It’s February 8th, 2008, and it’s now official: One member of the broadcast MSM has officially joined the ranks of those “crackpots” and “conspiracy theorists” over at The BRAD BLOG!
Congrats to Pittsburgh’s WTAE’s Team 4 for their excellent, responsible, and appropriate reportage on the serious concerns facing Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County voters in the upcoming election. Their investigative report asks “Is Your Vote Safe With County Voting Machines?” and the clear, well-reported, fair and balanced answer comes back as an unambiguous, no punches-pulled: Absolutely not!
The report’s “conspiracy theories,” confirmed by video, photographs and on-the-record statements from both public officials and Election Integrity experts, as detailed by Team 4’s Jim Parsons on WTAE-TV’s evening news yesterday (transcript and video both here), include some of these well-known-to-BRAD-BLOG-readers, if still-stunning and rarely-reported-in-the-MSM, items…
- Election officials promising to ensure Pittsburgh’s ES&S iVotronic touch-screens will be “safe and secure” as the doors to the warehouse where those voting machines are stored are left wide open and fully unattended.
- Acknowledgment that access to the Personal Electronic Ballot (PEB memory cartridges) for these machines can allow easy tampering of the systems, and that several such PEB’s were never returned after their last election.
- Admission that “A week before each election, Allegheny County sends all of its electronic voting machines from the warehouse to hundreds of schools, churches and other polling places, where they sit, often open to the public.”
- “Little plastic zip tie thing with a number on it” used to “secure” the systems, “wouldn’t defeat anyone motivated” to hack them.
- Allegheny County’s iVotronic’s have recently been banned in several other states after scientific studies found that they were vulnerable to attacks by items as simple as magnets and personal digital assistants.
- There are no background checks done for criminal convictions of election workers despite state law which would disallow criminals from holding such positions. Team 4 found 13 such election judges with recent criminal convictions and charges against them for things such as felony robbery, gun and drug charges.
- Such election judges have “sole possession of the PEBs for several days leading up to an election.”
- “An Allegheny County Council advisory panel has issued a report, calling on the county to scrap the Ivotronic machines,” but they will be using them in Pennsylvania’s upcoming crucial Primary election anyway.
If a few thousand more such MSM outlets turned into such BRAD BLOG-style “conspiracy theorists” (read: responsible reporters telling their audience what’s actually going on) we might get to go out of business and go back to what we were doing before, or otherwise report on something else for a change! We’d welcome either eventuality!
Please go check out Jim Parsons’ Team 4 report and let us know if any of it sounds familiar to you long-time BRAD BLOG readers. And thank you Team 4!
I recommend highly the video Brad linked to in this. You can tell that someone over at Team 4 has been reading this blog.
The Allegheny County Elections Director is a hoot! When he’s interviewed about any concerns/worries he might have about the security of the machines, he says, “Nah. There’s usually somebody around.” You cannot make this stuff up!
When he explains how last year, one of the elections judges forgot to return (!!!) three of the cartridges/brains for the machines, and that he never got them back, you’d a thunk he was talking about staples, or pencil erasers. Very nonchalant, unconcerned guy. He will never have a cardiac arrest. Not only is he definitely NOT a type A guy, he’s a type triple-Z. We don’t even have people like that in CA. They’d never survive in this state.
Team 4 also talked about precinct officers with criminal records, felony robbers, forgerers, and violators of gun laws who are doing the jobs in Allegheny County that I do here in Sonoma County. They discussed whether the job of precinct officer is a position of trust. Once again, you cannot make this stuff up. Oh yeah. You wouldn’t BELIEVE what precinct officers are entrusted with. It’s a tremendous responsibility, with access to elections forms and systems that control who gets into elected office and which propositions get passed, which ultimately determines things like whether we go to war, whether we address global climate change, whether we suspend habeas corpus, little things like that. The fact that they felt they had to discuss whether this is a position of trust tells it all.
Anyway, I’m going to download this video and bring it to my polling place in June for my team to watch and laugh about during lulls.
