After all these years, not much has changed for the denialist jurisdictions that still insult their voters by using 100% unverifiable electronic voting machines.
Pittsburgh’s WTAE filed a report last week with a ring of exhausting familiarity — at least to long time readers of The BRAD BLOG. This one stars, as usual, both an open, unsecured door to the warehouse, and an election official — in this case, Allegheny County Pennsylvania’s Election Division manager, Mark Wolosik — claiming he’s “seen” no problems before, so everything is just dandy, nothing to worry about when it comes to his support of the use of 100% unverifiable electronic voting systems by his county’s voters…
“We have all these tests in place. We test before and after, and we haven’t seen anything that shows that anything has been tampered with,” Wolosik tells WTAE in the report, actually seeming convinced of the e-voting vendor-approved, scientifically-disemboweled propaganda on which he has foolishly decided to stake his career as an election official.
That anybody — anybody — is still using 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting machines after all of these years — much less ES&S’ iVotronic systems which have failed spectactularly in election after election, year after year — is astonishing. And yet, many parts of Pennsylvania (including the two largest jurisdictions of both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia) will do exactly that during their upcoming May 18th primary, and again this November.
For the record, as we’ve noted many times in the past, we are unaware of a single piece of evidence that exists to show that any vote, for any candidate or initiative on the ballot in any election, anywhere at any time, has ever been counted accurately, as per any voter’s intent, on any Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, commonly: “touch-screen”) voting machine.
For years, we’ve asked any election official or e-voting vendor to provide any such evidence. None have. Because they can’t. None exists. None. That, despite millions of 100% faith-based votes having been cast on such machines in a process which is 100% antithetical to the idea of citizen-overseeable democracy and self-governance.
Kentucky is also set to use the same, oft-failed, easily-hacked ES&S iVotronic touch-screen systems in its May 18th primary when their Sec. of State Trey Grayson — who has completely ignored e-voting problems and the use of uncertified voting machines in the past — will oversee his own primary election contest for the GOP Senatorial nomination against Dr. Rand Paul, son of TX Rep. Ron Paul (as we warned in late March to little notice. Candidate Paul has now twice-declined our invitations to appear on the radio to discuss the matter.)
Recently, half a dozen of the top election officials — including the County Clerk, a district court judge, and the county’s School Superintendent — were found guilty in federal court of having gamed elections for decades in Clay County, KY. Their most recent scheme in 2006 involved changing the votes of legal voters on ES&S’ iVotronic systems without the voters’ knowledge after they’d left the virtual “booth.”
When the next election blows up due to these systems — and it will — we’ll hope nobody faults The BRAD BLOG for having done our damndest, over the past six years, and literally thousands of articles, to warn of what is to come. Apparently it’s very easy to ignore the warnings.
At least they won’t be able to say, as with 9/11, as with Katrina, as with the BP disaster: “Who could have foreseen it?”
Right?
[Note to WTAE and “Team 4”: Appreciate your coverage. Hate that you do not allow embedding of video, since exponentially more viewers would otherwise be able to similarly appreciate your work if you did! This is 2010.]
Well they did get the part wrong about Ohio ditching iVotronics.
I don’t think any county in Ohio has (except maybe one that was flooded and went to paper ballots)
FWIW, Cuyahoga County OH (Cleveland) ditched their ES&S iVotronic touch-screens just prior to the 2008 election. (Or were those Diebold touch-screens, now that I think of it? Have forgotten now, but they ditched the DREs and went to paper-ballot op-scan there, in any case.)
Well, Brad, maybe when the voters read this book, they will get rid of those damn touchscreens:
http://www.amazon.com/Proving-E...88&sr=8-1
Kentucky’s decision is especially horrendous, given that election officials already have been convicted of gaming the very same machines that will be in use in the state.
Oh, well, you know, just a few bad apples in local contests, right?….
Big sigh.
Brad, as you know these warnings are not being completely ignored in Pennsylvania. There is a strong and vibrant election integrity community here and we have been working hard to get better voting systems. We are very thankful to Jim Parsons and WTAE for continuing to shine the spotlight on the paperless DREs, and to VotePA’s partner VoteAllegheny for helping to spearhead this coverage.
Despite thousands of individuals and many advocacy organizations like VotePA urging otherwise, bad choices were made by a lot of Pennsylvania counties back in 2006 when paperless DREs were purchased under HAVA. Sadly, despite our ongoing hard work, 50 of our 67 Pennsylvania counties still use those same paperless DREs today. It just breaks my heart that we have been working persistently for over 5 years (personally I sometimes work 60 hours a week or more for election integrity) and we are still using these machines in Pennsylvania.
The voting systems purchased in 2006 are now entering their fifth year of life and are aging rapidly. DRE failures will start to become more and more commonplace as these machines reach the end of their useful lives. But Pennsylvania’s DREs are not likely to be replaced anytime soon, no matter how much good information VotePA or BradBlog or anyone else provides as to why DREs are not trustwortthy.
To put it simply, Pennsylvania is broke. Whoever gets the governorship in this year’s election will enter office facing a state budget deficit of over $3 billion dollars. Pennsylvania’s state and local governments are cutting back on everything from libraries to schools to snow removal. There simply isn’t any state or local money to buy new voting systems right now.
There are two possible ways out of this mess.
The longer, fallback path is for states like PA to start budgeting now toward replacement of the DREs a number of years down the road. Although we would like to see change sooner, VotePA and other groups are working with our officials (including some of our 2010 gubernatorial candidates) to lay groundwork for this in Pennsylvania. Without an influx of federal money this is currently our best hope, even though it will take years to replace the DREs this way and in the interim we may not be able to avoid some very difficult election failures.
