One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."
Arizona
and Florida have a lot in common, a powerful "Growth Lobby" and
“Election Fraud”. These short investigative video clips will help one
understand what we're up against:
****CBS Miami Series 1 of 6 Video CBS
Miami - For many voters Ion Sancho’s words hold weight. He was the
first elections supervisor in America to dare a “look under the hood” of
a voting machine, to see if the machines were recording votes properly
and if they could be hacked. ” I sanctioned the first investigation of a
voting system without the vendor’s authorization,” Sancho recalls. http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/10/02/cbs4-investigates-does-your-vote-count/
Public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of
democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by
seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events
and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties
strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional
integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist’s credibility. .
What is the main, bulkier part of the title? You guessed it:
Pima Sees Gains in Election Security
What was the actual current news to be reported in the story?
The lawsuit by citizens to compel Pima County to follow existing election laws.
What's the damage?
The Arizona Daily Star has over 364,000 readers for its Sunday edition,
which is about a third of the population of Pima County being falsely
assured about "Elections Security".
Blogger's Note: My yesterday's post seems to imply that "Republicans" are stealing our elections, whereas the truth of the matter is that elections are being stolen by criminals for illicit purposes having nothing to do with their political party affiliations. Case in point: John Brakey and I are both progressive Democrats and cofounders in Tucson of AUDIT-AZ (Americans United for Democracy, Integrity and Transparency in Elections), and in the video below you will hear Republican Brad Roach, former candidate for Pima County Attorney, remark on how much he learned from AUDIT-AZ. Although at opposite ends of the Democrat-Republican political scale, John and Brad are great friends in their quest to restore honest elections in Arizona (see photograph below)!
Arizona Citizens' Election Integrity Lawsuit Explained by Attorney Brad Roach and Republican Candidate Bill Beard
From left to right: Attorney Brad Roach, John Brakey,
Bill Beard, Chris DeSimone
KVOA Wakeup Tucson at 7:00 AM Mountain Time on 1030 AM radio
Stay tuned for the final clip containing Pima County shill Benny White refusing toparticipate in the Elections Integrity Board's emergency meeting
scheduled to discuss former NSA employee Mickey Duniho's analysis of
past elections. White mistakenly assumed that the meeting was going to
discuss the pending lawsuit requiring Pima County to follow existing
election laws. One can assume he is also mistaken in thinking he can be
a co-defendant in that case because he ultimately would be acting
against significant members within Pima County's Republican Party who
are plaintiffs in the lawsuit. NSA Analyst Mickey Duniho's presentation to the Pima County's Election Integrity Board will be posted later this evening.
......
Pima commission to discuss chance of election fraud in larger precincts
Arizona Daily StarOriginal here
Carli Brosseau
The Pima County Election Integrity Commission is holding a special
meeting today to talk about whether one member's statistical analysis of
votes in recent elections shows evidence of fraud.
Under the group's bylaws, an emergency meeting can be held if at least five of the nine members call for one.
Michael "Mickey" Duniho His presentation to the Election Integrity Board will be posted on The Intercept today.
Mickey Duniho, a retired National Security Agency computer programmer,
requested the meeting two days ago after he began plotting cumulative
votes by precinct and noticing that outcomes seemed to differ by
precinct size.
He was replicating earlier studies done by California researchers
Francois Choquette and James Johnson, an aerospace engineer and a
financial analyst. The researchers argue that their analysis of the
recent Republican primary shows Mitt Romney making strange vote gains in
most states' large precincts.
Duniho - formerly a Republican election observer in Maryland, a
supporter of Democrat-backed lawsuits against Pima County's Elections
Department and now a registered independent - said that his results seem
to parallel those of Choquette and Johnson, who tried to account for
their findings using demographics.
He is now collecting demographic data by precinct to try to explain his
results with other factors, such as whether a precinct is rural or the
affluence of the precinct's residents.
Duniho suspects that the patterns he found show a 10 percent flip of
votes in favor of the Republican candidate in the 2010 race between Raúl
Grijalva and Ruth McClung and the race between Gabrielle Giffords and
Jesse Kelly the same year, as well as votes switched to benefit Romney
in the Republican primary.
"The problem is figuring out what the statistical evidence does mean,"
Duniho said. "The computer is a black box. It is very easy for the guy
who wrote the program to do just about anything."
At today's meeting, Duniho hopes to persuade the county Elections
Department to sort early ballots by precinct before doing the hand-count
audit required by law.
He has been advocating for that sorting, as well as for upping the
percentage of ballots hand-counted, for about six years, arguing that
his method boosts the chances of revealing fraud if it were to occur.
By law, Arizona counties must do a hand-count audit of 1 percent of
early ballots and 2 percent of precincts in at least one federal and one
state race. Pima County already audits more than required - 4 percent
of precinct-cast ballots and 1 percent of early ballots. No local races
are audited.
Some of the commission's members have argued strongly against holding
the meeting and worry that it could unnecesarily increase fears about
the vote count.
Benny White, a Republican election observer, responded to news of the meeting request with a sharply worded email.
