ANYONE WHO THINKS THAT NEVER IN AMERICA WOULD TOWN ELECTION OFFICIALS STEAL AN ELECTION SHOULD WATCH THIS SHORT VIDEO DRAMATIZING A REAL EVENT: THE 1946 BATTLE OF ATHENS, TENNESSEE

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http://youtu.be/T9tUQxsrQGw

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The Battle of Athens (sometimes called the McMinn County War) was a rebellion led by citizens in Athens and Etowah, Tennessee, United States, against the local government in August 1946. The citizens, including some World War II veterans, accused the local officials of political corruption and voter intimidation. The event is sometimes cited by firearms ownership advocates as an example of the value of the Second Amendment in combating tyranny.

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For more info go to Wikipedia here.

However, for some reason Wikipedia doesn't tell it all.  The GIs returning from WW II knew from past experience that elections were being stolen in Athens (by Democratic officials), and for that reason they created the "GI Party" composed of both Republicans and Democrats and announced publicly  that there would be no more stolen elections.  After the battle, the votes were hand counted in public revealing public's will that all of the corrupt incumbent officials be removed from office.

The GIs who launched the battle were not prosecuted.  Moreover, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her nationally syndicated column that when free people are denied the right to have their votes counted as they were cast, despots should expect that they will rise up.

See also http://impactglassman.blogspot.mx/2012/02/bernie-ellis-american-patriot-speaks.html

IN TUCSON ALL POLITICAL PARTIES UNITE IN FIGHTING ELECTIONS RIGGED BY INSIDERS

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Original Here

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.

Occupy Rigged Elections: A Call for the Second American Revolution in 2012

Tuesday 27 December 2011

by: Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins, Truthout | Op-Ed

When candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent, the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.

A protester with the Occupy movement is
led away by law enforcement after interrupting
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at a campaign
event for former Massachusetts Governor
Mitt Romney.
(Photo: Eric Thayer / The New York Times)

A great battle is coming. The 2012 elections are our chance to turn the tide back toward real democracy, but we must begin immediately. Only by organizing for a democratic revolution now can we break the hold of corporate criminals over our elections and take real power in 2012, legitimately and nonviolently.

Thanks to Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement, millions of Americans are finally shaking off the depression and torpor of the past decade, heeding the mass-consciousness call to reclaim power from corporatist forces that have hijacked our country, our planet, and our future. We may not all have taken to the streets yet, but we will. Or we'll contribute in other creative, personally liberating ways, pitching in with prison-break fervor to unblock the channels of revolutionary energy.

Despite the jeering of the corporate media, the Occupy movement is not going to fade away, burn out or be crushed like the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. The Occupy movement is going to change the world, because the world itself has arrived at a momentous crossroads where change is inevitable. Occupy is part of an unstoppable transformation - the contractions of a new world desperate to be born, based on a renewal of community, tolerance, justice and deep respect for all life. A sane, resilient world capable of withstanding the ecological, climatic and economic upheavals we can no longer avoid.

Now is the time to prepare, in this newly awakened, prerevolutionary phase, for Occupy Elections 2012. Because the closer we get to democratically taking power - when candidates emerge who support the positions and demands of the 99 percent - the more certain we can be that our elections will be rigged.

Anarchists and many younger activists today reject representative democracy as unviable. They are rightly disgusted with the macabre, corporate-sponsored, electoral charade we endure every two years like a recurring nightmare. The Occupy movement has already birthed a powerful new form of roots-down direct democracy, where learning to communicate and really hearing each other is the first step toward rebuilding our shattered and alienated communities.

So, do elections matter anymore? Is representative democracy for the People even possible?

Wherever you are on the revolutionary road, whoever you are in your mind and soul, we ask you to please listen to the message we're conveying today, and consider how it impacts your activism in the coming year.

American elections are not going away any time soon. They are rigged, and we must end the rigging - for the sake of our planet and its 7 billion people, entwined in complex technological and social systems that do require some form of representative government to function.

