Close Congressional Race Between Barber and McSally Presents an Opportunity to Verify with a More Transparent Optical Ballot Scanning System

J.T. Waldron

The Arizona U.S. Congressional race between Democrat Ron Barber and Republican Martha McSally was alleged by the Pima County Elections Department to be such a close contest that they require a recount to determine the winner. Martha McSally's slim margin of 161 votes over incumbent Ron Barber falls within Arizona's "one tenth of one percent" rule that requires a recount after the state canvass. Despite one provision of the law calling for a different program, recounts are typically performed with the same machines that may have an estimated margin of error of over 0.13% or 250 votes. The most convenient, compliant means for confirming an election this close is through optical scanning of ballots as demonstrated in Humbolt County and with the more refined "Clear Ballot" system.  Clear Ballot takes photographic scans of each of the ballots, reads the ballots and separates them into precincts with a level of speed, accuracy and flexibility that has never been matched by any of the current voting systems.

Mickey Duniho, a former NSA analyst and member of Pima County's Election Integrity Commission, describes the problem with Diebold scanners used by Pima County:

Using Pima County’s 2012 Presidential Primary percentage as a guide, today’s scanners may have missed as many as 250 intended votes, almost double the number separating Barber and McSally in the original count. If you rescan the same ballots with the same scanners, you are liable to get different totals with every scan simply because of the technological imprecision of the scanners.

What was the cause of this 250 vote margin of error in 2012? In Pima County's elections system, voters use a black felt tip pen to fill in the ovals on a paper ballot to indicate their preferences. Diebold scanners recognize an actual mark inside an oval only if it contains what that particular scanner determines as a sufficient mark. Crosses, checks, center dots and any other effort by the voter to mark an oval may be interpreted as blank if the voter misses a portion of the white inside the oval.

Diebold's count is further hampered by stray marks or smudges errantly interpreted as another mark when the stray ink hits another oval. Pima County's Diebold machines are calibrated on a regular basis to provide some control over how these marks are interpreted. Unfortunately, the percentage of blank votes appears to be increasing over each election since 2004. Close elections like the Barber/McSally race turns this margin of error into a 'margin of disenfranchisement'.

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, recalls the birth of our current electoral quagmire:

Vendors and lobbyists leveraged the Florida fiasco to persuade well-meaning legislators to enact a sweeping election reform bill, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), creating a gold rush to purchase new voting systems, under tight deadlines, using federal money. Vendors did not disclose to lawmakers that their optical-scan systems and touch screens had a history of glitches, bugs and miscounts, and because their computer code was kept secret and proprietary, even U.S. senators and representatives could not know about security flaws or learn just how broken the “certification and testing” system really is.

Once this federal mandate was implemented, nationwide oversight has been abandoned as all the seats in the U.S. Election Assistance Commission remain vacant. Victoria Collier, the editor of votescam.org, describes the current electoral landscape as "a vast patchwork of electoral fiefdoms where laws, procedures and private-vendor technology change from state to state; even from county to county."

In the fiefdom of Pima County, effective verification is consistently undermined. In 2006, Arizona's hand count audit law saw its proposed sample size reduced to a mere one percent of early ballots thanks in part to the lobbying efforts of Pima County Elections Director Brad Nelson. In 2010, Nelson circumvented Pima County's Election Integrity Commission (PCEIC) by requesting that the Secretary of State waive his requirement for Pima County to presort early ballots by precinct before they are audited. Millions of taxpayer dollars were spent by the county in an effort to prevent election transparency. The video below explains some of the concerns that PCEIC members Mickey Duniho and Jim March had about lack of substantive auditing procedures for Pima County's elections.



Ironically, a hand count audit contradicting the official tally has no bearing on the election.