"After reviewing the academic research involved with the links in the
message, I conclude that the allegations being made are absolute
nonsense," he wrote. "These academics don't take into account the fact
that election results are the response by voters to campaigns and
candidates. …
"I think there is a greater probability that fluctuations in the
electrical voltage of the lines serving the election department have
more to do with variations in election results than these alleged
anomalies."
The county's technical consultant on election matters, John Moffatt,
agrees that the data do not seem to show a vote flip in Pima County, but
he does think the California researchers may be on to something with
their findings in some other states.
Pima County employee John Moffatt speaks of "witch hunts" in the past, but is responsible for the incoherent rationale that required a suit to obtain electronic public records.
"It's
worth paying attention to, and we took it seriously," he said. "My
personal opinion is that it's another witch hunt, but our responsibility
is to check this stuff out, not just blow it off."
He adamantly rejects allegations that county elections staff somehow tampered with any results.
The county's elections director, Brad Nelson, will not be at the meeting
to approve a change of audit procedures because of family issues, but
county workers involved in those processes caution that while it's
theoretically possible to make Duniho's suggested change, it would be
logistically difficult.
"That's a monumental task," Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez said.
"It's kind of late to be changing the procedures in the middle of a
major election."
The sorting machine needed to do the job efficiently would cost at least
$125,000, said Chris Roads, deputy recorder and registrar of voters.
To do the sorting by hand would likely take two days, Moffatt said.
The window to challenge a vote count after an election in Arizona is five days after the canvass.
Important tip: After you click the start arrow in the center of the screen, use your mouse to drag the little circle that appears at the lower left along the slider towards the right until you hit 41 minutes into the show, where the interview actually begins. Enjoy!
Press Conference April 30, 2012
This is a critical point in the efforts to get the RTA to abandon it's outdated plans for widening Broadway Blvd to 8-lanes and instead allow the Citizen's Task Force to provide meaningful input to re-scope the project in a way that is within budget and compatible with the surrounding neighborhoods and our desired future for this corridor.
* Council member Steve Kozachik has recently called for reconsidering and down scoping the costly and unnecessary Broadway Project. The 1987 plan to widen Broadway is outdated in view of conditions in the street itself as well as up-to-date thinking about sustainable transportation and livable cities.
* Wasting $71 million taxpayer dollars we simply do not have, widening the Street to 150 feet would destroy over 100 local businesses and historic properties, lifeblood of our local economy and tax base. Up-to-date infrastructure improvements such as bus pullouts, turn bays, and properly timed lights would better move traffic while encouraging bus ridership, biking and walking along a safe and pleasant street.
* Broadway Coalition call on our elected officials on the Board of Supervisors and the Tucson City Council to reconsider this costly and unnecessary project and find a sustainable solution that will better meet Tucson's needs now and in the future.
Speakers last evening at the press conference:
1) Ward 6 Councilmember Steve Kozachik
2) Mark Kerr, aide to Ward 5 Councilmember Richard Fimbres
3) Colby Henley, President of Rincon Hts. Neighborhood
4) Jessica Shuman, business owner of Kismet, 2627 E Broadway
5) John O'Dowd, President of Sam Hughes Neighborhood Assn.
6) Sid Hirsch, business owner of Hirsch's Shoes, 2934 E. Broadway
7) Rev. Stuart Taylor, Tucson Bus Riders' Union,
8) Demion Clinco, Pres. of Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation
9) District 5 Pima County Supervisor Richard Elias
Blogger's Note: At 37:30 on the video above is grafted in a discussion of election fraud in Tucson comprising and interview with Tucson election lawyer Bill Risner and stolen-election sleuths John Brakey and Jim March. John and I were two of the co-founders of AUDIT-AZ (aka Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections). Interspersed in this extension are some video clips of computer expert Harri Hursty hacking the memory card of an Diebold optical-scan voting machine with the aid of a device known to have been purchased by the Pima County Election Department.
Here below is another recent video, which within the first few minutes of watching should convince you that Attorney Bill Risner has gone to court seeking "prospective relief" from insider rigging of future elections (the full context of this video can be found here). In spite of numerous court cases lIke these, little prospective relief has been obtained ...while the "mainstream" media refuses to recognize such cases as worthy of mention on the evening news.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Arizona Election Fraud: Attorney Bill Risner's Argument Reaffirms the Need for Election Integrity
Audit AZ takes transparent election fight to court
fox11az.com
Posted on January 13, 2012 at 11:15 AM
Updated yesterday at 11:23 AM
TUCSON, Ariz. -- A non-partisan organization in Tucson is on a mission to make sure future
Pima County elections are done fairly.
Audit AZ says its long battle with the county, stemming from voting irregularities in a 2006 election for the Regional Transportation Authority, is finally going before a jury.
It's an essential part in our election process.
Technology is used to compile voters lists, draw electoral boundaries and count the ballots.
But some Tucsonans say it's getting in the way.
"We want the court to order certain things that would prevent Pima County from cheating again in the future," said Bill Risner.
Bill Risner is a lawyer representing Audit AZ, Americans United for Democracy, Integrity and Transparency in Elections.