Our electoral process is rigged in the following ways:

• Corporate personhood and the legal determination that money equals speech. 
• Corporate campaign financing and lobbying; billions to buy our elected representatives.
• Corporate restriction of candidate access to the media and to participation in vital debates.
• Corporate media exit polling, which often alters results to manufacture a false "red shift" of rightward-moving electoral outcomes.
• Manipulation of electoral structures and mechanisms
• Partisan redistricting, which re-draws electoral district maps that favor a particular party.
• Voter ID laws that disenfranchise young, poor and minority voters.
• Fraudulent purging of voter rolls, including "caging" - removing a voter from the rolls or discarding their vote based on the return of direct mail to their listed address, a practice found to be used fraudulently and with racial bias, making it illegal under the Voting Rights Act.
• Disenfranchisement of felons, many poor, black or Hispanic, and convicted on drug offenses.
• The centralized rigging of computerized voting machines. 

The battle to topple the corporatocracy must strategically attack all of these points. But for the purpose of this call to action - Occupy Rigged Elections - we're going to focus on the last, least understood bullet point: computerized election fraud.

In the end, how ballots are counted - the central control mechanism of democracy - could prove the easiest piece to reclaim; our first real step toward radically shifting power back toward the people.

Computerized Vote Rigging Is a Democratic Cancer

Undiagnosed, spreading through our nation's bones, centralized election rigging has been undermining the health of our democracy for decades, eating away at it from within, leaving us exhausted and hopeless - though unsure of why we're so sick.

But let's get something clear up front: not every election is rigged, so don't be confused by the few decent people who managed to get into office and stay there. First, ask yourself this question: Have they stopped the corporatist takeover? The answer is no.

Pay attention to the balance of power; watch it tipping ever further toward the corporatist/fascist side of the scale. Meanwhile, the spectacle of democracy maintains a pacified public. In other words, they will let some of "our" people in, or let some of our initiatives pass, while they keep winning more power, overall. Additionally - not all elections are easy to rig, and some have far higher stakes. But there is one constant in the equation:

Every election can be rigged. Undetectably.

If this is news to you, hang on to your hat. Once you understand how the machinery of the American voting system actually works, you're going to feel a little stunned, as if you came home from a three month vacation to discover you left your keys hanging in the front door.

Over the past 40 years - since computers first came online for use in processing and reporting votes - our secretaries of state and election supervisors have literally sold our democratic system to a small criminal cadre of extreme right-wing and religious ideologues who lurk behind shady voting machine companies. The top three are Diebold (purchased by ES&S in 2009), ES&S, and Sequoia Pacific (purchased by Dominion). They manufactured the majority of voting machines and software that secretly count our ballots.

Read it again. Let it sink in.

Yes, it's insane. For this reason alone, we have every reason to have lost faith in electoral democracy, but as you can see, we need to understand why it is failing. We need to know whose big, fat, dirty thumb is on the scale. We need to know how we lost our power before we can hope to reclaim it.

Hand-Counted Paper Ballots NOW!

This is the organic solution. Properly designed, cast in see-through plastic boxes, counted by hand, in public, on election day, with a stringent set of safeguards and a vigilant public  - paper ballots can deliver fast results and provide a fully transparent and accountable voting system. Attempted fraud can be detected and prevented. Conversely, computerized election theft is accomplished secretly, within the "proprietary" software owned by the corporations who manufacture the machines.

Did you know that no one - not even an election supervisor - is allowed to view the software?

Did you know that the Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois just hacked a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen voting machine by remote control with $26 in computer parts?

We know these things because a small group of American election integrity activists have been working tirelessly, without much recognition or compensation, to compile a mountain of evidence:

• Detailing the criminal histories and the partisan and extremist ties of the voting machine manufacturers
• Demonstrating how the machines can be rigged and hacked
• Exposing Department of Justice (DOJ) coverups of election fraud evidence
• Exposing the roll of the corporate media in aiding and abetting election fraud

See the resource list at the end of this article to learn more. Get informed. Take action, and please help us fight back – WE NEED YOU.

Democracy is our birthright, but it has never been fully realized. We've had to fight and die for the right to fight and die for it. It's a dream, a shared vision, a work in progress that has been derailed. Though some activists idealize earlier times - pre-industrial, communal, tribal - we can't go backwards, only forward. What do we want today? Tomorrow? What do we want for ourselves and our children?