According to the tallies provided by opensecrets.org and the New York Times, over sixteen million dollars have been spent on the Barber/McSally race exceeding the cost of $70.00 per vote.
Incumbent Ron Barber's campaign asked the Pima County Board of Supervisors (PCBOS) to delay canvassing over concerns of rejected ballots, poll workers sending voters to errant polling places and at least 132 ballots thrown out due to mistakes by election officials. Pima's board supervisors have rejected far worse conditions in the past so Barber's team shouldn't be too surprised at their refusal to postpone this election's approval.

Both candidates should recognize why the winner of their nationally publicized, highly contested bid for Congress cannot be determined with certainty by the Pima County Elections Department.

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett has the unique opportunity to preside over the inevitable advancement in elections technology by confirming the result of this congressional race. We would like to name Bennett among forward thinkers like Secretary of State Jim Condos in Vermont who is now using the new scanning technology developed by Clear Ballot. Condos, who recognizes that random audits are "an integral part of performing checks and balances of our voting system" provides substance to his claim "as Vermont's Chief Election Officer, I take this duty very seriously".

Arizona Revised Statute Section 16-664(A) seems to provide for Bennett to follow suite:

In the event of a court-ordered recount of votes that were cast and tabulated on electronic voting equipment for a state primary, state general or state special election, the secretary of state shall order the ballots recounted on an automatic tabulating system to be furnished and programmed under the supervision of the secretary of state.

Subsection (C) allows Bennett to use a different program:

The programs to be used in the recount of votes pursuant to this section shall differ from the programs prescribed by section 16-445 and used in the initial tabulation of the votes.

In 2009, Clear Ballot founder Larry Moore visited Tucson to talk about the level of transparency graphic ballot scanning could bring to the elections process. Here he met Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, who attended his presentation at a meeting with the PCEIC. The video below shows Moore providing a brief presentation of what he learned from Humbolt County before his departing flight.

While Pima County was skirting a proper hand count audit in 2012, Larry Moore introduced his brand of election verification technology to a welcoming district in Florida. Here is a presentation by a local Fox affiliate.


Ushering in the new year with mid-term elections, Moore's development of Clear Ballot and its presentation finds larger audiences through talks like "TEDx".

For the first time in Arizona, a congressional race seems numerically impossible to resolve through our deficient tabulation systems. Ron Barber, Martha McSally and the Secretary of State have an opportunity to ensure the legitimacy of this recount by introducing a technology capable of the transparency so thoroughly eroded since the 2000 presidential election.

Mickey Duniho Resigns from Pima County's Election Integrity Commission

Mickey Duniho's resignation letter to Pima County Board of Supervisor Ray Carroll, the elected official who appointed Duniho to a seat in the Pima County Election Integrity Commission.

Dear Mr. Carroll,

I have spent many years at your request and that of others researching numbers of ways that elections in Pima County and the state could be made transparently honest. I have invested a great deal of research, much of it with others of the Pima County Election Integrity Commission and also with many others knowledgeable about methods of assuring the validity of elections. Six years ago I was honored by your appointment, having hopes for effective auditing of ballot counting in Pima County, and with the past experience of having witnessed apparently dishonest counts in my community. I now realize that these hopes and efforts have been wasted.

 The Election Integrity Commission in its six years has made a number of clearly sensible recommendations for improving legal and accurate processes for Pima County’s elections. Each of the Commission’s lucid suggestions to the Board of Supervisors or to the Secretary of State has been rejected outright or put off to another day when it was ultimately rejected by one or the other. The most recent recommendation, a very simple trial of an improved auditing procedure, was rejected quickly and blatantly, adding to the belief that the Pima County Board of Supervisors, the Pima County Administrator and Election Director, and the Arizona Secretary of State are engaged in the (successful) effort to block any substantive effort to improve the public auditing of ballot counting.  The only reasonable surmise at this point, considering the concerted and continued effort to prevent election reform, is that a majority of our county and state officials have a sincere stake in continued support of election fraud.

