How a democracy dies

Default settings. Remember the stories that have circulated ever since November 2 that voters in many compu-vote states would press buttons for Kerry only to see the name "Bush" appear on screen? That mountain of anecdotal evidence forces attention on the latest piece by Richard Hayes Phillips, who claims that electronic voting machines had "default settings" directed toward Bush.

E-vote machines were used in Mahoning County, Ohio. According to Phillips,

Mark Munroe, Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections, said there were 20 to 30 machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate’s opponent.

Moreover:

Mahoning County utilized ES&S Ivotronic touch screen machines. The administrative password for these machines was reported on the ES&S website itself.

By default, the password is 1111. According to http://savethevote.com/issues/glitches.htm this password cannot be modified easily, which would mean that anyone who knows the password could change other default settings on the machines.

Phillips goes on to present evidence indicating that default settings may account for suspiciously high numbers that Bush received in various wards. Also:

But the most damning evidence about Youngstown Precinct 2E is the fact that no undervotes were reported. This is the precinct where two voters selected Kerry and Bush’s name came up, where one voter had to scroll through five times before his votes were finally recorded, and where three voters said that the presidential option never appeared at all while they were trying to vote, and that this happened on two different machines.

Video interview. We've heard the excuses Triad has offered for the strange doings by Michael Barbian, the Triad tech in Hocking county whose behavior during the recount caused so much angst. In a videotaped interview, he seems like a pleasant, soft-spoken fellow with nothing to hides. One should note, though, that the interview reveals that he also "visited" six other counties.

Keith Olbermann observes that...

...the issue in Hocking is not so much what was or wasn't done to the machine, but the efforts of the Triad man to find out which of Hocking's precincts was to be subjected to the mandatory 3% hand recount.

To be specific:

Ohio law is specific about the 3% sample that must be hand recounted in each county: it's supposed to be selected randomly. If the effort is made -- either by an election official, or somebody else (like a manufacturer's rep) -- to decide in advance which 3% of the vote is to be recounted, the concept of random selection is thoroughly contaminated and once again, a puff of smoke rises from the entire recount process.

Mr. Whidden told me by phone this afternoon that there are a lot of puffs of smoke. "86 of Ohio's 88 counties have pre-selected their random precincts," he claims.

Which brings us back to Mr. Barbian of Triad. Although he insists he did nothing wrong, John Conyers and other feel that this video raises more questions than it answers.

We still don't have answers about the "cheat sheet" remark. That's what rankles Conyers:

I have just reviewed a tape prepared by the documentarian Lynda Byrket of the hearing held by the Hocking County Board of Elections on December 20, and based on the tape I have more questions and concerns than ever before about the conduct of your firm in connection with the Ohio presidential election and recount. In particular, I am concerned that your company has operated -- either intentionally or negligently -- in a manner which will thwart the recount law in Ohio by preventing validly cast ballots in the presidential election from being counted.

You have done this by preparing "cheat sheets" providing county election officials with information such that they would more easily be able to ignore valid ballots that were thrown out by the machines during the initial count. The purpose of the Ohio recount law is to randomly check vote counts to see if they match machine counts. By attempting to ascertain the precinct to be recounted in advance, and then informing the election officials of the number of votes they need to count by hand to make sure it matches the machine count is an invitation to completely ignore the purpose of the recount law.

The bottom line: Anyone figuring out a way to "game" the election must also figure out how to game a potential recount. Did the "three percent" rule in Ohio provide the entranceway for mischief?

How did Ken Blackwell rig the Ohio recount? According to Glenn Sanders of the Votergate Resource Center, the job was accomplished by a variety of tactics.

The various county Boards of Election had to chose -- at random -- three percent of their precincts for a recount; if the new numbers differed from the old ones, a county-wide recount would have been instituted. But were the precincts chosen randomly?

