three months pass...
more weirdness (reported in the
Mobile Register which generally supports the GOP):
GOP asks Mobilian to vote in Florida
Mailing reflects fierce battle in Sunshine State
Thursday, October 14, 2004
By EDDIE CURRAN
Staff Reporter
Last week and again on Tuesday, Mobile resident Jerry Mosley received fliers from the Florida Republican Party encouraging him to cast a Florida absentee ballot in the November election.
The 49-year-old telephone technician thought it odd to be sent the "Vote by Mail Request" cards, addressed to the Seminole County, Fla., supervisor of elections, because he moved from Florida to Birmingham last December, and two months later, came to Mobile, where he registered to vote in August.
The first flier contained a message from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush encouraging recipients to cast their absentee ballots "for the Republican team."
Both were addressed to Jerry C. Mosley, and gave his current location on Jennings Drive, near Midtown Mobile.
"I was a registered Republican in Florida, and this came from the Republican Party. How they got my Mobile address, I really couldn't tell you," Mosley said.
Neither could Chandra Mills, a worker at the Seminole (County) Supervisor of Elections. Mosley, according to Mills, is still registered to vote in the county just north of Orlando and is shown as living in the town of Altamont Springs. That's where he lived prior to moving to Alabama.
"I'm not sure how the Republicans or Democrats got his new address, because we don't have that information," Mills said Tuesday.
As it turns out, the reason Mosley received the fliers appears to have less to do with political shenanigans than the political realities of the presidential race in Florida, where both sides are hunting down voters and urging them to vote by absentee.
Mindy Fletcher, a spokeswoman for Victory 2004 -- the name of the state party's effort to re-elect President Bush -- said the Republican party gets its names and addresses from voter registration rolls, then puts them into the National Change of Address program, which is available from the U.S. Postal Service.
That program verifies addresses, and, if people have moved, it automatically changes their addresses so that businesses involved in mass mailings can save money by reducing the amount of undeliverable mail or re-mailings made necessary by address corrections.
The service as applied by the Republican Party doesn't remove people showing an out-of-state address, since those people could still be Florida voters, Fletcher said.
As an example, she cited the many people who've been misplaced from their normal residences by the four hurricanes that have drilled Florida since early August.
"Obviously we're not encouraging people not registered to vote in the state of Florida to vote absentee here," said the Republican spokeswoman.
Recent polls indicate that the Nov. 2 election between President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry will probably hinge on the outcomes in a handful of the so-called battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and, biggest of all, Florida.
Though it took a U.S. Supreme Court decision to finalize it, Bush became president in 2000 by defeating Democrat Al Gore in Florida by fewer than 600 votes.
The memory of 2000 -- when hanging chads, butterfly ballots and a host of lawsuits and scandals kept the election in doubt for more than a month -- has both parties bracing for post-election legal wars that could depend on the validity of a handful of votes cast in Florida.
Absentee voting:
For several reasons, absentee ballots have already been identified as a potential source of voter fraud and post-election disputes in Florida.
For one, Republicans and Democrats are engaging in massive and unprecedented efforts to encourage their supporters to vote by absentee ballot. Both sides believe that the sooner they have each vote in the bag, the better.
According to news reports, the Republicans have mailed some 1 million fliers of the type Mosley received, and the state Democrats have for more than a year been calling registered Democrats and encouraging them to vote absentee.
The efforts are working. According to media reports, election officials throughout Florida are reporting record-breaking numbers of applicants for absentee ballots.
In addition to the big numbers, there's concern about the state's absentee voting laws, which have been loosened since the 2000 election. For example, people voting absentee in Florida are no longer required to provide a reason for doing so. Nor must they have their ballots signed by a witness, as was required in the past.
By contrast, in Alabama, people wishing to vote absentee must check one of several boxes explaining why they can't come to the polls. Reasons include that the voter will be out of the area on voting day, will be working a shift of more than 10 hours, or is too infirm to come to the polls. Also, absentee ballots cast in Alabama must bear either the signatures of two witnesses or be notarized.
Voter responsible:
Susan McManus, a University of South Florida political science professor and a widely cited expert on Florida politics, said the voter bears the ultimate responsibility for voting legally, regardless of how he or she came to vote absentee.
Absentee ballots require voters to make certain declarations, including that they're not voting elsewhere, she said.
Voting twice in the same election is a federal offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Double-voting, a type of election fraud that generally involves absentee balloting, has become a hot topic in Florida, McManus said Tuesday.
The issue was brought to light, she said, by a story in the New York Daily News that "got a lot of publicity, and everybody's still talking about it."
The Daily News compared databases of voter rolls in New York and Florida and reported that an estimated 46,000 people were registered to vote in both states. Of those, the great majority were Democrats, the paper reported in its Aug. 21 story. The tabloid described it as a "massive snowbird scandal," a reference to the name given to northerners who head South in winter for the warmer climate.
As many as 500 to 1,000 of the snowbirds have voted twice in the same election, the paper reported. The Daily News was able to identify several voters, Democrat and Republican, who cast votes in both states in the 2000 election, including a Republican who'd voted twice in four presidential elections.
Florida election officials responded to the paper's findings by acknowledging that it was all but impossible to prevent this type of voting fraud because there's no national registry of voters that would allow such cross-checking.
However, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood asked the FBI and the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission to investigate the Daily News' findings. Last week, the Tampa Tribune reported that an investigation is under way into double-voting.