 Coming to the understanding that the Election Integrity Commission has been thwarted in its serious and sane efforts for election integrity in Pima County and the state, and that there currently seems to be no hope for election integrity in Pima County, I tender my resignation from the Commission.

 Sincerely,

 Michael A. Duniho

Duniho discusses the matter in a recent interview on the local radio show "Wake Up Tucson".  Video courtesy of John Brakey.

Would You Fight Arizona Computer Vote Fraud for 7 Years?

Arizona Election Fraud: Supervisors Accept County Shenanigans, Reject a Proper Audit

J.T. Waldron

The Pima County Board of Supervisors refused to conduct a proper hand-count audit of the 2012 general election ballots. This decision was made despite seasoned statisticians and computer experts in its own Election Integrity Commission indicating that the county's elections are not verifiable in their current state.

The primary reason? Timing. Pima County's use of this rationale is ironic because it appears that the county was in complete control its timing. As EIC member Mickey Duniho states in reference to Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry:

"Mr. Huckelberry unilaterally postponed the recommendation without consulting or informing the Election Integrity Commission. This violated the Commission’s right to advise the Board of Supervisors without interference, and it also violated basic rules of courtesy."

This postponement plays a role in solidifying the board's argument that 'it's too late'.

Huckelberry's recent memo, which is rife with distortions and errors, states that it's impossible to do a hand count audit. Such hyperbole was thoroughly eviscerated by Mickey Duniho's point by point response to the erroneous memo. Duniho provided his rebuttal in writing to each member of the board of supervisors.

"Your elections are being run by a sociopath," said EIC member Jim March. Elections Director Brad Nelson was held under a burning magnifying glass in the most recent Board of Supervisors meeting as March leveled a series of new charges against Nelson. First, March states that Nelson had his county-issued credit card yanked for fraud, yet he still keeps his job.

Other charges had to do with Nelson's management style with his employers. According to March, employees are willing to recall how they were retained because it was easy for Nelson to "make them cry" and "that's something he needed to do on occasion". Finally, March accused Nelson of breaking the law as he states that Nelson would ask temporary staff and poll workers to switch their party allegiance so that he can continue to retain these employees for future tasks.

Jim March's history of careful, meticulous analysis  before calling any one person's reputation into question adds significant weight to these charges.  We can only hope that an independent investigation into Brad Nelson's activities will take place. 

The only Supervisor concerned about having verifiable elections for this elections cycle was Ray Carroll, a Republican who has consistently moved to transcend party affiliation and improve transparency.

Arizona solidifies its national reputation as the 'meth lab of democracy' because those who can intervene refuse to make direct, immediate, substantive changes to the elections process.

Did Expert Witness, Activists Thwart a Rove Ohio Vote Plot?

The Justice Integrity Project

By Andrew Kreig

 

A software expert’s testimony last week may have thwarted a plot to flip enough votes to secure a victory for GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Building on years of efforts by activists, election software critic Michael Duniho testified in Ohio's state court that secret software installed on Ohio machines could enable officials to flip enough votes to select a different statewide winner that the one chosen by voters. 

Duniho, a retired National Security Agency analyst, is shown at right in similar testimony in Arizona, where he is a local elections official. 

Duniho provided his explosive testimony first via telephone to a federal judge in a temporary restraining order hearing in the morning, and then to Franklin County Judge Mark Serrott to amplify his written affidavit, published here. The testimony supported an injunction request by election machine critics who have argued for years -- with scant previous success in courts and in the media -- that election machine software tampering has enabled theft of major elections, and thus poses a grave danger to the democratic process.

On Election Day 2012, their litigation and testimony raised the issue to unprecedented prominence. The litigation against state officials would have put any plotters on notice of serious threat of investigation and retribution. 

The contrary view is that no plot ever existed -- and that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, shown at left, and fellow Republicans are being falsely suspected of bad intentions. Husted has denied misconduct in court filings. I reached out to him also for more specific questions, and shall update this post with any comment he or his staff provide. The Ohio Secretary of State's website contains background information.

