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 Black Box Voting: Investigations An update on the Black Box Voting “Help America Audit” project The news coming out of Ohio -- vote suppression and punch card problems (Triad) -- is fascinating. As you know if you have been following this site, we are a nonpartisan 501c(3) organization and are prohibited by law from becoming involved in recounts or partisan politics. You can expect more news from Ohio, especially in the areas of punch card integrity and vote suppression. You can follow the latest breaking news in a new section on our Web site: Click “News Stories” at this link As you will see, vote suppression and punch card issues in Ohio, though significant, are only a small part of the problem. Our voting system is not transparent (even if punch cards go away and we deal more effectively with suppression). To date, almost nowhere have the elections held on optical scan and touch screen machines really been audited. Citizens are finding their questions surprisingly unwelcome in too many places. The pain of millions of Americans, who were forced to vote on paperless touch-screens against their will, who have no idea if their provisional ballot was counted, who wonder whether the central tabulators lost or altered their optical scan ballot vote, whose voter registration was lost in the computer, who were not allowed to watch or ask questions, either during voting machine purchase or while votes were being tabulated, will not be go away simply by doing investigations into Triad voting systems (a punch card manufacturer that is being phased out) in Ohio. What we need is REAL electoral reform, so that all votes, everywhere, for all positions, are cast and counted accurately. That is the mission of Black Box Voting. We are in it for the long haul, and our overall mission is to force accountability and transparency back into our electoral system, on both local and national levels. Now the real work begins: THE “HELP AMERICA AUDIT” CAMPAIGN On Election Night, Nov 2, 2004, Black Box Voting sent out a massive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. What we requested were audit documents – internal logs from the voting machines themselves, in every county in America. Our first audit, Volusia County Florida, using the documents we received from our Nov. 2 request, resulted in a lawsuit seeking to set aside the election in that county due to missing records and discrepancies. We are still working on Volusia County. Our second audit, Palm Beach County, Florida, resulted in a lawsuit against Theresa LePore (of butterfly ballot fame in the 2000 election) for unlawfully withholding records. She has still refused to part with a large part of the records, and we are still fighting to get them. We will win this fight; the question is, how long can she delay Our third audit, Lucas County, Ohio, is our first “open source” public audit. You will see many more of these. We have posted internal logs for the Diebold optical scan voting machines online. If you have skills with computer records, or auditing, please join us in the effort. You can find the Lucas County audit on this week’s featured forum: Help America Audit Lucas County Ohio Our fourth audit is nationwide in scope, and pertains to auditing various documents to identify the remote access setup for the Diebold central tabulator, which was used in 30 states, and counted at least 40 million votes on Nov. 2. We have posted a number of documents about this, which you can also find in the forum workspace at the above link. In order to activate a truly “open source” audit, we beefed up our Web site security and capacity. We are still working on that. We have added two new domains: bbvdocs.org, which will be a gigantic document repository, and bbvforums.org, which provides a workspace for citizens who wish to help bring back transparent, accountable elections. Another piece of infrastructure needed for “Help America Audit” is a specific document scanner that can convert computer logs given to us on paper into text files, and burn them to CD, so we can upload them to the Web for open source audits. We are putting that apparatus in place shortly, and it will help convert tens of thousands of pages of documents into Internet-friendly form. You may remember a group called Judicial Watch, who did the hand recount of Florida in 2000. As you’ll recall, they were not finished in 10 days, or even 30 days. The project we have undertaken is large, but of critical importance, and will continue throughout 2005. The documents we are analyzing and the information we are obtaining will be used in court and as basic research to guide corrective legislation. We have already targeted additional locations for more auditing. These locations include: Cuyahoga County, Ohio We are also following up on several FOIA requests pertaining to the actions of members of NASED and the ITA certifiers. We do need your continued participation. Please become a part of the action.
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