Many say they were not. Precincts were chosen which had fewer than 550 ballots; factors such as precinct size, voting history and affluence affected the supposedly "random" choice. As noted by Olbermann above, 86 out of 88 counties used "pre-selected" precincts.

Moreover, as this report from David Cobb's site specifies...

Anomalies were found. Almost all of the witnesses that I spoke with felt that the ballots were not in random order, that they had been previously sorted. There would be long runs of votes for only one candidate and then long runs for another, which seemed statistically improbable to most.

From what they were able to get through, witnesses found that signature counts were very much different from the official recorded number of ballots.

More than that, anomalous numbers did not trigger a full recount:

When the hand recount of the 3% test sample did not match the official vote totals, a full recount should have been ordered for all county ballots. Instead, the recount was "suspended" by county officials who said that Secretary Blackwell recommended that the recount should begin again "from scratch." The Green recount observers then were told that it was 4:00 PM, the building was closed, and all had to leave. The Republican contingent, however was allowed to stay in a conference room for an additional ten minutes or so for a private discussion.

In short: We have no reason to express faith in the integrity of this recount effort.

Kerry navigates the Ohio river. This story is related to the above.

According to William Rivers Pitt, John Kerry "will be filing a request for expedited discovery regarding Triad Systems voting machines, as well as a motion for a preservation order to protect any and all discovery and preserve any evidence on this matter." He would have filed yesterday, but was prevented by a snowstorm.

Bravo! This move will not lease the Democratic Kerry-haters, of course. (You know the rule: When a Republican loses, his/her supporters blame the opposition; when a Democrat loses, his/her supporters blame their own candidate. Come to think of it, that's also what happens when a Democrat wins.)

A self-proclaimed lawyer on the Democratic Underground offered these quotable observations on Kerry's post-election conduct:

That concession speech was the smartest thing he could have done

He removed himself immediately from the fray everyone hoped would ensue, and, in fact, that's what's going to take place in Ohio now. So, Kerry didn't flip-flop - he just made a brilliant strategic choice and preempted any possibility of the Republicans taking anything to the Federal court system.

That was what happened in Florida in 2004, and we all know how well THAT turned out, right? Gore let the Republicans take control of the legal process, and he never got it back.

In this case, Kerry's been staying quiet, letting the appropriate people - the Greens and Libertarians - build the proper foundation for an entry into Federal court, where his standing is --- ahem ---- unimpeachable.

It's what I've been saying would happen since November 3, and you cannot imagine how excited I am to see this happening.

My crystal ball on November 3 did not operate in this fashion. Even so, I'm glad to see movement.

Ohio, we have a problem. According to the New York Times, Ohio has election "problems." "Fraud" and "tampering" are verboten words. The accusation of intentional disenfranchisement constitutes Thoughtcrime Most Foul. But...there were problems.

Take the first example cited by the Times:

Mr. Shambora, an economics professor at Ohio University, moved during the summer but failed to notify the Athens County Board of Elections until the day before the presidential election. An official told him to use a provisional ballot.

But under Ohio law, provisional ballots are valid only when cast from a voter's correct precinct. Mr. Shambora was given a ballot for the wrong precinct, a fact he did not learn until after the election. Two weeks later, the board discarded his vote, adding him to a list of more than 300 provisional ballots that were rejected in that heavily Democratic county.

Accidental? Perhaps. But when anecdotal report after anecdotal report indicates that these "accidents" target Democrats and almost never Republicans, some of us don't feel comfortable keeping the talk restricted to the level of the accidental.

If you find that someone has "accidentally" spilled tar on your office chair five dozen days in a row, you may come to the conclusion that you are disliked.

Brad Friedman has examined this very same NYT piece, and noted:

1. The writers quote Blackwell without noting his key position within the Bush campaign.

2. The piece damns punch cards, which are in fact more easily recountable than e-votes.

I will add this: Why is it that mainstream media reports on election "problems" usually resolve with calls for high-tech solutions that will only make matters worse?