This column reports Duniho’s testimony, and summarizes other evidence that election software poses a threat to fair elections. Reported also are: an Oct. 24 news conference announcing a chart alleging a Rove-linked “empire” of vote theft; a half dozen recent books on electronic election fraud; and a survey of a decade of major scandals, books, and articles.
The documentation draws on my previous columns, my research for a forthcoming book, Presidential Puppetry, and my ongoing interactions with research sources, several of whom asked my advice concerning their recent  news announcements in Washington. I suggested they announce litigation before Election Day because the public tunes out complaints from losers.

Update: I am scheduled to appear Nov. 12 on vote theft-critic Harvey Wasserman's 3 p.m. (EST) radio show on the Progressive Radio Network to discuss next steps with him and his fellow pioneer in the election integrity movement, Robert Fitrakis, a 2012 Green Party Congressional candidate. Fitrakis, based in Columbus, is a professor, attorney, website editor, and co-author of several books with Wasserman. Fitrakis filed the suit alleging electronic voting theft in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election and elsewhere.

Theirs and my multiple roles are increasingly typical in modern communications. Many news makers blog and broadcast these days, thereby blurring the lines between being a news source and part of the media. 

An even greater departure from past categories is that Karl Rove covered the Democratic National Convention September on a press pass. This was while he was also in the process of spending an estimated $300 million to help Republican candidates via his American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS funds. Also, he was allegedly scheming to steal elections via software fraud and voter suppression. Rove, like Husted, denies wrongdoing, and failed to respond to my request for comment on specifics. Whatever the facts on election fraud, Rove clearly is part of the Washington punditry elite delivering news to the nation.

The Duniho Testimony
 
Michael “Mickey” Duniho is a volunteer election official in Pima County, Arizona. He became prominent this fall among electronic voting machine critics because of his videotape testimony in an Arizona case arguing that dishonest officials can easily steal votes electronically. The photo above portrays that testimony, not his remarks by telephone in the Ohio litigation Nov. 6.

Duniho worked nearly four decades as a National Security Agency computer expert before his retirement. NSA is far larger and more secretive than the better-known CIA. It has vast information gathering and storage capabilities reported, among other places, in a series of authoritative books by former NSA staffer James Bamford.

Duniho claimed that the United States faced the threat of vote theft in Ohio because Husted, Ohio's secretary of state, had secretly installed software on voting machines covering 80 percent of the state’s population for no apparent legitimate purpose. The witness said the software could enable vote theft by officials, and no actual “emergency” required its installation throughout Ohio in violation of a state law requiring testing before installation. Also, Duniho said the voting machine company, Electronic Systems and Solutions (ES&S), appeared to be cheating the state on the cost of the software.

Husted’s legal team rebutted Duniho’s affidavit and testimony. The presiding state court judge failed to issue the injunction requested by the plaintiff.

A whistleblower in Husted’s office prompted the litigation by telling the Fitrakis team Thursday that the state secretly installed the controversial software in September. The Fitrakis suit was one of several he filed in state and federal courts last week with the cooperation of Columbus attorney Clifford Arnebeck, at left.

The litigation failed to attract much news coverage from major news outlets. Historically, reporters ignore allegations of electronic vote fraud as, in general, too complex and controversial. NBC News Political Director and Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd sent a Tweet this fall claiming election machine fraud is a “conspiracy theory” unworthy of coverage. 

Similarly, the New York Times published on Nov. 8 what can only be described as a biased, mocking profile of Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University professor and author who has documented election fraud. The Times article was A Long Day for a Professor Suspicious of Voting Machines. In contrast to the snide approach by the Times reporter, a YouTube video garnered more than 80,000 views with its more straightforward interview, visible here: None Dare Call It Stolen: US Election Fraud in 2012?
Despite such handicaps, the litigation last week doubtless reminded elections decision-makers that civil and perhaps criminal investigation could await them if dubious election results occurred. A reporter such as NBC's Chuck Todd can ignore a story. A defendant must respond in court, sometimes by sworn testimony that could potentially escalate into a criminal investigation that trumps secrecy provisions in official contracts with private vote tabulation companies.

