BBV: Tuesday Feb 3 Primarys, tell us what you see and hear

[GregD]

Tuesday offers a number of Primaries, and Verified Voting is asking for help. Iowa was "counting noses" and New Hampshire is 100 percent paper. This is the first Primary in 2004 featuring paperless in some areas... We are hoping you will be our eyes.

Arizona Preference Election, Delaware Primary, Missouri Primary, New Mexico Caucuses, North Dakota Caucuses, Oklahoma Primary, South Carolina Preference Primary

This page includes links to ElectionLine, where they show what basic equipment is in use by county. We'd like to keep track of what paperless touch screen equipment you see out there, so if you can, send them to us at [e-mail]

We have created a new message board secion for reporting your stories. We are hoping to learn about any reports of: equipment problems, illegal harrassment, videotaping in precints, suspicious people with laptops in precincts - all that weirdness that folks spotted last November.

Also in November, we saw stories (for example in Texas) where the news was pretty bad early in the day, and later in the day the same story sounded like nothing happend. They literally changed the character of the story mid-day. Please watch for machine failure news stories, and when you do, please consider copy and pasting the whole story, them e-mail it (HTML is fine) to [e-mail]

Keeping this bumped into Wednesday will be much appreciated. Thanks to one and all.

www.VerifiedVoting.org

[burrowowl]

1. I am going to observe now

ABQ. Will finish at 7 pm

[Zan_of_Texas]

2. Hi Greg! We interrupt for an announcement about Houston

Well, NH was "paper," -- paper scanned, and paper.

Half the towns vote by optical scan, and it seems they were the bigger towns. Some of those optical scanners were sold by .... Diebold -- ACCUVOTE. The others were called OPTECH Voting Machine.


Meanwhile, BBVers who know anyone in the Houston area -- two of the nationally-known technologists on BBV will be speaking here on Feb. 25.

Please spread the word.

Lecture - Technology, Society & Public Policy Lecture Series
Computer and Information Technology Institute

The battle for accountable voting systems

by David Dill
Professor of Computer Science from Stanford University
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Time: 4:00 PM
Duncan Hall McMurtry Auditorium
Rice University
6100 Main Street
Houston, Texas, USA

Additional speakers include: Dan Wallach, assistant professor of computer science at Rice (one of the four investigators of the original Diebold study called the Hopkins study), and Adina Levin of Electronic Frontier Foundation Austin.

http://dacnet.rice.edu/depts/citi/calendar/index.cfm?EventRecord=4012&TimeFrame=61

edited to get tail end of long link, and add names of NH equipment.
... depts/citi/calendar/index.cfm?EventRecord=4012&TimeFrame=61

[shirlden]

3. Hi Greg,

Here is a kick

:kick:

[donsu]

4. kick

hope we have a lot of watchers at the polls today

[John_H]

5. Suggestion: Carefully check for Dean anomalies.

Since Dean is the overwhelming GOP choice for the Dem nomination, I'd look for precincts and counties in which Dean makes an unusually good turnout.

[Eloriel]

6. That's nonsense -- the ONLY "evidence" you have for that

is some remarks from the GOP, as if they'd be foolish enough to announce to us and the world who they'd like to go up against.

Further, there are a number of published analyses by GOPers that pointed to the fact that he'd be a real threat.

Finally, I truly resent your planting the seed that any Dean showing should be suspect. That's disgusting.

[nolabels]

7. So now that corporate America has chosen the Democratic nominee..........

Can we now watch how they install him, the nominee, that is.

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?articleid=1070
Democracy at Risk

By Paul Krugman, New York Times OP-ED Columnist:

The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation's psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.

Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory — but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?

Unfortunately, this story is completely plausible. (In fact, you can tell a similar story about some of the results in the 2002 midterm elections, especially in Georgia.) Fortune magazine rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology of 2003, but it's not just a bad technology — it's a threat to the republic.

First of all, the technology has simply failed in several recent elections. In a special election in Broward County, Fla., 134 voters were disenfranchised because the electronic voting machines showed no votes, and there was no way to determine those voters' intent. (The election was decided by only 12 votes.) In Fairfax County, Va., electronic machines crashed repeatedly and balked at registering votes. In the 2002 primary, machines in several Florida districts reported no votes for governor.
(snip)

on edit: I don't know if any of this could be true, but why is so much material been writen about this, why all unanswered questions and weird vote tallies

Many other countries have had vote fixing going on, what makes the USA so much different?

[Zan_of_Texas]

8. well

It's impossible to know all of the countries' situations, but it is a known fact that our CIA and related entities have fixed elections in other countries, and in fact have assassinated heads of state and other political leaders.

I think it "worked so well" elsewhere, they thought it would be fun to bring it home.

[nolabels]

9. "they thought it would be fun"

That just confirms it then. Willy wasn't joking when he sang the song "Moma's don't let babies grow up to be cowboys"

Really though, do you know of anyone would shuffles a lot money into something that they could probably get no benefit from? I like to think about things in that way, it always puts things in better perspective.

[maxr4clark]

10. I've always wondered about that lyric.

Does that mean that mothers whose children show cowboy-like tendencies should drown them to keep the world safe from cowboyism?

Barbara, you let us down!

[burrowowl]

11. New Mexico

used paper ballots. In Santa Fe voter turn out was so great, they had to print some more.
The Kerry and Clark people were a bit vicious at our caucus zone. Taking down some of the other candidate signs and putting theirs in non-post areas. Otherwise, we had a good turn out, I think people are really worried about another term of pResident select.

[burrowowl]

12. Bump! Any poll workers out there

people who voted? Machine or paper?