Linda #1
Funny, when asked “Are there any concerns” I expect them to begin to say, “Nah. There’s usually somebody
aroundon the payroll.”HAVE FAITH … take up thy payroll check and WALK … 😉 …
Yeah, like I said a few posts ago the only security on my i vote tronic machine (next county over) is a dealy wop plastic tie thingy.., I’m a Judge of Elections, but no, I’m not a convicted felon. Hey Allegehney has a GREAT EI group who are quoted in the article. Sean and David have been at ths for quite a while. Kudos to them and I’m sure Marybeth too, Linda. I guess I’ll start watching channel 4 now, got that KDKA!
It’s truly sad how the concept of ‘fair and balanced’ reporting has been so bastardized.
It defies logic to emphasize so-called balance when the positions of the “other side”, “critics” and the notoriously vague “some say” are demonstrably, patently false, or just plain absurd — like elections officials who prize speed and convenience (theirs) over accuracy and best practices.
Hopefully more reporters will catch on to the fact that equal time for absurd or outright fraudulent positions does not constitute “balance”, it constitutes stupidity. If they must offer two sides, no matter how ridiculous, they should at least provide mitigating details in rebuttal.
Hey Des, how do you think they would hold up if THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE made it back into air space?
And more than just inept oversight… but legal liability was still apart of the process?
Please go to http://www.tangibleballot.org
Sorry Collin, that was an Irish mistake.
Ancient
Yes, Jim Parsons is one of the Good Guys.
And Jim has been getting months (years really) of good information from the wonderful Pittsburgh-area election integrity activists who work with us in VoteAllegheny and VotePA.
These Pittsburgh area folks, including Collin, David, several other prominent computer scientists in the area, and many dedicated ‘regular citizens’ have been incredibly diligent at observing Allegheny County L&A tests, vote tabulating, and other procedures.
The really scary thing is that Jim Parson’s report only covers Allegheny County and these ES&S iVotronics are in use in 25 Pennsylvania counties overall which is more than any other machine in the state. We are sure that what goes on on elsewhere is likely just as bad — or WORSE.
OH, this was BEYOND a joy to watch. Felt like breathing fresh air after years in a vacuum. Must write JIM PARSONS and thank him/ send him all kinds of (metaphoric) sweet, tender, forehead kisses…
…and LOVE the end where JIM PARSONS says that the Election Director would be happy to sit down and discuss this in further detail WITH THE FEDS AND THE STATE’s (approval…?!)
HHAHahhhehehheheeeEEEE! THAT would be an interesting follow up!
I watched the video.
Excellent report … at first I thought it was a history video showing how the MSM was in ancient times … then I realized this is now … there are some MSM folk who have a good handle on the issues of election integrity.
Then my countenance fell when I realized they could be one in a million.
What about voting do these people not get! This is so widespread that I have come to think that it is a Kevin Smith slackers movie.
This is one push in the right direction for the MSM. With their herd mentality, maybe they will start reporting this story.
onorato gets HEAT from this. That ambitious asshole!
Act local, be global.
Is that smart enough for you Conyers?
Here’s a good pick from PA:
http://www.opednews.com/article..._be_stolen.htm
I really liked the, “Paper in 08 Before Its Too Late” comment.
Just what does it take to get you off your haunches, sir?
Wow, I really like the part about the (lucky) 13 felons serving as election judges. Certainly it would never happen in any other city, town, county or state in the great US of A.
There is a county in So Cal where doing background checks has been suggested a number of times. But in this county, there is “faith” that every single election judge (including some 18 year-olds) has no felony convictions for fraud, robbery, burglary, embezzlement, bribery, assault or child endangerment, to mention a few choice crimes one might be convicted of.
This “faith-based” approach to “trusting” that every one of 3,000 persons hired has no criminal background will come back to bite the higher-ups when they have to explain to the electorate why they chose NOT to see if someone handling the election system was a criminal. And there are elections coming up soon for some of the “higher ups”.