The Secretary of State's Role?
Several voting theft opponents allied with Fitrakis and Arnebeck helped publicize the Ohio-litigation with a news conference Nov. 5 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Speakers included Clint Curtis, a Florida IT consultant who helped pioneering whistle blowing in the field by alleging that a Florida congressman asked  him to help defraud voters in the 2000 election. Also speaking were Harvey Wasserman, a frequent co-author with Fitrakis of books and articles on the topic, and Lori Grace, who has helped provide funding for such research. The activist group Protect Our Elections created a video of the speakers.

Several days previously, Ben Swann, a television-consumer reporter based in Cincinnati for Fox News affiliate WXIX-TV, published an investigative report describing how electronic vote thievery can occur. Swann’s video was widely circulated until YouTube removed it for violating terms of service. Election theft critics hope that such news reports encourage the FBI to demand records and interview all those involved. 

Their view is that massive elections fraud can be accomplished by very few conspirators so long as the operators are sufficiently expert and corrupt.

On Oct. 24, I  co-moderated with Arnebeck a news conference at the National Press Club. Alabama attorney Dana Jill Simpson and IT consultant Jim Marsh unveiled a new chart that they described as “Roadmap to Karl Rove’s Empire of Election Fraud.”

The chart is displayed at right, here on a downloadable link, and in larger size below. The relationship chart diagrams voting machine companies, and their ownership (including by Romney and Bush family backers).  Also, it asserts that a national training network runs a significant part of the nation’s back-office election operations through private companies hired by partisan officials who conduct operations in secret because the voting companies use proprietary software immune from outside scrutiny. 

Simpson, Marsh, and Arnebeck also announced formation of a new organization, Election Protection Action. This is one of several small civic groups across the country that have developed election fraud research for years, primarily in obscurity. 

Simpson has said she formerly worked with Rove and his allies on campaign opposition research that inevitably led, by her account, to campaign dirty tricks that soured her on the Republican Party. Among her allegations is that SmarTech, a Chattanooga IT consultancy, has played major role helping Republicans control elections, government websites, and government email  traffic both through the United States and globally.

Alabama Test Run For Election Theft?

Now a progressive, Simpson says that when she was a Republican volunteer opposition researcher she visited SmarTech in the days it was handling vast volumes of sensitive political traffic. Also, she has been reported to be knowledgeable on certain circumstances of one of the nation’s most notorious election software mysteries, the late-night switch of nearly 7,000 votes in rural Baldwin County that flipped Democratic Governor Don Siegelman’s reported re-election victory in 2002.
Speaking also at the Oct. 24 news conference was Siegelman's daughter, Dana, 27. She said the family went to bed on Election Night in 2002 believing news reports that her father had won re-election, but awoke to learn that votes had been shifted electronically in Baldwin County for never-disclosed reasons. She said that Alabama's Attorney General William Pryor, a Republican since elevated to the federal appeals court, threatened to arrest anyone who tried to investigate the vote-change. 

Therefore, she said, there was nothing her father could do except try to run again for governor in 2006. However, the Bush administration indicted him on corruption charges in 2004. When that case fell apart, they indicted him against before a different judge, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller, who was able to help prosecutors secure corruption convictions by making many pro-prosecution rulings that have puzzled legal experts for years but have been affirmed by appeals courts, including Pryor's. The convictions were primarily for Siegelman's reappointment to a state board in 1999 of a Republican who had donated to a non-profit that Siegelman supported.

In 2007, Simpson broke with the Republican Party to swear that she was aware of a Republican plot for years to prevent Siegelman from running for re-election in 2006 by framing him on corruption charges with the help of “Karl” {whom  she identifies as most likely Karl Rove] and Fuller, whom she swore was picked to preside over Siegelman as judge because the judge "hated" the defendant and wanted to "hang" him.

