Problems in New Hampshire

The ballots in New Hampshire are being reviewed, and the results are quite disturbing:

Ballots that were not read by the op-scan at all. Voters given the wrong pen to use for machines. Unsecured memory cards. Private contractors in charge. . .

From Bev Harris at Black Box Voting:

(1) A reckless reliance on a sole source private contractor. Not particularly bothered that the company has private chain of custody during critical points, no policy or even apparent concern with having convicted felons involved in the voting system.

(2) Use of a system with known defects without even taking any mitigation steps that other states took.

(3) NO REQUIREMENT to even save the memory cards. The explanation is that they get a disk with the "program" on it. VotersUnite attorney Jon Bonifaz questioned the assistant attorney general on this closely today, because federal law requires records retention of 22 months on electronic media.

New Hampshire has a haphazard policy of allowing the memory cards to be kept, or not, with a chain of custody, or not, shipping back to LHS, or not, and it's perfectly okay with New Hampshire if the memory cards are erased altogether the day after the election. They profess to believe that if they just have LHS ship them a disk containing some purported program -- BEFORE the election, when there aren't even any votes registered -- everything is okay. No one could tell us if this is the memory card program, or the GEMS database file, or the optical scan chip. They seem to have no idea what they are doing with this and I would call this wilfull ignorance, not naivete.

(4) Lack of documentation and lack of diligence on keeping documentation or written procedures in key areas

(5) Ballot chain of custody procedures with major holes and a few very creepy areas that will be the subject of a future article.

The upshot will be that New Hampshire could be the role model for the nation, but not until they purge themselves of a limited number of very significant problems.

The problem with chain of custody: You can have a strong, beautiful, stainless steel chain but if one link is broken, the rest doesn't matter.

How many of these scenarios played out in 2000? In 2004? The answer: just enough.

Why are states such as New Hampshire still using such easily hacked machines and not following a strict chain of custody for memory cards? Who's been involved with this vote manipulation - are they still involved? These are questions that we MUST have answers to before the 2008 elections are conducted.

- How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican National Committee Operative

New Hampshire

This is interesting:

Theron Horton and I have confirmed that based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of State web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan versus votes tabulated by hand:

Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%

Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

The percentages appear to be swapped. This seems highly unusual.

Recall that the specific model of Diebold op-scan [1.94w] and central tabulator in use in New Hampshire are proven by demonstration [Hursti Hack] to be vulnerable to insider manipulation.

Theron Horton and I are proceeding with the intra-county and demographic analysis.

More to come.

Bruce O'Dell
Co-Coordinator for Data Analysis
Election Defense Alliance
Bodell[at]ElectionDefenseAlliance[dot]org

And even more interesting:

Brad, the coincidence is even greater than that. The numbers match to within .0001% !

Optical Scan
Clinton 91,717 52.9507%
Obama 81,495 47.0493%
Total 173,212

Hand Counted
Clinton 20,889 47.0494%
Obama 23,509 52.9506%
Total 44,398

I normally try to avoid "conspiracy theories", but Dennis Kucinich may actually be onto something here. I wonder if Secretary of State David Scanlan is still feeling so confident?

Exposing Diebold's Flaws

Just in case anyone missed seeing this the last time:




The main findings of our study are:

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with
little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the
records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even
careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have
constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory
card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious
software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice,
poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses -
computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly
from machine to machine during normal pre- ! and post-election activity. We have
constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our
demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.

4.
While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software,
others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to
election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

Read the dialogue between Diebold and the scientists here.