We want our damn democracy back.

We want the chance to make it real for the first time, with our own candidates who truly represent the needs of the people, and with a safe voting system accountable to the people.

Help us organize to secure hand-counted paper ballots before the 2012 elections. This is something we can do, if we start now. The stakes of those elections could not be higher.

Join Occupy Rigged Elections on Facebook, started by activists responsible for the historic occupation of the Statehouse in Madison, Wisconsin. They are organizing now to recall Koch-brother puppet Gov. Scott Walker in 2012.

We only have a small window of opportunity. Let's make 2012 the year we took our country back.

To learn more:

www.votescam.org
Www.votescam.org/paper_ballots_now
Www.votescam.org/the_evidence
www.blackboxvoting.org
www.bradblog.org
www.handcountedpaperballots.org
www.electiondefensealliance.org

Visit the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project

On Facebook:

Occupy Rigged Elections
Occupy Voting Booths
Election Integrity
WI Citizens for Election Protection 
Votescam  
Black BoxVoting  

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This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. 

---

Victoria Collier

Victoria Collier is the daughter and niece of James and Kenneth Collier, authors of the book "Votescam: The Stealing of America." She is the editor of www.votescam.org.

Ronnie Cummins

Ronnie Cummins is the national director of the Organic Consumers Association, campaigning on behalf of its 1 million members for food safety, public health and corporate accountability.

When you go to vote tomorrow, take notes on any voting machine malfunctions or any odd actions by poll workers ...and report them to the election-integrity activists at the Election Defense Alliance

Watch these two short videos. The things that Jon Stewart refers to are definitely true. While the so-called mainstream media are mostly mum on this subject, these facts are well known to me and others who regularly track this kind if information on the internet.





Our elections are defenseless against rigging by those in charge of voting machines with programmable memory cards and/or ballot-tabulating central computers. Your vigilance, concern, and perchance material aid are dearly needed to begin to reverse this situation.

Just remember:

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
- - Thomas Paine

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-- Goethe

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
-- Thomas Jefferson

“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.”
-- Edmund Burke

http://electiondefensealliance.org/

Full Disclosure: The blogger is a member of the Coordinating Council of the Election Defense Alliance.

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Some optional choices (added 11/2/10):

Please make time to report incidents/problems around this Nov 2, 2010 election.

- MA, Election Incidents Hotsheet.  The reporting is very simple to do

http://massachusetts-election-incidents-blog.blogspot.com/2010/10/reports-of-problems-observed-firsthand.html

Sponsored by the Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots

http://www.handcountedpaperballots.org/

  IL Election Incidents Hotsheet

http://illinois-election-incidents-hotsheet.blogspot.com/2010/09/reports-of-problems-observed-firsthand.html

Sponsored by http://ballot-integrity.org/

- TX Election Incidents Hotsheet

http://texas-election-incidents-hotsheet.blogspot.com/2010/09/reports-of-problems-observed-firsthand.html

Sponsored by http://www.voterescue.org/

Two pages of polling-place etiquette, plus a one-page checklist of things
to be alert for.

Download pdf version from http://ballot-integrity.org/pollwatchertips.pdf

Or read as online at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pollwatcher-Tools-A-Carro-by-Roy-Lipscomb-101101-438.html

Convicted Criminals Take Over Counting U.S. Mail-In Ballots. Plan on Voting Locally!

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FELON'S FINGERS IN USA VOTE-BY-MAIL SYSTEM

by Bev Harris
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Posted Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Vote the old fashioned way. Vote at the polling place, allowing plenty of time, and ready to assert your right to use a provisional ballot if your name is not on the list. Vote by mail is second only to Internet voting in the risk it presents to our democracy.