Nonetheless, Fuller has remained on the case, and in August ordered Siegelman, now 67, to resume a seven-year sentence. Dana Siegelman, at left with her father before his reimprisonment, is leading a nationwide petition drive to persuade President Obama to pardon her father. The petition is here.
 
She said it has been signed by 34,000 people so far, including an unprecedented group of 112 former state attorneys general who separately wrote the Supreme Court that Siegelman's actions did not constitute a crime under the law. The Justice Integrity Project has gone beyond that finding and concluded that prosecutors and the trial judge framed Siegelman, thereby creating a notorious political prosecution of global significance. 
The Siegelman prosecution is the kind of result that can occur when vote thieves acquire the power to appoint prosecutors and judges. 

Simpson’s “roadmap” devised with Marsh is so other researchers, including the media and law enforcement personnel, can understand the ownership, operation, and goals of the nation’s vote-tabulation process. The critics allege that the process is increasingly secret and controlled by partisan officials seeking to rig outcomes in selected locales when the stakes are high enough.



Rove has denounced her as someone who makes incredible allegations. Also, he states that he has never met her. Vanity Fair columnist Craig Unger examined her allegations, SmarTech's responses and , and Rove’s denials in his recent book, Boss Rove. Unger found her to be more credible than Rove on the specifics.

I have reached a similar conclusion. Rove has failed to respond to my requests for comment, or an in-depth interview. Furthermore, representatives of the Romney family have denied that family or Bain investments in a voting tabulation company, HIG Capital, which controls Hart InterCivic, has a fraudulent purpose.

Historical Background of Software Fraud
 
Fitrakis, Arnebeck, and Wasserman have alleged election machine fraud for years, including in litigation alleging that the 2004 presidential election was determined by IT fraud. In their  books and unsuccessful lawsuits, they say Ohio’s electoral votes went to President Bush via what they call a “Man in the Middle” strategy whereby IT consultant Michael Connell helped arrange for SmarTech to have access to Ohio’s votes before they were announced to the public. 

Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a GOP partisan, arranged Connell’s consultancy via his company, GovTech, which hosted its operations at SmarTech in Chattanooga. Blackwell denied any improper motive or result. Yet Steve Spoonamore, the top IT employee for 2008 GOP nominee John McCain, testified that the set-up enabled vote-switching without public knowledge. Connell described in a 2008 pretrial deposition the specifics of how he set up vote transfers. Connell died a month later when his airplane crashed. I summarized that history in a 2010 column. An appendix to the column provides hot links to nearly a decade of major books and articles in the field.

The concept of "election fraud" orchestrated via voting machine software is different from "voter fraud," which typically refers to ineligible voters casting ballots. Republicans have enacted many harsh voter suppress laws to restrict voting by largely Democratic groups, as Huffington Post columnist Dan Froomkin noted Nov. 12, Voter ID: The More You Know, The Less You Like It. Some voter fraud does in fact exists, counters Melinda  Pillsbury-Foster, a host of World Truth Radio who formerly had close contacts with prominent conservatives. But, she says, whatever actual problems exist in voter fraud have been grossly magnified by the media to create a false equivalence with the much-greater problem of massive elections fraud.

Summing up
Conventional wisdom is that no plot existed this year, or ever in the past. But we’ll never know for sure unless the relevant operatives and officials are examined under oath. 

Michael Duniho took the process to a new level on Election Day, Nov. 6. Let’s hope that the beginning, not the end, of any questions.

Retired NSA Analyst Mickey Duniho Testifies in Arizona Election Integrity Trial

Mickey Duniho testified in yesterday's election integrity hearing held in Tucson, Arizona.  Duniho is one of thirteen plaintiffs suing Pima County to get them to comply with existing election laws.   He provides an excellent summary of the problems verifying elections counted on electronic voting machines.

