Three fledgling new tools are now available for election protection:
Election Storm Watchers Needed
SUMMARY (Details follow, scroll down)
1) Results watchers: AUTOMATIC UPDATING techniques, called "Web site mirroring" or "offline browsing" -- Will automatically capture every change on Web sites you want to monitor. How-to tips from extraordinary volunteer John Howard, see below.
2) Tech Patriots: WEB SNAPSHOT tool - Tool to automatically capture and extract incoming results data from CNN and government results sites. If you have been tracking results, you may have noticed that clicking county by county for updates is inefficient -- the "Web Snapshot" tool developed by Donovan Levinson is designed to automate data collection and speed analysis. The (hit or miss) county precinct data can provide live-time detail data. Program code, see below.
3) Stats people: County by county spreadsheets identifying voting systems, voter registration numbers, past voting histories, and more. Drawn from Secretary of State Websites and Election Assistance Commission data tables. See below for links.
BACKGROUND, WHY THESE TOOLS ARE IMPORTANT:
Today, South Dakota and Montana have presidential primaries. Many more states have primary elections for local, state, and federal office. Nowhere near enough citizens with analytical skills are monitoring June 3, and November will have over 5,000 jurisdictions rolling in at once, so if you have analytical and/or computer skills and you care about fair elections, what are you waiting for? Jump in!
Thanks to new tools provided to Black Box Voting by citizen volunteers Levinson and Howard, you can be more efficient. If you are tech-savvy, please try out the tools, volunteer a bit of your time, and if you can improve on the tools or invent additional ones, have at it.
ELECTION STORM SPOTTERS -- BEAT THE CLOCK
Anomaly-spotting SPEED is a huge part of the election protection challenge. Wrong results only have to make it through Election Night, post-election activities, and certification of election and then it's all over. Use the June 3 election, including the updates that will roll in during the next 10 days, and follow each new election -- regardless of what state it's in -- to practice and refine your ability to spot problems quickly.
You can post what you find in real time at Black Box Voting so other citizens can get to work on other aspects, like communicating to the press, to candidates, requesting public records, or legal actions.
When votes are counted in secret on computers that government insiders control, citizens can't know whether results are legitimate, but we CAN identify results that are illegitimate! So let's get busy on that.
Look for:
- Impossible times and dates
- Impossible numbers
- Results that go down midstream
- Two plus two equals five
- Results come in too early, before polls close
- Results start and then stop, with a trend reversal after the lag
- Delayed results
- More votes than voters
- Late precincts that produce a trend change
- Omitted information
- Obstruction of information
- Insufficient randomness (example, same number of votes for several candidates)
- Zero votes when there should be some
- Some votes where there should be zero
OVERVIEW OF TOOL KIT 2008:
In the new Black Box Voting 2008 Tool Kit, we will ask you to match your skill sets to one or more of five categories to help protect Election 2008. Are you a ...
