The
Black Box Voting Cleanup Crew volunteers have just issued over 1,000 public records requests to counties throughout the USA, and more are on the way. We are reducing election secrecy and holding public officials accountable for their election security.
Beginning with the swing states, and then proceeding with counties whose officials have been secretive, we are launching a series of formal public records requests to force officials to define their electoral procedures. Those who fail to comply will be targeted for increased scrutiny.
We need your help. Please sign up on our
home page and you'll receive instructions every few days. TAKE ACTION: Go to our
forum and jump right in. The project is "self serve." Here you can see the results of everyone's work, along with the answers given by public officials so far.
The information belongs to us! Each state has public records laws which allow citizens to obtain information. The rationale is simply this:
As taxpayers, we paid for both the documents and the public officials' time, and those documents belong to us.
While some public officials, like Scott Konopasek (Elections Registrar, San Bernardino County, Calif.) seem to believe they own the system and owe no responsibility to taxpayers to disclose what they are doing using our money and authority, such behavior indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of public records law.
When we discussed public records requests with Konopasek in late July, he said, "You'll get more from me with honey." When we sent him a public records request, asking for the list of persons who have accessed his central tabulator, he never responded at all.
The courts frown on such behavior. King County (WA) has already been hit with a judgment of over $100,000 in fines and attorney's fees for failure to comply with public records requests, and the penalties may go as high as $1 million.
(
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/aplocal_story.asp?category=6420&slug=WA%20SCOW%20Stadium%20Critic )
California is implementing stiff new penalties for officials who fail to comply.
Of the people, by the people, and for the peopleThe fundamental conflict that the American people have with voting machines is not that we are using computers, but that, in the present implementation of voting machines, they do not allow transparency.
Without transparency, elections are no longer "of the people, by the people, for the people" but instead are "of the vendors, by a few election officials, for the people."
This creates subtle but fundamental changes in the operation of our republic, and removes a key safeguard, the "many eyes" technique for ensuring electoral integrity.
"Many eyes" means that everyone can watch, creating a broad, stable base. Indeed, the genius of democracy is in the dispersed nature of grass roots power, which creates a rather messy, and sometimes argumentative, but very stable governmental framework.
Reducing public scrutiny of the preparation and counting of the vote may appear to tidy up the process, but this comes at the expense of public trust in the electoral process, jeopardizing governmental stability. Reducing public involvement also concentrates power (and opportunities for bribery) into fewer hands, making it easier to corrupt the system.
It is for this reason that we ask your participation in taking back transparency.
We own the process, and we own the records that define the process.When public officials misrepresent their security, as
King County did in its Sept. 2004 primary, or try to keep their procedures secret, as
Riverside County California has been doing, they should be rewarded with increased scrutiny, don't you think?
What we're asking for in public records requestsAll requests, and answers from officials, are publicly posted in our Cleanup Crew forums. We seek to identify security procedures, like obtaining lists of the elections officials (and vendors, and temporary employees, and county IT people) who are given access to voting computers, passwords, remote access protocols, and keys to the rooms that hold critical parts of the elections system.
We're requiring elections officials to tell us the version numbers on their voting systems, part with their computer audit logs (which will show that they log different people into the computer under the same name -- in the case of Diebold, everyone signs in as "admin.")
We're getting disclosure on polling place procedures, modem use, computer crashes and discrepancies (surprisingly, many locations do not require officials to disclose anomalies in the vote count, if they do not believe it would "affect the outcome of the election.")
These records requests will also identify locations which don't keep records, and officials who are unresponsive to divulging information.
Another subtle change: It used to be that access to voting systems was granted only to certified and sworn elections officials, whose names we knew and who were accountable directly to us. Nowadays, such access is typically also granted to unsworn and undisclosed county computer techs, employees of vendors, and even temporary workers hired off the Internet by subcontractors of the vendor. These individuals are not only not sworn election officials, but often aren't even from the state where the election is held. They do their thing and then fade away, sometimes
carrying data or disks from the election with them.
They ran the clock outVendors, courts, and county officials have been generally unresponsive to improving election transparency. We must reclaim our right to know how our vote is being counted, and the methods left to us, in the last few weeks before the election, are limited to two things:
1. Force transparency and disclosure, through public records requests
2. Observe election day and election night counting, asking questions, taking notes, videotaping, and photographing what goes on. Bring binoculars, so you can see computer screens.
The more secretive your officials are, the more scrutiny they earn.
Cheers...
Bev Harris
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