Currently at issue: desperate to stall the case, the county is trying to say that because we're alleging wrongdoing, a criminal investigation by the state AG (who is lukewarm on election integrity at best) should happen before our public records cases can go forward. It's an absurd "hail mary pass" that the judge appears so far unlikely to try and catch.

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Black Box Voting : Latest News : Mainstream News Reports: (AZ) Probe of possible vote rigging may stall case
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Posted by Jim March on Thursday, June 07, 2007

There's likely to be a LOT more to talk about on this one after the
12th of this month (another court hearing date).

There has been enough public discussion of this case that I think I
can talk about some of it. I'm involved in this up to my neck, hired
by the Democratic Party as a consultant, I helped prep the public
records requests, etc.

OK.

First thing that happened was, during the general election 2006 (Nov.)
a new set of procedures had to be created to allow at least
hand-spot-checking (hand audit counts) of a small percentage of the
mail-in ballots. Up until then there was no hand-recount ("spot
check") law at all.

The new procedures called for doing "audit batches" of mail-in ballots
processed specially to allow hand-counting. These boxes were randomly
picked by party observers. A printout of the summary report (the
"who's winning" report!) would be made, about 400ish ballots would be
scanned, then another summary report is cut. NOBODY was supposed to
look at the summary reports (this is up to two weeks before election
day) and all three parts (two summaries plus ballots) would be taped
up in a cardboard box with tamper-evidence seals all over it. Party
observers would watch the process and make sure nobody "peeked" - and
record the tamper seal serial numbers. Party people also recorded when
these special boxes were created and knew how many existed.

Right.

So after the election, we asked for the GEMS audit log. The county
stalled for about 19 days. We took the audit log, compared the summary
report print events to the audit box counts and found we were off - at
least three apparent "extra printouts" of how the election was going
were made prior to polls close. Seriously prior.

Alarmed, we (Democratic Party plus Libertarian me) asked to see the
video tape covering the hours in which the extra printouts were made.
Whoops. The video was on a 20-day rotation cycle and since they'd
stalled, it was all gone. Too bad.

Well now we were upset. So in basically a surprise move, we got audit
logs off the machine covering prior elections going back to 2002
(oldest GEMS files they had that record print events).

They didn't like it, but they (county elections office) did cough 'em
up with myself watching.

In scanning the logs, 2002 looked clean (no printouts of election
results) but in EVERY election we obtained records for after that,
somebody had either been printing summary reports or "peeking at them"
("print preview" to the screen command). 2004 general and primary,
2006 special election (RTA race), 2006 primary.

In the case of the primary of '06, on the saturday before election day
somebody did a summary report at 3:45pm. At around 8:00pm this
horrible slanderous "robocall" (automated voice message) went out to
voters in Ted Downing's area where he was running for Senate against
another Democrat with no Repubs in the race - so whoever won the
primary won the whole match. The ad was paid for by the Republican
Party and slammed Downing six ways from Sunday. Ted Downing was THE
strongest election integrity legislator in AZ.

OK, so now our hackles were up. Bigtime.

We asked for an accounting of the summary reports that had been
printed out during the '06 general and stuck into the "audit boxes".
The county's reply? "Whoops, we locked 'em in the vault with the
ballots and per state law, since the ballots can't be looked at, we're
assuming everything locked with them (even though the summary reports
ARE public record!) are in a no-touchy situation. So sorry."

In other words, if the county had public records showing where Jimmy
Hoffa was buried and locked them in the vault with the ballots,
they're off limits.

We took issue with that and sued them for access to those summary
reports so we could make an accounting of "peeking issues" for the
general '06.

Understand: during the processing of the mail-in vote, the Diebold
software can produce a "cards cast report" showing how many pieces of
paper got fed through the scanners but NOT who's winning or losing.
The "cards cast report" is the proper auditing tool until election
evening when the first summary reports can be looked at.

Meanwhile, we took a fresh look at the audit logs and John Brakey
noticed an anomaly in the RTA race.

This was a non-partisan election for a 20-year construction bond paid
for by a small county sales tax. The county government had been
pushing this for years but the public had repeatedly voted no. There
is *huge* construction dollars at stake, the sort of situation quite
likely to lead to fraud. Oversight by the parties was severely
hampered by the county at the time, and they're now claiming that
since it was a non-partisan race political parties have no right to
observation or oversight at all - and in AZ the public has NO
oversight rights.

The county wants the ability to run these elections with zero outside
auditing. Red flags anyone?

Oh ya: this is also the election where, looking through the glass, Ted
Downing and some local activists spotted and photographed a Microsoft
Access advanced programming manual open and being referred to right
next to the Diebold central tabulator. Most of y'all know that's big
trouble: MS-Access is well known as a "burglary tool for elections"
able to tweak the contents of a Diebold vote database without a
password or leaving an audit trail record.

OK. Finally back to John Brakey's review of the audit log.

The election was on 5/16/06.

Scanning of mail-in votes began the morning of 5/10 and ran about four
hours the first day. We know the county can process about 2,500
ballots an hour max so let's call this 8,000 votes.

When they were done with the day one scanning, they saved the data to
TWO files: "main data" and "day one backup".

The next morning they opened the main data file, printed two full
summary reports of the vote totals (illegal as hell under AZ law) and
then saved the data to the "day one backup" filename, OVER-WRITING
whatever was saved to the data file the night before.

This is consistent with the following scam:

* Take a copy of the main data file home at the end of day one and
tweak the hell out of it in MS-Access or similar tools.

* Bring it in the next morning and make printouts, either to check
your work or prove to whoever is paying you that the hack is done.

* Re-save over the previous backup so that there's no discrepancy
between the main and backup data files.

We don't KNOW that this happened. But this is the only time this
pattern of overwrite-backup was done from '02 forward. At a minimum
it's bad data processing practice and it happened right as a
definitely illegal act happened (the summary report printout).

Seeing this, the Pima County Dem. Party filed a second suit for copies
of the GEMS databases, when they wouldn't cough them up.

The reason I'm going into this much detail is that as part of that
second case, we have asked for and gotten a complete copy of the GEMS
data files (GBF and MDB) on the central tabulator. It was written to a
hard disk the party provided still in the shrinkwrapped box from Best
Buy. It was then driven by a cop (with me along for the ride) to the
courthouse where it was stored in the court's vault.

IF they messed with that file, it may not match the innards of the L&A
database file (also on that hard disk). It may be possible to catch
the fraud, and the county can't cover it up now because they don't
have access to both disks.

Again: I don't know if there was fraud, I don't know if it'll be
possible to catch it if there was. But we now have a fighting chance.

Next court hearing is June 12th.

Currently at issue: desperate to stall the case, the county is trying
to say that because we're alleging wrongdoing, a criminal
investigation by the state AG (who is lukewarm on election integrity
at best) should happen before our public records cases can go forward.
It's an absurd "hail mary pass" that the judge appears so far unlikely
to try and catch.

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Use this link to go directly to full article:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/show.cgi?8/47447

Authors Bio:
Jim March is on the board of Black Box Voting.