Hence, the screen grab and other archiving of that page “just in case”) 🙂
REVOTE NOW!
Why does Kathy Dent need to go on vacation? She already lives in Florida! LOL….
I thought “John” fully explained the 18,000 undervotes in a previous post (sarcastic)…
“And then the Voting Supv goes on a week’s vacation!!”
sounds very bush like ,don’t ya thunk ?
I want a job as a top election official. I assume they make more money then an optician, but they don’t seem to be any more accountable then a TV weatherman, (I said it wasn’t going to rain yesterday, but it did, so sue me).
If those reading this thread caught the thing about AT&T.
Uh, there’s some things you can do if you want to save the internet, your communications, your networks, your spectrum.
savetheinternet.org
savepublicaccess.org
commoncause.org
I think there are some forms (better to rephrase it yourself -imo) on these sites to help.
I care about the web being controled, net neutrality, and public access. Personally.
Cause I see it as a removal of your 1st amendment. The FCC (Bush Appointee(s)) do not see it that way. e.g. as a first amendment issue. But fuck them. They’re not managing power and frequency for dogshit. They’re managing it for PROFIT.
public access is NON PROFIT (they also take donations, just like BRAD BLOG does by the way.)
One other thing (PBS) e.g. Public Broadcast Service aka http://www.pbs.org/ is CORPORATE OWNED. (even though their website domain name is “organization” they SEEK PROFITS)
They do not allow the PUBLIC / e.g. “We The People” to turn in a show there.
PUBLIC ACCESS on the other hand is NON CORPORATE. They will allow YOU to turn a show in there. So, chew on that when you don’t bother to support public access, which is a unique local voice, not corrupted by corporate bottom line.
Okay so go MAKE A SHOW and SHOW ‘this fucking witch’ for what she is in the FL-13th!
I think the Sarasota Elections website description of the undervote confirmation option was misleading. The same machines in Miami-Dade County ask you to browse the review page and if you see anything you wish to change you may choose to go back through the ballot to make changes or you may press the flashing red button to cast your ballot as is. You aren’t told specifically if you left anything blank – you have to review the summary page and see for yourself. Then, you either go back through the whole ballot or cast your ballot the way it is – you don’t receive an option to just go back to undervote items.
Brad What do you think about this ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8773jXO9o
JoJ – All kinds of concerns about that thing. Virtually none of which I have time to detail at the moment. But I don’t regard that as a serious “solution” to anything at this time.
Brad – Tnx 73. . .
Reconciling 2006 Discrepancies: 7:07pm and Final Exit vs. Pre-election Polls
http://www.progressiveindepende...8;mesg_id=3404
There is no longer any doubt that the poll/vote discrepancies are caused by miscounting votes. The proof is once again found in the Final National Exit Poll which matched to the recorded vote count with the use of fallacious weightings. As in 2004, the Democrats won the “preliminary” 7:07pm NEP by a solid 55-43%. But the 1:00pm Final NEP cut the margin in half (52-46%).
The 7:07pm NEP low-balled the Democratic vote share with the use of “How Voted in 2004” Bush/Kerry (46/45%) weights. The Final NEP weights (49/43%) were a carbon copy of the mathematically impossible 2004 Final Bush/Gore (43/37%)weights. This is the best evidence that the Final Exit Poll once again was forced to match a fraudulent miscount. Simple logic dictates that if one demographic requires impossible or implausible weights and/or vote shares in order to match the vote count, then the other demographics must use them as well.
Matching to the vote is nothing new; exit pollsters have been doing it long before Bush arrived on the scene and stolen elections became the norm. In the pre-BushCo world, matching the Final NEP to an essentially fraud-free recorded vote made sense – until BushCo came along and stole the 2000 election, along with repeat performances in 2002 and 2004. The 2006 Democratic Tsunami overwhelmed the fraud but the Dems still “lost” 10-15 House seats they should have won.
To derive an approximation to the TRUE vote for all demographics, the 7pm NEP vote shares and weights were adjusted to match a 57-41% Democratic vote margin. The base case assumptions were that 5.7% of Democratic votes were uncounted (2.1% of Republicans) and an average of 5% of Democratic votes were switched to the Republicans. A sensitivity analysis determined the effects of a range (5-7%) of vote switching.
The assumed TRUE 16% Democratic margin was based on the 120-Generic poll linear trend which was confirmed in the Wikipedia early vote count. It has always been the case that millions of ballots, mostly Democratic, are never counted. In this election, uncounted ballots accounted for less than half of the total discrepancy. The major fraud factor was vote-switching at the polling place and/or the central tabulator.
This analysis does not include the millions of disenfranchised voters (mostly Democratic) who never got to the polls. The Generic LV pre-election polls, as one-sided as they were, low-balled the intended Democratic vote.
The theoretical Intended Vote is given by:
IV = Recorded + Uncounted + Switched + Disenfranchised
The True Vote is given by:
TV = Recorded + Uncounted + Switched
In both the 7:07pm and Final 1:00pm Exit Polls, the results were adjusted to obtain an estimated TRUE vote. For each demographic, switched votes were applied to final vote shares to determine pre-switch shares. Uncounted votes were subtracted from the 7:07pm exit poll result. Unlike the Final, the 7:07pm poll was NOT matched to the vote count. Uncounted and switched vote shares were added in the Final since it was contaminated by implicitly including them in matching to the vote count.
Note that when TOTAL exit poll vote shares did not SUM to 100%, the shares were normalized to do so by adjusted them proportionately. Similarly, if the GROSS vote shares (after adjusting for uncounted votes) did not sum to 100%, they were also adjusted to derive the TRUE vote share.
The 120-Generic Poll 57-41% projection matched the Wikipedia-reported vote count and was assumed to be the TRUE vote. Corresponding weights and/or vote shares were adjusted to match the projection. Uncounted vote shares were subtracted from the TRUE vote in order to derive the pre-switch vote share. The switch vote share was subtracted to obtain an approximation to the Final Exit Poll. If the vote shares did not sum to 100%, they were adjusted proportionately to do so. This assured that the results were comparable across all demographics.
Move On .org jumps on the Florida Dist. 13 re-vote band wagon with an on line petition.
Link to Move On .org online petition.
Yep, looks like they switched the exit polls again. Nice to see MoveOn getting involved with the voting machine mess for once. Everybody sign up. This might be the one.
Darn..! I want to sign the Move On petition, but I have a postal code instead of a zip code… 🙁
Hey Brad, Did you see this? Very interesting from an observer of the Venezuela elections……….. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/m...e_b_36066.html
ES&S’s iHackTronic 2008…the latest in ruining democracy!!!
btw? “Unresigned” is very, very funny, Brad!!!
What? Are you following her around, camoflauged as a tree, snapping pictures of her getting in her car? LOL!!!
But Brad/TIA: “John” previously explained to us, that the 18,000 missing votes were legit!!! Remember?
Fuck the statistics and facts!!! Read John’s explanation!!!
https://bradblog.com/?p=3883#comment-145865
https://bradblog.com/?p=3883#comment-146194