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Audit Finds Many Faults in Cleveland's '06 Voting
CINCINNATI - An audit of last November's general election in the Cleveland area has found that hundreds of votes were lost, that others were recorded twice and that software used to count the ballots was vulnerable to data problems.
In a state that was pivotal to President Bush's election and re-election, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, has seen more than its share of recent election troubles. Lines at polls there were hours long in the 2004 general election. And in the primaries last May, the county's first experience with electronic voting, poll workers were absent or poorly trained, computer cards on which votes had been recorded were lost, and one polling place opened hours late.
Citing problems like those, Ohio's newly elected secretary of state ousted the county's entire four-member Board of Elections a months ago.
The five-month audit, which the board had commissioned, was conducted by an independent committee made up of representatives from the county's Democratic and Republican Parties, the League of Women Voters and two other citizen groups.
The audit found that some batches of ballots registered in optical scan machines had been scanned twice, producing a double count of those ballots.
Other ballots were deleted because of flawed data and, owing to human error, were not rescanned, the committee found.
The optical scan and touch-screen machines used in the county were made by Diebold Election Systems Inc. The audit committee said Microsoft's JET file-sharing database system, which Diebold used, was known to have previously had problems that could result in corruption of the database.
Scott Massey, a Microsoft spokesman, said any file-based database was subject to corruption if a connection was lost while a transfer was in progress. He confirmed the committee's finding that Microsoft recommended a different system for operations as large as Cuyahoga County's.
The audit committee was allowed only a limited review of the data collected by Diebold. The panel tried to gain access to the raw data, but Diebold claimed that the information was proprietary.
Mark Radke, a spokesman for the company, said that he had not read the report thoroughly but that whatever problems there were with the system had been corrected. In some instances, he said, there were no problems at all: the committee had simply misunderstood the system.
Barbara Simons, a former I.B.M. researcher and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery, said: "There is no excuse for Diebold's having used such an insecure and unreliable database. There were far more reliable databases available over 20 years ago."
The committee called for extensive changes to ensure the integrity of future elections, among them streamlining the process by eliminating either optical scanner or touch-screen machines, both of which are currently used in the county.
"Part of the message is that for elections to be accurate, there must be careful attention to minute details at every step, and sloppiness at any point will affect the accuracy of tabulations," said the audit committee's coordinator, S. Candice Hoke, director of the Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University.
The committee said its audit was based on unofficial results, because it had not been authorized to audit the official results, which added provisional, overseas and paper ballots. But Dr. Hoke said, "We have no indicators that the problems we found in the unofficial count were corrected in the official count."
Jennifer L. Brunner, Ohio's secretary of state, praised the audit as an important step in fixing problems in the county as well as establishing standards to be used elsewhere in the state. Ms. Brunner is considering issuing a directive to all counties to undertake routine audits of elections.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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8 Comments so far
Show AllDuh, Now who would have guessed?
Looks like Florida 2000 all over again.
How else can a crook get elected unless of course you have a supporter who heads up DieBold and promised you a victory?
Actually Jim McCombe it was far worst than Florida 2000. Bush didn't win either election and in 2004 bushes skull and bones buddy Jerry didn't even try to contest it. Kerry never was in it to win.
Why should anyone wonder that the Lickcan Party e-mail server can actually delete e-mails? They obviously know how to delete votes.
Republican conservatives routinely refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party. In the interest of being Fair & Balanced, I now drop the first part of Republican and call them what they are - Lickcans. As in having their heads shoved so far up W's ass we can say they are licking his can. And the can of any corporate bozo they can find.
In the election fiasco of 2000 the Associated Press did their own intensive
investigation and found voter fraud throughout Florida in heavy Democratic
districts. They also found over 100,000 names of mostly People of Color
who were systematically disqualified to vote due to reasons ranging from
being in prison to just being Democratic.
It was proven conclusively in 2000 that Bush did NOT win. The final count
of the popular vote found Gore was elected by The People by over 240,000
votes. The Electoral College fiasco was pure manipulation. Never before
has any Supreme Court elected the President of the United States.
Now substantial and solid evidence proves once more the election of 2004
was also stolen through the same kinds of manipulation at the Electoral
College level again!
