November 14, 2006 at 14:05:41
Straight from the Shoulder of Michael Shelby
POST ELECTION AUDIT A FARCE IN ARIZONA
Not unlike the 18,000 missing votes or counties reporting more votes than citizens or vote flipping in Florida, double votes counted in New Jersey, Republicans impounding all electronic voting machines from 27 counties in Pennsylvania, machines unable to be turned on causing waits hours long in Colorado, Ohio, South Carolina, Indiana, Georgia, and North Carolina resulting in polls held open longer so voters could return to vote, sleepovers of election machines in California and Arizona, and I could go on but I'll refer you to www.BradBlog.com, warning of the problems with electronic voting; the post-election audit law in Arizona to manually count 2% of the precincts was made a farce by Arizona's Secretary of State Jan Brewer.
Perhaps I was too optimistic, perhaps I wanted to believe we had made some progress despite my writing about and knowing that nothing really had changed; that the machines were just as flawed, vulnerable to hacking and vote manipulation, that pre-testing the machines would reveal nothing of bugs, vote flipping programs, Trojan Horses, or trap doors in the secret software. Maybe I wanted so desperately for the message of the dangers of electronic voting to have made an impact that even when I personally observed at our Maricopa County Elections Department the transfer of data between electronic tabulating machines would be performed by "thumb drives" upon which it would be easy to insert a virus to infect all the machines and manipulate votes, that there was no security applied to the custody of the thumb drives before, during, or after the vote counting, that even then, I showed up for the post-election audit skeptical but hopeful that it would happen despite the rigid, nonsensical, arbitrary requirement that a quorum of 72 auditors from each major party participate or the audit could not be performed. Even though I knew that almost every conceivable obstacle to conducting a post-election audit of the electronic voting machines was inserted into SB 1557, Arizona's Election Reform Bill, by the Secretary of State Jan Brewer, a Republican dominated legislature, a small-minded power-mongering Democrat, and elections officials who wanted nothing of this burden added to their already overloaded responsibilities; I thought that just maybe because of the outcome of this election with its the repudiation of an illegal war and of the politics of cronyism, corruption, and greed by a coalition of American voters and not just the party faithful or the base voters, that just maybe, this time, we might have a go at accountability. Sadly, it was not to be.
The first day of the audit was spent scrambling for the necessary quorum to even conduct the audit. Needing 72 auditors from each major party the Democrats fielded an initial 80 and the Republicans only 50 by the initial start time of 1:00PM. To her great credit Elections Director Karen Osborne gave a one hour grace period for each party to beat the bushes (no pun intended) for more bodies. For a moment it appeared as if the operatives from both parties had trolled the local public golf courses for retirees. Then the entire staff of "20 and 30 something's" from the AZ Democratic Party Headquarters paraded in as if displaced from a scene in Animal House. Add to that some mothers with sleeping infants in their carriers, a college freshman here or there, some other late comers, and a wonderful lady whose first vote was probably cast for FDR and VOILA! The quorum was exceeded, there would be an audit! That was the first day.
Returning on the second day well before the 9:00AM drop-dead start time to avoid being shut out from the audit, I had expectations of the time and tedium that would be involved in the manual counting and reconciling of the ballots with the machines. This was going to take several days and be painstaking, boring albeit important work. A statistically significant procedure in SB 1557 for counting the ballots had been negotiated vigorously between the obstructionists and the proponents of real election reform in which I participated. My first hand knowledge came by way of being in support during the negotiations and testifying before the legislature as an election integrity activist and advocate for SB 1557. My experience in dealing with some of the obstructionist legislators, the Secretary of State choosing to manipulate the proceedings insidiously behind the scenes , in negotiating toward a value-added audit procedure can best be described as trying to nail Jell-O® to a wall! The Republican led opposition (SB 1557 having actually been sponsored by a Republican State Senator) embodied an uncanny ability to deny factual evidence presented right before their eyes and to dismiss statistical methodologies universally accepted by the fact-based scientific community. They stubbornly forced their zero sum agenda of "we win you lose or no deal" into the process. The perceived need to have at least something for the 2006 election led to compromises that should never have been allowed. No deal and public exposure of those entrusted with protecting the public, outing them as election reform denying, self-serving, obfuscating, ethically-challenged politicians would have been better! Still, we got what we got so we could proceed. Then, when all was said and done, the bill passing unanimously in the House, with only three no votes in the Senate (all Republican), and the Governor signing the bill as emergency legislation so it could fast-track through the Department of Justice, Arizona being a Jim Crow state, they manipulated the procedures manual so as to make the post-election audit a travesty.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__061114_post_election_audit_.htm