It's working to prove the county used voting machines to rig a 2006 election that passed a 20 year RTA project and half cent sales tax to help fund it.
"It seems they pretended it passed, when it didn't," said Risner.
The case is now heading to a jury, but the county says it doesn't stand a chance.
"Their accusations are pretty silly and ludicrous," said Chuck Huckleberry.
County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry says taking their fight to court is a waste of time and money.
"There has been a complete recount of all the ballots by the Attorney General, there has been a full investigation, there is no voter fraud," said Huckleberry.
But Audit AZ and its supporters believe in their cause. Since 2012 is such an important election year, they want a judge to order a change in the system as soon as possible.
"Because our system is used in other counties in other states, we'd like to do it sufficiently in advance so it would be the most good for the people," said Risner.
To fix the election process, Audit AZ is proposing an independent graphic scanning of all ballots.
The images would be posted on a public website after the polls close, so anyone could count the ballots.
Ted Downing, Research Professor of Social Development at Arizona Research Laboratories, the University of Arizona, is a powerful intellect far from the aloof "ivory tower" stereotype. During his two terms in the Arizona State House he was a not only a tough defender of his Democratic constituents but also a conciliator with his colleagues on the other side of the aisle when it came to issues affecting all of us.
Indeed there are issues affecting us all that both the Republican and Democratic State Committees ignore, because in effect they have become cliques with their own agendas and their ears closed to the citizens' needs and desires. This is why Ted decided to run for State Senator (District 28 in Tucson) on Tuesday as an Independent.
As an independent Ted will not be required to answer to either of the major State Party hierarchies and will collaborate with likeminded Senators on both sides of the isle.
I'm not just making this up. Ted Downing has done this before.
Back in 2004 when the first whiff of election rigging caught the attention of rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans, their State Party officials and entrenched elected officials refused to hear citizen complaints. And when citizen investigators actually produced evidence of insider election manipulations and carried forward court cases, they were stone walled by elected officials of both party affiliations at the state and local levels.
The few grassroots Democrats and Republicans who were paying enough attention percived that "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." And naturally they immediately suspected each other.
But then miracles began to happen, and Ted Downing was huge part of them.
There was a gradual realization by many citizens that, in the words of Tucson election sleuth extraordinaire John Brakey, election fraud "isn't about right and left, it's about right and WRONG!"
Following a fiasco in the 2004 Republican primary, Republican Senator Jack Harper authored an election reform bill that was immediately opposed by knee-jerk Democratic opponents -- the very event that brought out John Brakey's famous remark.
In the end Harper's bill didn't pass.
But later on, then-State-Representative Ted Downing formed an alliance with his friend, Senator Karen Johnson, a Republican State lawmaker who had become deeply concerned about the state of election integrity in Arizona. Together Ted and Karen assembled what may be the best election-integrity bill in the country and successfully marketed it on both sides of the aisle.
This bill, SB 1557, was passed by both houses of the AZ State Legislature with only 5 opposing votes out of 90!
An incredible but true story of bi-partisan cooperation when our democracy was on the line!
Elect Ted Downing on Tuesday and expect more pan-partisan laws to pass that match the wishes of you the voter, rather than those of the big corporate interests that have the complete attention of most members of the major-party power structures.
Why did Arizona's two main gubernatorial candidates, Gov. Jan Brewer, former secretary of state/head of elections, who contracted for highly criticized and easily-hacked Diebold and Sequoia ballot scanning systems, and Attorney General (AG) Terry Goddard, with his three-year "criminal investigation" into a 2006 Pima County (Tucson) local election allegedly hacked, according to a whistleblower, do everything in their power for years to stifle polling accountability while expensively fighting enforcement of Arizona's election laws?
"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin
Arizona voters head Tuesday 24 August to primary polling places. They will mark paper ballots that will be optically scanned by Diebold and Sequoia vote scan machines. And there is absolutely no guarantee their vote will ever be tabulated.
Six plaintiffs recently filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County (Phoenix) alleging recently relaxed ballot handling rules ensure a lax chain of control over ballot papers in direct violation of Arizona law. Coupled with unapproved software installed on multiple election department computers, and it creates what the citizen watchdog group AUDIT AZ calls an "interlock." "This makes manipulation of vote counting easy and thus leaves elections vulnerable to undetectable fraud."
Arizona public officials confidently claim their system is completely safe from hackers. Yet, Maricopa County is the USA's fourth-largest elections department handling 56-58 percent of all Arizona votes cast. Its polling places rely on 22, sole-purpose laptop computers and their phone line modems to transmit final polling data from the Sequoia machines to election headquarters over phone lines and the Internet.
If CIA and Defense Department sites are hacked thousands of times daily, what, besides desert bravado or blind arrogance, gives anyone any indication their vote is safely counted?
John Roberts Brakey
As AUDIT AZ co-founder John Brakey told us, "Lax handling of ballots and decisions relieving poll-workers of audit responsibility mean, regardless of the wishes of individual voters, the entire system can be manipulated and outcomes determined on central tabulation computers with expert hackers who are then able to completely cover their tracks."
