Saturday, August 14, 2010
The Post-Election Challenge for Dummies
Posted by Jackson Baker on Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 12:52 PM
- JB
- Shep Wilbun, one of the affected Democratic candidates, examnes discarded voter data at Election Commission headquarters.
At this point, it is nigh on to impossible to imagine what happens next in the saga of the famous FUBAR election of August 2010.
Officials at the Election Commission are still trying to maintain, with all the inflexibility and certitude and desperate determination of single-bullet theorists, that what happened Thursday of last week was a simple minor-league glitch that inconvenienced at most a few hundred potential voters, few if any of them permanently, and was quickly corrected.
And they hold in reserve a trump card which I’m about to reveal: The perpetrator of the presumed offense — that of dumping the wrong set of early-voting data (from May of this year, allegedly) into the electronic voting book for the August 5 election — was a Democratic hire from years back, a civil servant type, as it were.
That revelation, which is just around the corner, will, the EC officials hope, have two ancillary consequences — absolving Republicans per se of any culpability in a hypothetical vote-suppression plot; and simultaneously insulating the current management from charges of inexperience and incompetence.
Meanwhile, an ad hoc confederation of Democratic activists, done-wrong candidates, consultants, conspiracy theorists, public service lobbyists, and pro bono legal helpers has descended upon the Election Commission’s places of operation determined to ferret out the secrets of this misadventure, even as the EC’s own personnel and attorneys have responded with maddening delaying tactics that may be designed to safeguard proprieties but look more like stalling or stonewalling to the seekers.
The army of the avengers has been buttressed on-site at various times by out-of-town newcomers such as Bev Harris of Seattle and Floridian Susan Pynchon, both consultants with BlackBoxVoting a consumer organization, and Mary Mancini of Nashville, the newly named head of Tennessee Citizen Action (TNCA). There has also come into being a new Facebook site entitled “I want a New Shelby County Election on Paper Ballots.”
And in the background the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is supposedly concluding its preliminary inquiry into the election mess while the Department of Justice in Washington is presumably mulling over 9th District congressman Steve Cohen’s request for a formal federal investigation.
As the indefatigable Regina Newman, as of now still the Trustee and a plaintiff in the case, has explained via Twitter, a group including herself, Cardell Orrin, Del Gill, George Monger, Shep Wilbun, Harris, Pynchon, and ad hoc attorney David Cocke spent hours at the Election Commission’s Mullins Station Operations Center on Thursday.
This group kept trying to access the election-day files they thought they were free to inspect as a result of the compact reached earlier in the week between Shelby County Democratic chairman Van Turner and the GOP’s John Ryder, lawyer in this case for the EC.
Turner and Ryder had done their deal in the courtroom of Chancellor Walter Evans, who had seen no need to make any further ruling. Problem was: For various reasons, neither Turner nor Ryder were available for consultation at Mullins Station on Thursday afternoon. (Turner, who presided over a meeting of the local Democratic executive committee that night, would turn up later.)
So Cocke, subbing for Turner, was left to deal with Gene Gaerig, the assistant county attorney subbing for Ryder, at EC East. EC director Rich Holden was in the building but taking no part in the negotiations and mainly just staying out of the way and standing ready if needed. Also present was Dewun Settle, Chancery Court clerk and master, prepared to authorize and oversee whatever actions ended up being taken.
Gaerig, while being personally agreeable up to a point, came up pit bull-hard against any suggestion that the group of Democrats and their supporters should access the facility’s central computer or any of the stored files or voting consoles that pertained to the case.
The machines and their data were “intellectual property” and subject to a contract between the county and the Diebold Corporation, said Gaerig, and, without a release of some sort from the latter, were not to be tampered with.
Harris and Pynchon were sure this was stalling and nothing but and insisted that Diebold had long since sold its interests to a successor organization and that, in any case, only Microsoft files were at stake. No matter. The stalemate went on for hours until Cocke suggested, and got approved, a compromise whereby the plaintiffs’ group would be able to download a list of relevant files contained on the voting machines and/or the central computer.
While all of this was going on, Turner was conducting a balls-out meeting of the Democratic Executive Committee at the AFSCME/MLK Center on Beale that, impressively enough, concerned itself less with accusations that the election had been stolen and more with some serious probing into how and why it may have been lost honestly.