Not only do we need a US Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing voter rights,
but we need to eliminate the Electoral College, an ancient "safeguard"
instituted by the framers of the Constitution because they firmly believed
that the general public was not intelligent enough to elect a President
wisely.
And of course the electronic voting machines and the "private firms," all
Republican affiliated must also be banned. Elections must be removed
from private anything! in order to have half a real chance to work as
they are intended.
All that being said, what exactly are the Dem's and other doing to ensure
election manipulation will not happen in 2008, cause I feel sure enough
to say, that I don't believe this administration and those behind it have
any intention of giving up what they have lied, cheated and maligned everyone to get.
Strange?? This new york times article failed to mention that a couple ex-members of the Cuyahoga County Baord of Elections are currenty doing time in prison. Would't that have helped to make the point?
Computers cannot handle secret ballots. Period. ATMs require individual names and PINs to maintain security. There is no way to assure that these computers are not hacked or otherwise reprogrammed with time-sensitive programming that automatically destroys the evidence. This is the reason that experts advise only using voting systems which scan paper ballots which are always preserved and partially audited as a check. In 2004, with 80% of our votes counted by Diebold and ES&S (Diebold's v.p. is the brother of ESS&S's prez) and over 29% being on computers with no paper trail, the original exit polls, BT (before tampering), indicated a Kerry win. In the months that followed, statistical experts at some of our top universities analyzed what happened. The conclusion was that well over seven million votes were shifted or disappeared and that Kerry won the popular vote by over four million. A number of the "red" states were, in fact, "blue" states. That does not count the several million votes that would have been if voters had been able to make it through the Republican gauntlet. The reason it was so obvious in Ohio was that key swing state with Blackwell in charge of the election was bound and determined to win it for Bush by hook or by crook. They pulled every trick up to and including fake FBI agents clearing out all observers for one major city count falsely claiming that there as a terrorist threat. Of about 92 thousand votes in a strong Democratic area with a very large minority population, over 70 thousand votes went to Bush. There is legislation being voted on including the Holt bill that might have a chance. But even if this gets through, I'm not too optimistic that Bush won't veto it. Be that as it may, we may have another bloodless revolution of our citizenry in 2008 as we did in 2006. It's estimated from exits polls, etc. that about three million votes were shifted or disappeared in 2006 with 39% of the computers having no paper trails. It was the huge turnout that made the difference. Though, I've read that there should be at least 10 more Democrats sitting in Congress now than there are. The most glaring hacking occurred in the 13th district in Florida. It is being challenged.
When our police find a "suspect" they arrest him and often abuse him/her. When our soldiers see "suspected terrorists",
they shoot. When our government finds suspected or even proven crimes by itself,
it denies or obfuscates, ignores, and moves on. Double standard?
All due respect to urthsong, but the Holt bill HR 811 will do nothing but institutionalize the DRE voting machine and continue our downward spiral in voting integrity. The DRE is an electronic ballot/tabulator and there is absolutely no way for anyone to verify whether their vote was counted as cast, you can not verify a computer chip record with your eyes!. The so-called voter verified paper audit trail, not "ballot" as Holt misguides his supporters, is not the vote of record and is virtually worthless unless a recount is triggered and even then HR 811 language dismisses the voter verified paper audit trail in the event of the closes of races. Most voters do not even verify their vote on the vvpat and in the case of an Orange County supervisor race a judge dismissed the recount of the vvpat in favor of just pressing the button on the machine to spit out the same results as before, so much for the " paper trail" since this is now precedent! The Holt bill HR 811 needs to be amended to BAN DRE voting systems, abolish the EAC (since HR 811 permanently funds it), and put in place a system with Voter Marked Paper Ballots scanned at the precinct with an universal precinct sampling to verify the accuracy of the scanning and if such scanning is found to out of the required margin of error, trigger a full hand recount of the " Voter Marked Paper Ballot". Then, when we find that the scanning of the ballot triggers multiple recounts we will then go back to Hand Counted Paper Ballots at the precinct.
There is too much information to explain the utter failings in the Holt bill HR 811 so please educate yourselves and visit:
www.bradblog.com
www.votersunite.org
www.blackboxvoting.org