And before you take Governor Brewer's or AG Goddard's (neither of whom would answer questions posed over three years by this reporter) tack of ignoring the message and instead attacking the messenger, dismissing all charges as baseless conspiracy theory ... ask yourself why Arizona's elected and unelected leaders (who all took a forced, unpaid, furlough day Friday to save money) have spent more than $1 million tax dollars hiring high-profile law firms to fight citizen-filed lawsuits from multi-partisan groups seeking ballot handling reforms?
William "Bill" Risner
Bill Risner, Democratic Party attorney for Pima County, is no stranger to election procedure battles. In 41-years of practice, he says the central problem of the current computerized systems is they are easy to cheat. "When the fact of 'easy to cheat' is combined with the 'impossibility of challenge' and 'nobody is looking,' the seriousness of the present vulnerability of our election system is obvious," he says.
Brad Roach, unsuccessful Republican candidate for Pima County attorney and lead counsel on the voter case said, "John Brakey and I are as politically opposite as you can find and would not likely agree on anything, but we agree on this." He describes Brakey as being as passionate as any death penalty opponent crusader he's ever met. "John's devoted years to this and we should thank him. While we disagree on most things political, he's absolutely right, your vote is the most important thing any citizen has," said Roach.
Brad Roach
Roach further said he cannot fathom why elected leaders don't understand that "when you fight, fight, fight everything, you make things worse and it serves no utility." He continued, "If you have nothing to hide, why not just be open on something this important?"
He is suing the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and others requesting "Mandamus" and Injunctive Relief. The Mandamus action is unique in that it demands the court order public officials to follow existing Arizona election laws.
Plaintiffs want to ensure the entire ballot chain of custody is secure and Arizona's mandated audit trail is returned to full compliance, no matter how inconvenient or time consuming, to ensure integrity in the voting process.
The case was recently assigned its second judge. In a Friday telephone hearing, Judge Oberbillig, County Defense Attorney Colleen Conner and Roach all agreed nothing could be done in time for the primary election on Tuesday.
However, the Mandamus action falls outside of cumbersome civil trial rules and the judge said there was time to move forward with an expedited jury trial and emergency orders issued from the bench before the November general election.
Said Roach, "How patriotically ironic is it that on a question as important as insuring everyone's individual vote is counted, a jury of one's peers will decide the merits of this case?"
But what, if anything, can stop the arrogance of Arizona's elected and unelected leaders?
When Governor Brewer was secretary of state, she wrote the rules for voting machines across the state, however, when questioned repeatedly about them, claimed she had no authority to change the rules or order new ones.
The bar in Arizona for any recount is already higher than in almost every other states, with a minuscule one-tenth of 1 percent margin and inside five days the standards to trigger a recount. Miss either milestone and no recount can ever be granted.
Indeed, during a 2004 primary election between two Republicans decided by just four votes, officials were ready to begin a hand recount of all paper ballots, at their own expense, to ensure accuracy. Secretary Brewer called the local supervisor of elections and informed them they were "breaking state law and ordered them to stop." The only way to count ballots under Arizona law was to rerun them through the same machine that had already spit out this data. Jan Brewer explained on video she stopped the recount because "an angel was on her shoulder and guided her in the right direction."
In the second machine run, 496 extra ballots magically appeared inside one machine's "count" that were not part of the first ballot. Maricopa Elections Supervisor Karen Osborne under deposition stated, "an 18 percent error rate in machine tabulations was within their acceptable margin of error." What citizen would volunteer their ballot to be one of the nearly one in five miscounted in that "acceptable margin of error"?
Across Arizona, there is a pattern of refusal to cooperate with voter groups. Elected officials refuse to return phone calls asking for comment, ignore or obfuscate Freedom of Information Act requests for information and, later, even ignore judge's orders. And there seems to be zero consequences for state workers. To date, no one has been fired, reprimanded or reassigned for incompetence for any of these bungled elections.
Even when brought into court, the rank incompetence causes judges to throw their hands up in disgust, resulting in convoluted rulings. Two years ago, Bill Risner won all of the legal argument, but lost his case when Maricopa County Judge Edward O. Burke agreed County Elections Director, Karen Osborne, did not follow election law, ensure ballot integrity and provide an unbroken custody chain.
However, he ruled against the plaintiffs saying, "in a county the size of Maricopa, perfect compliance with the statutory electoral scheme, while desirable, is not possible due to time, space, the practicalities of the electoral process and the number of persons involved" in denying their injunction for a hand recount.
So, where does the voter go to ensure the accuracy of their vote count? Well, one could try voting in the UK as an example. There, the hand vote count performed across 650 parliamentary constituencies during the recent general election was a model of efficiency and accuracy.
This reporter covered Wales' Vale of Glamorgan constituency hand count. The result was declared final at 2:23 AM, with congratulations all around. It was completely transparent. All votes were counted across the nation in exactly the same way, with party observers and even candidates sitting directly across the table from and silently observing the counting teams throughout the night. Too, there was no artificial time pressure of reporting vote results on the 11:00 PM news. They were committed to getting it right.