Permission to excerpt or reprint granted, with link to http://www.blackboxvoting.org

For a glimpse into just how slipshod our vote-by-mail controls really are, take a look at how two convicted felons obtained intimate access to the system:

The primary architect for current vote-by-mail computer software was Jeffrey Dean, an embezzler who specialized in computer crime. Dean's Dept. of Corrections papers:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/dean/dean-criminal-docs.pdf
Court transcripts showing Dean's key role in vote-by-mail software:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/17789.html

While in prison, embezzler Jeffrey Dean became friends with a narcotics trafficker named John Elder. While still in prison, on a work-release program, Jeffrey Dean was tasked with creating a computerized vote by mail program for King County, Washington. He began this assignment while working for his brother, Neil Dean, whose business had a contract with King County to provide temporary workers for its huge absentee voting operation. At the time, King County had about 1 million voters, 600,000 of whom voted by absentee.

Jeff and Neil Dean became involved in creating a vote-by-mail automation program to handle mail processing and signature comparison. Jeff Dean then left his brother Neil Dean's employment to launch his own ballot printing and mailing company, then called Spectrum Print & Mail. He brought in prison buddy John Elder to help him manage the company.

One wonders how Jeff Dean ever got the money together to fund his ballot printing operation, which featured high-end printing machines from Europe. At the time he owed nearly half a million dollars in court-ordered restitution for his embezzlement. Someone funded his ballot printing operation, which almost immediately was given the lucrative ballot printing contract for million-voter King County.

It's not that Jeff Dean didn't have political connections. In his depositions, he claims that his embezzlement from the law firm back in the 1980s was not really an embezzlement, but a kickback scheme for some of the partners related to an off-the-books project they were doing.

Now, Jeff Dean is a liar and a crook, there is no doubt of that (most recently, he did an illegal, unregistered stock offering for an RV park he owns in an Idaho resort area, bilking a lovely couple, the Laners, out of their life savings; he purchased this expensive RV park while declaring in Washington state that he was bankrupt, then sold shares in it to unsuspecting investors).

I've looked at copies of the checks Jeff Dean wrote to himself while allegedly embezzling from the law firm (he took an Alford plea, never admitting guilt). He looks guilty to me, but his claim that he was doing something off the books for the partners is interesting, given the political nature of the firm and his immediate access to the King County election system beginning while still incarcerated. One of the partners, at the law firm Jeff Dean embezzled from was Bud Krogh, who formerly headed the Watergate burglars under Richard Nixon. Jeff Dean claims he took a fall for some of the partners on some off-the-books deal they were doing. There is no doubt that he landed on his feet unusually quickly post-incarceration.

After Jeff Dean was released, having already begun work on the computerized vote-by-mail system which would later come to dominate the US absentee voting market, he somehow launched a pricey print shop, immediately got the biggest ballot-printing and mailing assignment in Washington state, and then was assigned to work INSIDE King County elections with the GEMS central tabulator and the voter registration database. He was given a key and 24-hour access, and when then-supervisor of elections Julie Anne Kempf dug up his prison record and complained, she was fired but Jeff Dean and prison-buddy John Elder were retained.

Jeff Dean then became a primary stockholder in what was then called Global Election Systems, by selling his lucrative ballot printing and mailing operation to Canadian-based Global Election Systems, which was then purchased by Diebold. Dean pocketed a few million in the deal, but due to a court judgment against him, hid the money by transferring it to his son -- then taking assets purchased by the money back -- meanwhile declaring bankruptcy in Washington while hiding assets in Idaho.

Under Diebold, Jeff Dean became a paid consultant and John Elder took over the ballot printing and mailing, until 2004, when Black Box Voting exposed the two felons, along with three more crooks involved in the start-up of Global Election Systems (Michael K. Graye, Norton Cooper, and Charles Hong Lee, who were convicted of embezzlement, stock fraud, "defrauding the queen" and in the case of Charles Hong Lee, ordered to pay restitution for bilking investors).

The story of what became the backbone of the US vote-by-mail software doesn't end here, though. Neil Dean, Jeff Dean's brother and partner during his initial design of the vote by mail software, sold his own firm to Pitney Bowes, which came out with -- guess what? -- vote by mail software. So now we have Pitney Bowes (which purchased Neil Dean's outfit) and Vote Remote (Jeff Dean's software) dominating the automated vote by mail industry in the USA.