All of the prevalent theories — the Herenton-Cohen fizzle, turnout from the GOP gubernatorial whiz-bang, etc. — were considered, along with one or two striking new ones: e.g., that the Democrats had signally failed to engage the interest and participation of Generation X-ers.
Turner, whose conduct of the party during election season had been challenged by Commercial Appeal opinion editor Otis Sanford, got an informal vote of confidence and something of a standing-O, and those speakers (like State Rep. G.A. Hardaway) who defiantly rejected published suggestions that the Democratic slate of candidates had been sub-standard were not refuted by anyone.
Meanwhile, back at Election Commission East, right up ‘til the approach of midnight, the petitioners, assisted by Orrin’s IT know-how, were going through the time-consuming process of downloading the file list. (At some point, according to Newman, Gaerig apparently objected to the “Yankee rudeness” of one of the visiting consultants, who were kept at bay both then and on Friday.)
Two new discoveries had been made — (1) Ribbon scrolls containing candidate-by-candidate, precinct-by-precinct totals of the sort no longer released by the EC publicly were found in trash bags and, at the request of the petitioners, were impounded for safekeeping. And (2) there was such a thing as a “manual override” capability in the county’s Diebold voting-machine software, and records pertaining to possible use of it continued to be under lock and key.
The petitioners would end the evening in possession of one disc’s worth of information and two bags’ worth of the discarded ribbon scrolls.
On Friday the action shifted back and forth between the EC’s Operations Center East and the EC’s downtown office as the petitioners continued to request downloads from servers at both locations, the process interrupted by long delays due to continued legal sparring.
Tweet from EC apropos one of the standoffs: “Our silence is us protecting your votes & voting rights while following strong advice from attorneys.”
It is somewhat unclear exactly what data was finally downloaded, though three identical copies were supposedly made of it — one disc each for the petitioners, the Election Commission, and the Court. More information will undoubtedly be sought.
At some near point all the participating parties will presumably prepare analyses of what they have. When and how the rest of us become acquainted with it — whether through monitored legal process or some other means — remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the second called meeting of Democrats and others interested in challenging the August 5 election outcome was convened at the AFSCME/MLK Center on Friday afternoon but was essentially only a rump session, quickly adjourned, in light of the simultaneous activities going on in the Election Commission’s spheres.
All of this, you may be sure, will be continued in the new week.
Comments (21)
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Good work, JB. Seymour Hersh's got nothin' on you. Can't wait for the other shoe(s) to drop. What're Ryder's and Cocke's respective batting averages in these kinds of political pissing contests? Seems like Cocke's batting 1000 every time he comes to bat for the Dems.
It also seems pretty obvious to me that what we need is a "canvassing board," like the one they had in Palm Beach County in 2000. That would resolve EVERYTHING, wouldn't it?
I must be a dummy. Because I can't make heads or tails out of all this. But it definitely churns my stomach. Somehow the simplistic act of counting as gotten out of whack.
1.2.3.4. so on and so forth.
We're all dummies when it comes to something as arcane as computerized vote-counting, Zip. That, I think, is one of the reasons cited by advocates of Opti-Scan (which combines electronic ease with paper-ballot results) for going in that direction.
With a read of your article about dummies , there are documents from the supplier Diebold going back a number of years in similar situations Dems in this case in Alaska where Dieblod agreed that the data base and data on them was PUBLIC data not their data. They did not say that the source code was public that drives the program but any data from the election generated from the election, reports data bases, and other items was NOT their proprietary data but public data. Further based on this letter Hillsborough County Florida in 2009 issued an answer to a public document request where they acknowledged that the Alaska letter was valid and they issued an identical worded letter from the supplier Diebold saying the same thing signed by Diebold then Premier Election services staff in Florida. I am sure that the Democratic Party of Alaska or Hillsborough County Elections could supply the letters. It is understandable with out a court order how a supplier (Diebold now Dominion) would want to protect a client from discovery of poor election management by sending them a letter that all the data in the machine was proprietary, (Thus no one could see it to create a forensic analysis of the administrations actions) and they could sue the customer if they released the election data contained on the software.. but in the case of real court action or threat of it, each time the supplier was forced to acknowledge that the people owned the data of an election as most State laws provide.