Pima County is notorious for fighting measures for election integrity and  have spent millions of taxpayer's dollars to prevent disclosure of public election records. 

The aim of the lawsuit against Pima County is to get the court to:

1. Issue an injunction requiring the Defendants to instruct poll workers to include, in every Official Return Envelope, a copy of the signed “tally lists” or results tape as required by A.R.S. §16-615.

2. Issue an injunction mandating that the Defendants separate the vote by mail ballots by precinct.

3.  Issue and injunction ordering Pima County to conduct sufficient randomly selected hand count audits of the vote by mail ballots, according to the procedure outlined in A.R.S. 16-602.  County races must be included in the audit.

This suit also requests the recovery of legal fees incurred.

A ruling on this case is expected today.

Arizona Citizens' Election Integrity Lawsuit Explained by Attorney Brad Roach and Republican Candidate Bill Beard

From left to right:  Attorney Brad Roach,  John Brakey,
Bill Beard, Chris DeSimone 

KVOA Wakeup Tucson at 7:00 AM Mountain Time on 1030 AM radio

Stay tuned for the final clip containing Pima County shill Benny White refusing to
participate in the Elections Integrity Board's emergency meeting scheduled to discuss former NSA employee Mickey Duniho's analysis of past elections. White mistakenly assumed that the meeting was going to discuss the pending lawsuit requiring Pima County to follow existing election laws. One can assume he is also mistaken in thinking he can be a co-defendant in that case because he ultimately would be acting against significant members within Pima County's Republican Party who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Editor's Note:  I was wrong with that assumption.  Benny White did testify last Thursday and stated that it was not his desire to separate ballots by precincts, despite it's value as an auditing function.  We'll have a post of it shortly.




NSA Analyst Mickey Duniho's presentation to the Pima County's Election Integrity Board will be posted later this evening.

Pima commission to discuss chance of election fraud in larger precincts

Arizona Daily Star
Carli Brosseau

The Pima County Election Integrity Commission is holding a special meeting today to talk about whether one member's statistical analysis of votes in recent elections shows evidence of fraud.

Under the group's bylaws, an emergency meeting can be held if at least five of the nine members call for one.

Michael "Mickey" Duniho
His presentation to the Election Integrity Board
will be posted on The Intercept today.

Mickey Duniho, a retired National Security Agency computer programmer, requested the meeting two days ago after he began plotting cumulative votes by precinct and noticing that outcomes seemed to differ by precinct size.

He was replicating earlier studies done by California researchers Francois Choquette and James Johnson, an aerospace engineer and a financial analyst. The researchers argue that their analysis of the recent Republican primary shows Mitt Romney making strange vote gains in most states' large precincts.

Duniho - formerly a Republican election observer in Maryland, a supporter of Democrat-backed lawsuits against Pima County's Elections Department and now a registered independent - said that his results seem to parallel those of Choquette and Johnson, who tried to account for their findings using demographics.

He is now collecting demographic data by precinct to try to explain his results with other factors, such as whether a precinct is rural or the affluence of the precinct's residents.

Duniho suspects that the patterns he found show a 10 percent flip of votes in favor of the Republican candidate in the 2010 race between Raúl Grijalva and Ruth McClung and the race between Gabrielle Giffords and Jesse Kelly the same year, as well as votes switched to benefit Romney in the Republican primary.

"The problem is figuring out what the statistical evidence does mean," Duniho said. "The computer is a black box. It is very easy for the guy who wrote the program to do just about anything."

At today's meeting, Duniho hopes to persuade the county Elections Department to sort early ballots by precinct before doing the hand-count audit required by law.

He has been advocating for that sorting, as well as for upping the percentage of ballots hand-counted, for about six years, arguing that his method boosts the chances of revealing fraud if it were to occur.

