------------------------------ Black Box Voting : Latest Investigations from Black Box Voting: 4-22-08: Pennsylvania - The Worst Place to Vote in America ------------------------------------------------------------
Posted by Bev Harris on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - 1:23 pm:
Early problems reported in the April 22 primary in Philadelphia County and Delaware County -- broken voting machines, delays, and a report that some provisional ballots are missing a candidate's name.
Black Box Voting has dubbed Pennsylvania "The Worst Place to Vote in America" due to overlapping voting rights problems, with obstructive Freedom of Information practices, obstructive citizen oversight practices, unrecountable, unauditable paperless DREs ("touch-screens"), a balky state legislature who leans for guidance on an expert named Professor Michael Shamos (who has managed to miss spotting almost ALL of the critical security flaws identified in studies by Black Box Voting, the state of California, the state of Ohio, the state of Florida, a gun guy from Arizona, and a chimpanzee).
But it doesn't stop there. Pennsylvania is one of the few states in the nation with a history of corruption that includes both the rural "moonshine government" traditions found in states like Kentucky and West Virginia and the mob-tradition corruption associated with New Jersey, New York, and New England.
Black Box Voting will be trying to carve a few crumbs of information out of a state that treats elections like the personal and secret property of its government employees, and to do that we need the help of some dedicated Pennsylvania citizens.
One of the defects in Pennsylvania's election administration procedures is that they rule out whole classes of information as "proprietary" and off limits for citizens -- who actually own the government -- to see. Other classes of records simply do not exist.
Most Pennsylvania counties have no ballots to examine. But even those classes of election records deemed to be public records are not accessible to anyone who is not a bona fide citizen of the state of Pennsylvania.
So, for our citizen friends in Pennsylvania, we have this to ask: Will you act as co-signer for public records submissions with Black Box Voting?
We will ask for documents pertaining to the voting machine breakdowns being reported, and we'll check out some basic accounting records, and even some expenditure reports. We'll post it all publicly here at Black Box Voting for everyone to chew on.
To participate, please e-mail us: crew@blackboxvoting.org with your full name, address, phone number and e-mail address.
And for those who are not in Pennsylvania, now would be an excellent time to donate. The more funds donated for Pennsylvania public records, the more documents we can buy and set free for public examination.
Let the forensics begin.
And watch the map on our home page this week. We'll color in new counties each time anomalies are reported, and will seek freedom of information documents to unravel their mysteries.