The sanctity of one person, one vote, unites otherwise deeply divided and polarized Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Tea and every other party. So, why won't a Republican governor and a Democratic AG, both seeking the state's highest office, demand transparent accountability by state officials?
Terry Goddard
AG Goddard has led a "Keystone Cops" criminal investigation of the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) election. Bill Risner sued Pima County, demanding a recount (and they are the party that WON!), trying to assure vote integrity as the result made no sense. How could a measure they supported suddenly win after losing so badly in every previous election?
When a whistleblower came forward saying the election result had been hacked, AUDIT AZ entered the fray. In the original UK Progressive article on this subject, they alleged and proved a Pima County election official had purchased an illegal scanner. Election Director Brad Nelson admitted in a deposition he wanted to test for himself whether ballot scanning machine memory cards could be hacked as demonstrated by Finnish scientist Harry Hursti in the HBO film "Hacking Democracy."
And boy did they test. (The question remains ... until they got it right?) Seventy plus machine memory cards were reported as "damaged." Hacking enough voting machine memory cards to affect an outcome before an election is clearly difficult. The more ingenious way is, as alleged in Risner's case documents, to break into the central tabulator using a simple and untraceable Microsoft Access table. This instantly changes results inside headquarters and leaves no trail.
And this was four years ago, imagine how sophisticated hackers have become since 2006 (placing a full PacMan game on one "sealed" machine being but one example.)
Risner asserts one can determine if the RTA ballot results were hacked by reviewing the polling summary tape totals included with the ballots from the poll site and comparing them with the actual paper ballots from each polling location. A furious legal battle, costing Pima County hundreds of thousands of dollars, ended when AG Goddard's team swooped in and removed the ballots to an undisclosed location from a storage facility in Tucson. He then did his own recount without reconciling the poll tapes and declared the result final.
The problem? Almost one-third of the poll summary tapes, supposedly stored with the ballots, were reported "missing" at the time of his count. No one knows and the AG will not answer whether they were missing when he conducted his recount or before. Too, Pima County officials as "the customer," were allowed unfettered access to the ballot storage facility despite being implicated in the criminal investigation. And the logs of who visited the facility have not been released by the AG.
The issue has been stonewalled because, according to a local attorney wishing to remain anonymous, "by implication, the AG's office ends up looking either incompetent or complicit in a cover-up. With the election just 10-weeks away, the impact it could have on Goddard's election chances to the only office he has coveted since childhood, would be devastating."
Aside from immigration reform, economic loss issues around the "Paper's Please" law and an increasingly radical right-wing agenda, any further light on her otherwise anonymous tenure as secretary of state would create more problems for Governor Brewer's re-election campaign.
The irony is Democrat Goddard may end up hoisted on this petard and never know for certain his own ballot count fate since the rules change makes it easier for heavily Republican and lax-on-security Maricopa County officials to find results that favor Governor Brewer's re-election bid.
No matter what happens, democracy could be the ultimate casualty. As I wrote after the '08 general election for The Huffington Post, with the Maricopa recount case and result, was it possible Arizona's John McCain actually lost his own red state when every other state touching Arizona voted FOR President Obama?
Connecting electoral dots, Phoenix (Maricopa 56-58 percent) and Tucson (Pima 18-22 percent) account for roughly 75 percent of votes cast in any Arizona election. Evidence also exists that Pima County election department staff frequently accessed the early "vote by mail" official count database. Imagine the impact of this "Zogby poll from hell" as John Brakey calls it. "Illegally passing along actual early vote totals to party insiders allows them to conduct a series of Robocall and other campaign activities that could sway voters based not on research or polls but on actual vote counts!"
Arizona is no stranger to election controversy. Paper or machines? Most would probably now vote paper every time. To quote AUDIT AZ's motto: "Election Integrity is not about the Right or Left; it's about right, wrong, greed and corruption."
Denis G Campbell is the American Editor of UK Progressive. He is a political and business pundit contributor to both BBC television and radio. Denis specializes in translating the American electoral and governing process for UK and EU audiences and vice versa, contributing regularly on UK elections and issues to the Huffington Post. He has contributed to newspapers and magazines around the globe. In his “spare” time, he is managing director of Target Point Ltd focused on social media, communication strategy, leveraging technology, corporate change and building world class selling organisations. Denis has lived in the EU since 1998.
The mystery surrounding a long-questioned and allegedly "fixed" non-partisan 2006 Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) bond election in Pima County, AZ continues to deepen as troubling new details have now emerged. The resolution in this matter --- should it ever come --- could spell trouble for supporters of paper-based optical-scan electronic voting systems, since indications are that if the election was rigged, it was done with insiders via the electronic central tabulating computers.
Late last week another new twist was discovered in the years-long election fraud investigation by Democratic and Libertarian Election Integrity advocates in Tucson. The revelations come to light in what was thought by many to have been a settled election, at last, following a long-sought hand-count of paper ballots carried out last year by the office of AZ's Democratic Attorney General Terry Goddard. The AG had announced in April of last year that his criminal investigation hand-count had "affirmed" the original results of the election were correct.