John Elder, after being booted out of Diebold's print and mail shop (which by then was national, handling Washington, California, Georgia, Colorado, and many other locations), set up shop as an elections consultant. What does he consult on, you may ask?

Black Box Voting has learned that John Elder has recently been acting as a middleman, massaging the huge vote-by-mail databases for California and Colorado counties before they go to the print shop. It works like this: Counties contract with a middleman to help them with their vote by mail; the middleman is findable through public records for the contracts, but John Elder is not. Why? Because he acts as an off-the-books secondary middleman. The first middleman sends the database to John Elder, who massages the vote-by-mail data and sends the database on to his friend at a print shop in Fresno.

Jeff Dean, meanwhile, lives in a huge home in Idaho overlooking Hell's Canyon, along with his computer server and several expensive horses. No one will ever serve a search warrant by surprise here, because his mountaintop house is accessible only by a forest service road he can watch from his panorama picture windows, and it takes a good 15 minutes of dusty driving to get up to his horse pastures.

Why is Jeff Dean and his server still of interest? According to court transcripts, Jeffrey Dean admitted to remotely accessing the voter databases and vote by mail programs for California counties during live elections. So what we have (or have had) is a convicted embezzler tinkering around by remote access in the vote databases that control elections.

And that's the story on our vote-by-mail craze. What we need to be focusing on is restoration of the public right to see and authenticate every one of the four essential parts of elections. It may be "easy and fun" to vote by mail, but with vote by mail we have just "easy and funned" our way out of public elections. We have transferred power.

Maricopa County, AZ, Court Case Update: Today a Multi-Partisan Team Will Begin to Press the Maricopa Election Office to Cease Their Numerous Election-Law Violations

Jim March (Libertarian) -- Attorney Brad Roach (Republican) -- John Brakey (progressive Democrat)

Trial begins Friday, September 10th 2010 at 8:15 AM.
Proudly brought to you by AUDIT AZ ...which urgently needs your donations

HONORABLE JUDGE ROBERT OBERBILLIG
CIVIL PRESIDING JUDGE
OLD COURT HOUSE
COURTROOM 309, 3RD FLOOR
125 W. WASHINGTON,
PHOENIX, AZ 85003

So far the score is even: our request for a jury was canned, their motion for summary judgment has been ignored.

We’re even on points, no knockouts; round three is the main event.

This case is about forcing Maricopa County Election to follow the law – nothing more, nothing less. As such, most of the issues are going to be of limited benefit outside of Arizona, although the basic concept of this sort of suit (Mandamus action) is possible across the nation.

The one major except is the use of uncertified software - that points a finger through Maricopa County back to the state and national-level voting system certification processes. Arizona bars the use of voting system software that isn't federally certified to the standards promoted under HAVA. While those standards are weak, they still scared Sequoia into dodging them completely on a key part of their product line – a part that can subvert the outcome of elections and produce data that both Maricopa County and Sequoia want to bar us from having. This part of the case is at the cutting edge of election law issues – the intersection of the rights of election software producers to maintain trade secrets versus the right of the people to know how our vote is counted.

This part is complex, but in a nutshell: Sequoia created an entire section of their election system that they didn’t submit for testing like they should have – in direct violation of AZ law. They then needed to hide the extent of the security breach that resulted. To do THAT, they needed to make sure the data files altered by this illegal module don’t see the light of day and to make sure, they labeled the data files as “containing proprietary trade secret software”. Right. In the data. So we couldn’t get it via public records. Well that was a mistake, because there’s no possible way the data files could conform to the rules on “election software”, which isn’t supposed to change from election to election. The data files do. So it’s gonna be comical: if they still claim the data contains “software”, they admit to a class 5 felony for installing uncertified software (the data) on a certified system. If they blanch at the idea of confessing to a felony and call the data “just data”, we get it via public records and per our insider tipster (did I mention him yet?) we get to prove the program that produced the data damn well should have been certified. It’s the world’s dumbest catch-22 and they’ve already walked right into it. At stake is yet more proof that the voting system vendors have been systematically “gaming” the voting system test process nationally – and that is the big enchilada in exposing the insanity of the US election system.