This should seem to satisfy the issue on IF the public and or parties have the right to it, and there is admission by the supplier of the voting machines in this case that the public does own it as any citizen would support after all the elections are the peoples business not corporations and not paid administrators. This should be a red flag by administrators that the TBI should be looking into this with full staff, was the right to vote in Federal races and State races lost and if so how? Further the election commission or canvass should grant emergency time knowing this and knowing what you reported as stalling time to clear this election up, and be fair to all the candidates who run for office, so they are credited with only the actual votes they earned.
Jackson,
Once again thank you for staying with this. This saga is not over by far and you reporting is evidence of this.
1. JB is dead on re: the fact that optiscan would help enormously with post-election reviews like this. The Elec Comm'n should be urged to get an early start on implementing Nashville's directive to switch over to optiscan by 2012.
2. The complainants were reportedly seeking merely a "text file," the actual data generated by precinct, and not the "source code,"the underlying computer programming which runs the system. The latter may be proprietary, but the former is certainly not. I expect you will hear tomorrow that the EC will concede as much and turn over the disputed information sought by the complainants.
3. The issue may now be enlarging beyond the supposed erroneous data load of May 2010 early vote data into the system, an error which could at most have affected 5300 voters. (A few, but only a few, of the election contests had margins of victory smaller than this amount). The existence of as-yet-unexplained "manual overrides," which can adjust vote totals, widens the panorama.
Beyond all this technical stuff is a simple matter of courtesy. The out of town experts should be allowed to enter any room and inspect any data that any of the folks who hired them are allowed to. Keeping them out of touch is just arbitrary. Basically, if it doesn't disrupt EC operations, compromise voter anonymity, or violate clear contractual or statutory requirements, the complainants and their experts should be granted access to whatever the heck they want. That's the only way to protect public confidence in the electoral process.
Widens the panorama and the paranoia.... Hasn't this particular voting system been found to be quite hackable?
Meanwhile, for $10 of paper and bucket of blue ink you can hold a vote in the Congo.
Why is the election commission partisan? That seems to me to be the root of the problem.
Most of the posts regarding this subject seem to be in favor of allowing out-of-state "experts" to stroll into our election commission and examine voting machines, data etc??? That would mean removing the seals/protective devices from the machines (basically nullifying authentication) in order to give these "experts" a free hand at the information?????
I fail to understand how in the world one could/would trust these outside "experts" (unfamiliar with our laws or methods) more than you trust our tried and true election commission? How do you know the "experts" wouldn't tamper with information to further their "expertness"?
The election commission is not a partisan group (however, I must admit that a commissioner has recently appeared to be too partisan).
It may be worthwhile to re-visit similar shenanigans in Memphis in other recent elections using the same Diebold/Premiere/Dominion/(pick a new name and think your history won't catch up to you) voting equipment.
In 2006, as I remember, similar manual override problems were detected in the EC's central tabulator which (it turns out) was connected via the internet to every other Shelby county government computer. It was discovered that, with very little effort, the vote tabulations could be accessed and changed with little time or skill required to do so. One computer expert at the time testified (in a sworn affidavit) that the Shelby county voting system contained the most egregious (and obvious) insecurity "features" that he had ever found in examining any county's election systems in this country.
That expert testimony (and the facts behind it) was disallowed in a subsequent court proceeding.
Everything old is new again ... in the birthplace of the blues.
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. - Stalin
Here's a link that describes the 2006 investigation of the (ongoing) insecurities of the Shelby county election system:
www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/442…
Yes, sirree, every election day is Groundhog Day ... in the birthplace of the blues.
Re: the "rude Yankees" comment. I have had dealings with Bev Harris in the past myself, so I know just how rude and overbearing she can be. Even so, I must prefer "rude Yankees" to "corrupt, country club crackers" any day.
In that vein, I have noticed lately that, for some reason, Tre Hargett is now several inches taller than he was when I first met him. (That observation was just confirmed for me by a Pennslyvania voting rights activist who ran into Tre at a national conference in the past several weeks and remarked how he appears to have "grown" in the job.)
Tre, we do want people of stature in our positions of leadership here in Tennessee. But simply wearing high-heels to work does not come close to meeting that standard.
Let's not stoop to making fun of the man's height or his fashion accessories, even if he is a heel.
You're right, Jeff, I suppose. It's just that Tre is not at all who he would like Tennesseans to believe he is (and likely never has been).
Much taller than when he took office for one.
A dedicated and democracy-loving guardian of our franchise for another.
I am sure there are many more disconnects between the reality-based world and Tre Hargett's reich-wing Bizarro World ... but those two are enough for now (at least from me).
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