As it turns out, The BRAD BLOG, which has been covering this bizarre matter for years, plays a small roll in this latest development, as a promise that Goddard's office made to us last year concerning the "poll tapes" --- remarks which he was asked about during a press conference at the end of the hand count [see the remarks on video below] --- may have now boomeranged on him.
Given that Goddard is now the likely Democratic nominee to face Republican Gov. Jan Brewer in this fall's Gubernatorial race, this revelation couldn't have come at a much worse time for him.
After many years of litigation, Election Integrity advocates have now finally been allowed to review the long sought-after poll tapes in question. What they've discovered is disturbing and, so far, without legitimate explanation.
Out of 368 precincts, 112 poll tapes are completely missing. Moreover, 102 of the "yellow sheets" --- certified precinct reports, signed by poll workers, detailing corresponding summary information, such as numbers of ballots received, cast and spoiled, as helpful for important auditing functions at the precinct level --- are missing as well.
Furthermore, of the poll tape records that are not missing, 50 of them do not match the results as recorded in the final canvas of the election, according to the Election Integrity advocates who have compared them to the original electronic database numbers...
The background, the anomalies, the whistleblower and the 'fixed' election
Some background is in order to explain the significance of the rather disturbing new discovery in the case, which we revealed in an on-air exclusive late last week during an interview with Pima County, AZ attorney Bill Risner while guest hosting the nationally-syndicated Mike Malloy Show. [Audio of the complete interview with Risner is available at the end of this article.]
Without getting into too many of the weeds -- and there have been many along the way -- the RTA bond measure, or ones like it, had been on the ballot several times in Pima, and had always been defeated. In 2006, however, the initiative was said to have finally passed. Ironically, at least in hindsight, the Democratic Party had actually supported the measure at the time in order to help see new roads built in the Tucson area.
The election was run in Pima County (Tucson) on Diebold's paper-ballot based optical-scan machines, the same ones seen being hacked in HBO's Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy (video of that hack here). Election Integrity advocates from AUDIT-AZ (Americans United for Democracy, Integrity and Transparency in Elections - Arizona) and BlackBoxVoting.org became suspicious about the election results after the measure had passed, and set about investigating various red flags in the contest.
Along the way, with Risner representing the county's Democratic Party, they were successful in securing the landmark release of Diebold's so-called "proprietary" databases from the race. The databases purport to show how votes were recorded and who may have accessed electronic tabulators at various times. In the course of that victory, it was discovered that county election officials had been printing out results of the race prior to Election Day, in violation of state law, and were perhaps even manipulating the databases themselves.
For years, Goddard refused repeated requests by the Democrats to hand-count the paper ballots from the election to assure the machine reported results were correct. The ballots had been held for some time by the Pima County Elections Division, and then in a supposedly secure, deep storage facility run by the Iron Mountain firm.
As the controversy roiled, and an official investigation by the AG found various concerns in the race, in the machines and with the county's security procedures, a former county official filed a startling affidavit in July of 2008. He alleged that he'd been told by Pima County Elections Division programmer Bryan Crane that he had "fixed" the RTA election "on the instructions of his bosses."
One of his bosses, Pima's Election Director Brad Nelson, had gained infamy at The BRAD BLOG some years earlier with his bizarre, video-taped outburst at a community meeting in response to questions by Pima County Election Integrity advocate John Brakey. Brakey had asked Nelson about Diebold touch-screen systems which the state had just purchased for use by disabled voters when Gov. Jan Brewer had served as Secretary of State. That video, which we fondly refer to as "Election Director Gone Wild" can be seen at right. (Nelson would later begrudgingly apologize for the outburst when asked about it by a local TV news channel.)
Even after the county whistleblower had come forward to allege he'd been told the election was "fixed" on the instructions of election officials, Goddard still refused the Democrats' newly re-iterated pleas to hand-count the paper ballots to determine whether the results, as reported by the potentially-manipulated electronic central tabulator, matched the hand-marked paper ballots as voted on Election Day in 2006.
Given that they had no way to hand-count the ballots on their own (only AG Goddard had the legal authority to call for a hand-count as part of a criminal investigation by that time), and that a judge had ordered the ballots --- long held at Iron Mountain pending the litigation --- could soon be destroyed, Risner filed a motion in court [PDF] requesting to review the "poll tapes and yellow sheets", supposedly stored inside the boxes along with their corresponding paper ballots at the storage facility.
The poll tapes are paper records printed by the precinct-based optical-scan machines at the close of polls, showing exactly what was scanned and what the results of that scan were before those numbers are sent to the central Diebold tabulator at county election headquarters.
Goddard's hand-count failed to examine poll tapes as promised
In February 2009, within days of the legal attempts to gain access to the poll tapes, and without notifying the Democrats who'd requested them, Goddard suddenly removed all of the ballots and poll tapes stored in the boxes with them in Tucson, and whisked them up to Maricopa County (Phoenix) after, he says, he suddenly determined that a criminal investigation merited a complete hand-count of the ballots.