Out of a total of four national voting system test labs ever approved, three have been thrown out for poor performance and let back in only with conditions. The two worst labs (Wyle and Ciber) are based in Huntsville AL where we hope they do better working on military aerospace flight systems for the Redstone National Arsenal, their main business. The one lab not thrown out (iBeta) obviously specializes in more important matters: they’re mainly a video game tester. We wish we were kidding. This is the fig leaf of sanity used to rationalize all electronic voting in the US: “don’t worry, the test labs are watching”. This is what we’re about to strike a blow against.

At the local level, Maricopa County has overreached. They've designed a complete election process tuned for fraud. Take a look at this one chain of destruction:

Soon after the hand
count audit bill
passed in late 2006
Maricopa stopped
having pollworkers sign
these tapes.
· Pollworkers don't sign polltapes per illegal orders.
· Also per illegal orders, pollworkers don't put one set of polltapes (signed or otherwise) into the “official returns envelope” also know as the conflict envelope, a signed and sealed clear envelope that election officials can't get into without major effort such as a court order or a special election team monitored by multiple political parties.
· Pollworkers are illegally told not to allow observers to see the precinct totals after the polls close.
· Ballot materials are transported by just one person instead of the two required by law from opposite parties. You guessed it. Illegal.
· Operations at the central tabulator computer are barred from any functional observation of any sort. Even when observers spotted obviously illegal activity, the county's response was to deny the use of cameras to document it and then tampered with the evidence.
Specifically, what we saw was a Sequoia employee running a Sequoia-owned laptop connected to the central tabulator. The laptop in turn had a cellular modem plugged into it, allowing an easy cross-connection between the cellular internet connection and the central tabulator station. Internet and outside connections to the central tabulator are flat banned. The county's response to an immediate complaint was to deny the use of cameras to document it and then tampered with the evidence. This happened on 08/23/10, just one day before the election with over 230,000 ballots all ready counted.

As a final insult, the county rigged the selection of precincts for the 2% hand audit, refusing to publicly commit the results as per the law or anybody else what the individual precinct results were beforehand. They illegally released "combined results" only. This allowed them to rig the rest of the precincts to whatever degree they want. Once they get the list of precincts selected for a count, they could "un-hack" those in the central tabulator database of votes and shift any hacking in the selected precincts to the unselected keeping the previously reported "combined results" intact. Arizona's hand-count law (new in late 2006) was designed to block this sort of thing. Maricopa County subverted it. They purchased the Sequoia system soon after that law was passed and stopped having the polltapes signed.

We're going to take it back.

This is our fight for our rights. Join us. Popcorn is unfortunately not allowed but otherwise, this is going to be the best show in town.

* They've agreed to start signing polltapes, and will make a concerted
effort starting this general election. A court order will be issued
compelling legal compliance.

* They'll also start reporting precinct details BEFORE picking
precincts to hand audit, a key barrier against fraud. This will also
allow anyone to identify cases where a candidate or issue had a huge
difference in votes between the early/mail-in vote and the precinct
vote. Such swings are a pointer to potential fraud or error and we
need to know about those ASAP.

FLASH UPDATE FOR THOSE KEEPING SCORE:

* Our motion for a jury trial was denied. Score a minor one for them.

* Their motion for summary judgment was ignored. Minor point for us.

Out of eight original issues, we've now officially won two before the
trial even starts.

Game is still on but we're ahead on points. No knockout yet.

Are we having fun yet? HELL yeah!

John and Jim

Link to reports:

Security Evaluation of the Sequoia Voting System Public Report

https://www.sos.ca.gov/voting-systems/oversight/ttbr/red-sequoia.pdf

Review of the Documentation of the Sequoia Voting System:

http://www.sos.ca.gov/voting-systems/oversight/ttbr/sequoia-doc-final.pdf

Source Code Review of the Sequoia Voting System1:

http://www.sos.ca.gov/voting-systems/oversight/ttbr/sequoia-source-public-jul26.pdf

WITHDRAW AL OF APPROVAL OF SEQUOIA VOTING SYSTEMS, INC.,

(October 1, 2009 Revision)

https://www.sos.ca.gov/voting-systems/vendors/sequoia/sequoia-31012-revision-1209.pdf 

For A You-Tube Blast To The Past, Maricopa Elections Finds 489 New Votes With 2nd Machine Recount in LD 20 September 2004.