As Mosley's case indicates, being registered in two places doesn't indicate a desire, much less a plan, to vote twice. After all, it's the rare person who, when leaving a county, would think to contact the area election office to say he's leaving.
However, when citizens register to vote, they're asked if they're currently registered elsewhere, and if so, to fill out a form giving their past address. Election officials are supposed to notify registrars in the other counties, including out-of-state counties, so that those registrars can remove the voters from their rolls.
Mosley, who registered in Mobile in August, filled out such a form, he said. An official at Mobile County Probate Court said it's office policy to send notification to election officials in other counties and states.
For a host of reasons, including voter error and clerical mistakes, the communication from one election district to the other doesn't always occur. In 2001, Deborah Phillips, the chairwoman of the Voting Integrity Project, told a Congressional committee that there was no "mechanism to match records of one state against another."
"Many voters assume that when they move, their old registration is canceled," she testified. "This may not be the case even within a state and certainly not across state borders. Thus, we believe, there is an undocumented prevalence of voters who are registered in multiple jurisdictions and multiple states."
The increasing use of absen tee ballots makes it easier than ever for voters to cast two ballots in the same election, Phillips testified.
Contacted FEC:
The front of the flier that Mosley received last week shows a picture of the president's brother, Jeb Bush, next to a big "537." Imposed on the number is the headline, "Stand Up and be Heard, Vote By Mail."
"That (537) is the number of votes that decided the last presidential election ... an election that was decided right here in Florida," opens the message.
Jeb Bush wasn't on the flier that Mosley received Tuesday, he said. It contained hurricane assistance telephone numbers, a picture of a man and a woman on a beach, and another picture of the Statue of Liberty.
Both fliers provided a list of instructions for requesting an absentee ballot by mail, and at the bottom, two vote-by-mail request cards to be cut out.
Mosley said believes he received the mail-out because he was registered as a Republican.
When people register to vote in the Sunshine State, they must declare a political affiliation, be it Republican, Democratic or independent. When Mosley registered in 1989, he did so as a Republican and voted that way in all presidential elections until 2000, when he voted for Democrat Al Gore, he said.
Mosley's roommate in Mobile, who also lived with him in Florida, was registered in Seminole County as a Democrat and hasn't received a mailing from either party, he said.
Mosley said he won't be voting Republican this year, at least not for the top of the ticket, he said. His twin brother was injured while fighting in Iraq, and his youngest son is serving his second tour of duty there, he said.
For those and other reasons, he's supporting Kerry, he said.
After receiving the first flier, Mosley called the Federal Elections Commission to report what he believes was wrongdoing on the part of Florida Republicans.
"Basically, they said there was nothing I could do about it but said if I voted twice, I would be violating state and federal election laws," Mosley said.
That's when he contacted the Mobile Register.
"It just makes me wonder, if I got it, how many other people got it? They mailed it to Alabama, so they know from the address that I'm an Alabama resident now," Mosley said. "I got it, and I'm like, 'It looks like it's not on the up-and-up.'"
― hstencil (hstencil), Thursday, 14 October 2004 22:45 (twenty-one years ago)
one year passes...
Some evidence FINALLY beginning to come in...
From BlackBoxVoting.org
The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.
After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.
Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.
You can find the complete set of raw voting machine event logs for Palm Beach County here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/6628.html
Note that some items were not provided to us and are ommitted from the logs.
The logs rule out the possibility that these were Logic & Accuracy (L&A) test results, and verified that these results did appear in the final totals. In addition to the date discrepancies, most had incorrect polling times, with votes appearing throughout the wee hours of the night. These machines were L&A tested, and the L&A test activities appeared in the logs with the correct date and time.
According to the voting machine assignment log, these machines were not assigned to early voting locations. The number of votes on each machine also corresponds with the numbers typical of polling place machines rather than early voting.
Many of these machines showed unexplained log activity after the L&A test but before Election Day. In addition, many more machines without date anomalies showed this log activity, which revealed someone powering up the machine, opening the program, then powering it down again. In one instance, the date discrepancy appeared when someone accessed the machine two minutes after the L&A test was completed.
Voting machines are computers, and computers have batteries that can cause date and time discrepancies, but it does not appear that these particular discrepancies could have been caused by battery problems.
The evidence indicates that someone accessed the computers after the L&A and before the election, and that this access caused a change in the machine's reporting functions, at least for date and time. Such access would take a high degree of inside access. It is not known whether any other changes were introduced into the voting machines at this time. As learned in the Hursti experiments, it is possible for an insider to access the machines and leave no trace, but sometimes a hasty or clumsy access (such as forgetting to enter a correct date/time value when altering a record) will leave telltale tracks.
For another example of time discrepancies, see the Volusia County poll tapes
Approximately 4,000 votes were cast on these machines. The vote pattern and activity pattern appears to be identical to typical patterns found on Election Day -- All votes on the discrepant machines were spread over a 12-hour period, the length of time the Florida polls are open.
A member of the Palm Beach County electronic voting technical committee asked for the names of the technicians for Palm Beach who had access to the machines during that time, but the IT person, Jeff Darter, remained silent and never answered the question.
The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, Arthur Anderson, said that his staff had looked into the problem and that the votes were normal, it's just that the dates somehow changed.
― The Equator Lounge (Chris Barrus), Saturday, 25 February 2006 00:18 (twenty years ago)
eleven years pass...