As the Arizona Daily Star reported on February 13th, Goddard said there was no basis for him to hand-count the ballots. State law, he said, doesn't allow for hand-counts simply out of "curiosity".
On February 18th, attorney Risner informed Goddard in a letter [PDF] of the party's attempt to examine the poll tapes.
And on February 23rd, Goddard's office suddenly announces they'd received a "secret court order", to remove the ballots from Pima to examine them in Maricopa.
"There were suspicions that went in all one direction that could not be explained," Goddard would later tell the media after the hand-count had been completed in April. "There wasn't a credible explanation for all of the different coincidences that seemed to have happened on this particular election."
Though Goddard's office had claimed the counting would be done publicly, observation was strictly limited to just a few observers from the various political parties who had to be specifically approved by the AG.
As the count proceeded, the AG's Press Secretary, Anne Titus Hilby, told The BRAD BLOG directly that the poll tapes would be examined as part of their investigative hand-count. The Election Integrity advocates wanted them examined to make certain that the ballots themselves --- which had been stored at various times at both the Pima County Elections Division (with the "Suspects", as Risner has described them) as well as at the Iron Mountain facility --- hadn't been manipulated and that they matched the poll tapes as printed on Election Day.
"Do we plan to examine those?" Hilby responded directly to our questioning by phone, "Yes, we're examining all of the evidence seized, including the poll tapes."
That, however, would not be the case.
At his press conference following the count, announcing that the hand-count had affirmed the original tally (with a few exceptions he believed to be minor), he was asked about the promise his office had made to The BRAD BLOG to examine the poll tapes.
As seen in the short video below, compiled by filmmaker J.T. Waldron, who has documented the years-long fight in Pima County in the recently-released documentary Fatally Flawed: The Pursuit of Justice in a Suspicious Election, Goddard threw his Press Secretary Hilby under the bus. "She did not have the authority" to promise poll tapes would be examined along with the thousands of ballots at the Maricopa County counting room, Goddard explained.
His bizarre responses to those who'd pressed him at the press conference --- perhaps much more bizarre in light of the recent discovery of so many missing and mis-matching poll tapes --- are worth watching to get a full appreciation of his comments in response to the concerns expressed to him at the time...
"Why would we count a poll tape?," Goddard said at the presser, as seen in the clips above. "I mean, I don't see how they are relevant to the hand-count."
"The final evidence of the election are the ballots themselves," he told the assembled citizens and media, apparently oblivious to the need to confirm the possibility of ballot manipulation by the "Suspects" in his own criminal investigation.
"The poll tapes are a different picture of the same process," he said, telling a reporter, to the amazement of the activists, that counting ballots is enough and that he didn't see how examining poll tapes would have any relevance to his investigation.
Unanswered questions, missing evidence and more red flags
The Pima County Election Integrity Advocates continue to be skeptical about whether the chain of custody for the 2006 ballots had been truly secure by the time Goddard performed his hand-count in 2009, or if the Pima election officials --- the "Suspects" alleged by affidavit to have "fixed" the election --- might have had the means, motive and opportunity to manipulate the ballots in order to cover their tracks.
In fact, as the EI folks pointed out during the hand-count --- while being ignored by Goddard --- the county had long ago purchased a "print on demand" ballot printer that can print ballots virtually identical to those used on Election Day in 2006. The actual original ballots, however, were printed by an offset printing press which, if compared under a microscope to the high-speed laser-printed "print on demand" ballots, offer tell-tale differences. Such a forensic examination of the ballots being counted by Goddard, might have revealed that original ballots had been replaced.
When Goddard was asked about such a forensic examination at the 2009 post-hand-count presser, he admitted that, despite the requests, he had carried out no such examination to determine the authenticity of the ballots.
"Did you do any forensic checks of the ballots to make sure they were real, period 2006 ballots?," asked Jim March of BlackBoxVoting.org at the press conference.
"No," the AG tersely replied.
One full year of litigation later, and the EI advocates have now finally gotten access to the poll tapes they'd sought more than a year ago, the ones which were stored in Iron Mountain.
"30% of the poll tapes are missing," Risner told us during our live interview with him on the Malloy Show last week. "They simply are not in the boxes. And that's compared with the last election we had in Pima County. Some citizens asked for copies of the poll tapes and they were all there --- 100% of them were there."
Risner says that prior to Goddard's having swooped in to take the ballots out of Pima last year in advance of the hand-count, they had explained to him the significance of reviewing the poll tapes.
"We told the attorney general's office that if we look at the poll tape, there would be clues on it that would tell us whether they had used the machines to fraudulently program [the election]," Risner explained. "That's when he grabbed the ballots."
Brakey and March's examination of those poll tapes which are not missing, show that some 50 of them do not match the numbers in the Diebold electronic databases. They say that many of the places where numbers don't jibe are the same places where their initial analysis of those databases --- the ones they received after their long court battle to get access to them more than two years ago --- are the same places where red flags were seen, such as precincts where memory cards appear to have been uploaded multiple times, for reasons still unknown.