By law, Arizona counties must do a hand-count audit of 1 percent of early ballots and 2 percent of precincts in at least one federal and one state race. Pima County already audits more than required - 4 percent of precinct-cast ballots and 1 percent of early ballots. No local races are audited.

Some of the commission's members have argued strongly against holding the meeting and worry that it could unnecesarily increase fears about the vote count.

Benny White providing false testimony
to the Pima County Board of Supervisors.
about John Brakey's arrest while monitoring
elections in the Fall of 2008.

Benny White, a Republican election observer, responded to news of the meeting request with a sharply worded email.

"After reviewing the academic research involved with the links in the message, I conclude that the allegations being made are absolute nonsense," he wrote. "These academics don't take into account the fact that election results are the response by voters to campaigns and candidates. …

"I think there is a greater probability that fluctuations in the electrical voltage of the lines serving the election department have more to do with variations in election results than these alleged anomalies."

The county's technical consultant on election matters, John Moffatt, agrees that the data do not seem to show a vote flip in Pima County, but he does think the California researchers may be on to something with their findings in some other states.

Pima County employee John Moffatt speaks of
"witch hunts" in the past, but is responsible
for the incoherent rationale that required a suit
to obtain electronic public records. 

"It's worth paying attention to, and we took it seriously," he said. "My personal opinion is that it's another witch hunt, but our responsibility is to check this stuff out, not just blow it off."

He adamantly rejects allegations that county elections staff somehow tampered with any results.

The county's elections director, Brad Nelson, will not be at the meeting to approve a change of audit procedures because of family issues, but county workers involved in those processes caution that while it's theoretically possible to make Duniho's suggested change, it would be logistically difficult.

"That's a monumental task," Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez said. "It's kind of late to be changing the procedures in the middle of a major election."

The sorting machine needed to do the job efficiently would cost at least $125,000, said Chris Roads, deputy recorder and registrar of voters.

To do the sorting by hand would likely take two days, Moffatt said.

The window to challenge a vote count after an election in Arizona is five days after the canvass.

Arizona Election Fraud: East Side Republicans Club host Democrat Bill Risner on election integrity

Arizona Daily Independent

Republican Lori Oien, head of the East Side Republican Club, invited democrat attorney Bill Risner to discuss election integrity in Pima County. The Election Division, under Brad nelson, has come under scrutiny since the RTA Bond election in 2006.

Oien, a former candidate for Tucson City Council, introduced Risner, Republican Election official Benny White, Democrat Election official Mickey Donohue, and a documentary film crew that has been following her and documenting her life for the past 11 months. She told the multi-partisan group, that she had heard Bill Risner on the radio and because election integrity is “not a Democrat or Republican issue, but a fairness issue,” she invited Risner to address the packed house.

Risner, White, and Donahue presented pending lawsuits, current practices, and continuing concerns. Risner explained that “the problem for people who care about democracy and whether your vote actually counts is that we using computers, and they are computers that are privatized and suing their software, and computers do what they are told.” It is exactly what the Pima County computers were told which is at the heart of the continuing legal battle between Risner and the Pima County government.

Pima County officials exempted County races from hand count audits, and have denied access to the ballots cast in the 2006 election, as well as refusing to use optical scanners in the County’s possession to account for all ballots cast in election subsequent to 2006.

Aside from the concerns about the computers’ accuracy and security is the manner in which early ballots are handled by the County. Currently, early ballots are tabulated over a week before General Election Day, which has triggered speculation in past races that the results were known to political operatives who used that information for unfair political advantage.

White, who is a staunch defender of Pima County’s system, conceded that in the past there was fraud, but he said that there is none now.

“It’s our contention base on facts and past history that by the morning of the 30th of October with approximately 25,000 plus vote counted they will know who’s winning and losing and if they need to HACK or STUFF any county races, they will have 7 days to do it, said John Brakey of Americans United for Democracy Intergrity and Transperency in election Arizona, (AUDIT-AZ).