In the U.S. it is easy for election-computer operators to rig an election and difficult to prove they've done it: Arizona activists propose a solution

Bloggers Note: This column by Tucson attorney Bill Risner is the latest appearance in the local media of the story of Pima County citizens' dogged efforts to establish a means of knowing whether or not future elections are rigged. My earlier posts on this subject can be found here, here, and here.

Notably, the national media never pick up on such stories. Given that it's a proven fact that computerized elections can be rigged by election computer operators, it's almost as though so-called "mainstream" media don't want you to know that...

OPINION >> GUEST COMMENTARY                              April 22, 2010

Guest Opinion

The elections-integrity fight isn't about the RTA vote; it's about future rigged elections

by Bill Risner

News stories have repeatedly framed the election-integrity efforts of the Pima County Democratic Party as a "fight over the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election," an illogical assertion, since the party endorsed the RTA.

That frame diverts attention from the truly serious systemic problem. Whether the RTA was fraudulently rigged is certainly a big deal, but the struggle for every vote count to be honest is a much bigger deal. In our world of media sound bites, it is difficult to get the media or the public to focus on a problem. The use of computers with secret instructions to count our votes is among our biggest problems that few are willing to examine.

It has been said that those who know the most about computers are the least willing to have them count our ballots. The Pima County Democratic Party and its ally in this struggle, the Pima County Libertarian Party, have a unique group of highly skilled and educated computer experts that began investigating our Pima County election system years before the RTA election.

In July 2003, almost three years before the RTA vote, the Pima County Democratic Party adopted a report that detailed security problems with our election computer system.

The problem that you and I share is that it is easy to cheat and rig any election in Pima County—and there is nothing that we can do under our current rules to expose the cheating or reverse any announced election result. This easy-to-cheat fact is not seriously challenged by any knowledgeable observer. Numerous reports from experts detail the many ways to cheat.

What makes it so easy to cheat? The Pima County Diebold GEMS computer was built so that the log entries that record how data has been manipulated is not a file separate from the data itself. Any log entry can simply be deleted, and no record will remain of what has been done to the data.

Those changes need not be done at the election office; they can be accomplished on a home computer using the common Microsoft Access program. Court testimony from several Pima County Elections Department workers established that our county's computer operator regularly took home copies of election data during elections.

The ballots at each of our precincts are counted on optical scanners that record and print the results from "memory cards"—that can be programmed in advance of the election to print fake results. When election departments nationwide were alerted on July 4, 2005, by a special report from the Black Box Voting organization that a machine called a "crop scanner" could be used to program the cards to fraudulently rig elections, Pima County's response was to immediately buy one of those hack tools. Pima County's election computer operator testified that he practiced with the machine, and that it wasn't difficult to get the memory cards to record and print false results.

The ease-of-cheating problem becomes magnified when combined with the impossibility of challenging any computerized rigged election in Arizona. Arizona law allows five days only to challenge an election. The Pima County Superior Court ruled last summer that the five-day period was the exclusive remedy not only to challenge an election, but even to obtain relief to protect future elections.

All computer experts are in agreement that it is impossible to analyze computerized election data within five days and show specifically how an election was rigged. The result is that it is easy to cheat and impossible to challenge.

The security problems are not limited to the Diebold system, as all of the systems have serious problems. The good news is that there is a solution to cheating: The Arizona Democratic Party has endorsed our plan to graphically scan all ballots. If all ballots cast are graphically scanned and made available to all parties and the public, those ballots can be counted by anyone. The result would be that no one could cheat in the future.

Pima County is currently refusing to graphically scan, and the court has refused to even accept jurisdiction to consider significant evidence of cheating. That legal fight is being continued by the Libertarian Party in the state Court of Appeals.

The goal of honest counting is the goal of local election activists. We fully understand that the RTA is here to stay. It is the next rigged elections that are our concern.