"A significant portion of missing poll tapes had corresponding anomalies in the electronic data records," documentarian J.T. Waldron told us. "It's naive to think that electronic records would be manipulated without some measure to cover tracks by either creating a new paper trail or removing the one that exists."
The investigators say they are eying questionable findings from, among other places, precincts in a small township north of Tucson, called Oro Valley.
When asked if he could offer any legitimate reason that the poll tapes would now be missing, Risner was blunt: "Yeah. They're possible evidence that the election was rigged."
Goddard's press office responded to The BRAD BLOG's request for comment just prior to publication of this article. However, new Press Secretary Molly Edwards informed us she'd need time to look into the matter and into our detailed questions on the missing and mismatched poll tapes and yellow sheets, on whether or not the materials were there and/or accounted for when they performed their hand-count last year, and other related matters. We will update this article with whatever responses we receive from his office.
'Immaculate' perceptions and 'Not the end of the story'
So was the election rigged? Have all these questions been those of a bunch of conspiracy theorists? Even AG Goddard himself, now set to be the state's Democratic candidate for Governor this November, had previously noted that "there wasn't a credible explanation for all of the different coincidences that seemed to have happened on this particular election." He even later conceded to the Associated Press that the paper-based optical-scan systems used in Tucson --- and in virtually every state in the nation, by the way --- "are very, very bad."
We still don't know all the answers, and the EI advocates promise more news to come as their investigation presses forward. But the fact remains that when we don't bother to actually count paper ballots and rely instead on electronic scanners which may or may not be accurate, which may or may not have been manipulated, all of these questions continue to persist and the legitimacy of American democracy itself is further drawn into question.
The corporate media, however, would like to see things differently. After Goddard's hand-count last year "affirmed" the original results --- out of some 120,000 ballots reviewed, the count was off by "only" 600 votes or so, according to the AG --- local media declared the mysteries surrounding the 2006 RTA election to be at an end. All was well again in Pima County's democracy.
"Let that be the final word," the paper pleaded, before offering a familiar, condescending refrain for Election Integrity advocates: "It's time to move on."
For good measure, they even used the "c" word: "Conspiracy theorists will probably remain unconvinced that Pima County is vindicated."
The Star editorial, hoping to quell concerns, uncritically quoted Goddard saying that "the chain of custody was immaculate."
How "immaculate" was that chain of custody? The Election Integrity advocates have discovered that the facility at Iron Mountain wasn't as secured as they'd originally been told.
"Our County Manager had instructed the County Attorney to tell Iron Mountain that no one could approach those boxes," Risner told us last week. "But in our recent poll tape case, the Iron Mountain guy said 'no one ever told us that, and our customers, the county, could always come in to these boxes'."
The county "could always come in to these boxes"?! Did they?
Risner doesn't yet know. "That's the next step in the lawsuit. I'm going to ask for permission to get that information from Iron Mountain," he said. "It's not the end of this story."
Pima County, it should be noted, still employs the same elections personnel who ran the 2006 election. They are still operating, as Waldron says, "with impunity."
To date, neither the Arizona Daily Star, nor any of the other local papers who declared the RTA election settled and done after last year's hand-count, have bothered to report on the newly discovered 112 missing poll tapes, 102 missing yellow sheets, and 50 poll tapes that don't match the original count.
• Special thanks to J.T. Waldron for his contributions to this article. • See this February 18, 2009 letter [PDF] from Risner to Goddard for much more detail on the back story.
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Our interview with Pima County trial attorney Bill Risner, as heard live on the Mike Malloy Show last week, on July 8th, 2010, may be downloaded here [MP3], or listened to online below [appx 30 mins]...
Blogger's note: For any Americans who think illegal aliens are a "problem" that requires a draconian solution, just remember that big business loves these people for the cheap labor they provide. Well, "love" is the wrong word; they treat them as slaves. And remember also that they don't come north to steal American jobs, rather they come north because the U.S. via NAFTA destroyed the jobs they used to have in Mexico. I once wrote a letter to the Editor of the Washington Post touching on this subject, which was rejected. I cannot recommend too highly yesterday's video interview with Isabel Garcia, co-chair of the Tuscon-based Coalition for Human Rights and legal defender of Pima County, Arizona. She is one of the most lucid and informed speakers I've ever listened to.
Legal Defender Isabel Garcia: Arizona Bill Forcing Officers to Determine Immigration Status Marks “All-Out Assault” on Latino Communities
Arizona lawmakers have approved what’s being described as the harshest anti-immigrant measure in the country, forcing police officers to determine the immigration status of someone they suspect of being an undocumented immigrant. Meanwhile, over fifty people were arrested Thursday in a federal immigration sweep targeting van operators allegedly involved in smuggling in undocumented migrants from Mexico. We speak to Isabel Garcia, co-chair of the Tuscon-based Coalition for Human Rights and legal defender of Pima County, Arizona.
Post Script: Just out on the internet: "America Must Boycott Arizona." It's first paragraph reads:
"Arizona is the Alabama of the new century and Maricopa County is the new Selma. America and the world should boycott GOP Governor Jan Brewer’s red state."