Federal help is the other pathway to replacement of DREs with voter-verified paper ballots. The fact remains that there IS a federal bill pending right now that would do much to correct these problems for PA, KY, and the rest of the country; a bill that will phase out of DREs nationally and will even stop internet voting. This bill is the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act HR2894 and S1431.
Brad, I know you haven’t liked this bill, but I urge you and everyone else to take a long and serious new look. Realistically the alternative is more years of the status quo while we work within our cash-strapped states to budget for DRE replacement — meaning more long years of states like Pennsylvania continuing to vote on aging, paperless DREs.
Your warnings have been clear, but so have ours. When a future election blows up in Pennsylvania, nobody is going to blame The BRAD BLOG for not sounding the alarm, but we sure as heck might wish then that we all had partnered more on realistic solutions to get these problems corrected sooner.
Brad, you are indeed very strong on covering elections.
Despite the fact that plenty of citizens openly and loudly oppose the paperless, proofless, elecronic voting machines, the march to total electronic voting continues.
Why? Let’s not waste our time and energy.
The answer to “why?” is because this crime is coming from the top. It is not from persuasive ciminal corporations bribing their way to sales. It is not from selected politicians in positions of power who order the march to continue.
As the Democrats and Republicans are just the Left and Right arms of a criminal body, the brain is the man who actually controls the money.
Control of our Federal Reserve Bank. Control of Goldman Sachs and every other big bank you can name. (You notice how the media will name CEOs but never the actual owners?)
The answer is an unAmerican man at the head of the wealthiest banking family in history. Not Americans.
Brad, I don’t know if you’ll publish my comment if I name the family. It starts with “R” and it isn’t Rockefeller.
Here it is, along with how to fix it. (Also linked at my name.)
http://www.EqualPartyUSA.net
Hello Brad,
A very simple suggestion. Paper ballots and hand counting. Nuff said.
Hey Marybeth, I still say with all the un-noticed failures and the soon to be apparent aging failures…why aren’t we organizing more people to participate in actual physical counts? Seems to me the organizational process is to talk to the deaf ears instead of the people. But, trust me your one of my heroes when it comes to trying! 🙂
Oh yeah, I’m with 99 about reaching out to the misinformed t-baggers. Go Bernie Sanders 90 sumpin to zip on the fed audit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Marybeth –
As ever, we all cannot thank you enough for your untiring advocacy for election integrity in PA!
With that said, a very quick response to just one or two of your points. You wrote:
Hopefully you know that I’ve kept up with, and have tried to be very fair with, every new version of the bill.
My analysis of the most recent introduced version, “A review of the good, the bad and the still ugly”, is here:
The very serious problems still in the bill, as discussed in that article, have been shared with Holt’s office, and attempts have been made to work them out — so far, to little avail. But I’m always happy to keep trying.
In the meantime, though I appreciate that the bill would make things better for PA voters, given the system you are forced to use now, there are still too many problems with the bill for *me* to be able to support it as currently written.
It’s certainly a GREAT deal better, as currently written, for PA, than it would have been had the bill in the *previous* section been passed as you had that then endorsed, since this version eventually bans DREs entirely, unlike the previous version which only replaced “paperless” DREs, with those which had “voter verifiable paper audit trails” (VVPATs). Both such systems are equally useless, in my opinion, and I can make the case that the DREs with VVPATs are even worse, for reasons that I won’t bother going into here.
I have, and will continue to partner with anybody who wants to fight for election integrity and transparency. But fighting for federal legislation which arguably makes the situation worse, not better, for the country over all makes no sense. At least not to me.
As you know, my mailbox and phone line are always open to you to discuss ways in which we can ALL work *together* to improve the current status quo.
And thank you again for ALL that you do — EVEN on those points where you and I may not always see eye to eye on every single issue and/or strategy and/or nuance.
Ancient said @ 8:
Yup. Though please note he was forced to change the bill (water it down) so that the audit would *only* be from Sep ’08 onward, as opposed to a complete audit, as Ron Paul has passed in the House.
“At least they won’t be able to say, as with 9/11, as with Katrina, as with the BP disaster: “Who could have foreseen it?””
And might I add: the economidc meltdown that “no one” could have forseen?
As for Audit the Fed: Paul doesn’t want to audit the Fed, he wants to get rid of it. I still think that auditing what happened from Sept. 2008 on is a good first step. What should be revealed from that — although I have my doubts the Fed will actually comply — should be enough to outrage and question and re-think the Fed. I’m not a proponent of getting rid of “the Fed” — all non-third world countries have a Central Bank — I am a big proponent of getting rid of the secrecy of the Fed.
And having said all that, what I really want to say is that I’m working on the census. And NO “personally protected information” is to be emailed. Even in just administrative emails among our group, our names are only initials. So the Dept. of Commerce has decided that email is not safe for the census information but otherwise, email is good enough for the voters?
Well then, go Ron Paul!
aND AUDIT THE FED 100 YEARS BACK KIM.
Sheet…oh what the bleep.
an that was ron paul…okay…everyone.:-)
My question this morning is…anyone around who’s watched What the Bleep Do wE(the summation sign) (k)n(actualy the pi sign)ow!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl...;v=DHXpnZi9Hzs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...eature=related
What’s his status about comin back into this country?
Okay, this is it from me right now…I’ve got a list a bazillion mile long I gotta get done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...eature=related
😉
I didn’t have quite enough info…yet from my last statement:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/
What do ya know?
There should be a comma in there after yet.
Oh crap it was supposed to be this article:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.c...t-designation/
How else could Republicans win elections….they have to cheat, to win…