I am amazed at the lengthy postings and posturing. I think Bobby has it right - we cannot allow the bureaucrats (the lunies) to run the lunie bin (pardon to all for a politically incorrect analogy). I have headed up a project over the last several months in Riverside County, CA, the first to go all-electronic voting in 2000 on Sequoia (yes, now owned by Venezuelan nationals).

A recent post on the Bradblog and Blackboxvoting.org by colleague Art Cassel revealed the RoV Barbara Dunmore instructed her staff to enter all paper ballots into an electronic unit (DRE) to be counted. The paper ballots were contained inside envelopes without a privacy shield and were signed on the outside, as the voter was instructed to do at the poll. All semblance of voter privacy was lost when staff opened the envelopes to reveal the xerox copies of a "sample ballot" that the RoV used as a "paper ballot" and the voters' markings were revealed to staff. The entering of the vote into an electronic system that the voter clearly wished to avoid was the ultimate insult, if not a legal violation.

Here are a few more "issues" we have had with Ms. Dunmore in the last 60 days or so:

1. Refusal to post precinct results at the precincts, as required by Fed, State and Certification documents. She claimed they might "blow away" and that posting could be a safety hazzard for the students (yeah, all those 9 p.m. students who are hanging around the campus just waiting to see election results!).

2. Claim that she HAD to spend $15 million in February '06 to buy new Sequoia Edge II machines b/c the existing Edge I's could not be retrofitted to accommodate the new VVPAT requirements. Unfortunately for her, three counties in CA were perfectly able to do so with no problems: Shasta (a county I formerly worked in!), Tehama and Napa. And the Sequoia Web site even touts the fact you don't have to upgrade to retrofit.

3. She told the Board of Supervisors that the Edge IIs were the ONLY approved system in CA at that time. DFA-Temecula Valley showed the Board at that same meeting that the Secretary of State's Web site illustrated that, indeed, only ONE system was approved at that time. Again, unfortunately for Ms. Dunmore, it was the ES&S Mark a Vote, NOT the Sequoia Edge II.

4. During the time between the closing of the polls at 8 p.m. and 1:30 the next morning, 17 memory cards went "missing". They were unaccounted for at the time she issued the preliminary tally at 1:30 on June 7th.

5. Last week (week of June 19th), she reported another 20 precincts' information somehow did not get entered into the canvass and had to then be entered.

6. She has prohibited any "meaningful observation" of the process at the central tabulator location, or at the 1% mandatory manual 1% audit (she calls it a "tally"), or at the counting of the absentee ballots. Election Observer Panel (EOP) members, nominated by the political party central committees and by community based organizations (CBO) and appointed by Ms. Dunmore were relegated to areas where we could not see nor hear the tallying and thus not able to verify/validate that the counts were conducted appropriately.

7. From time to time, she has prohibited video taping, claiming it could violate voter privacy (yet see what she did with the paper ballots in Art Cassel's Op Ed piece). In all instances we assured her there would be no taping of voter identifiable information, PARTICULARLY in the case of absentee ballots, when they had already been separated from their envelopes. Still she refused.

8. She has alternately allowed and disallowed the use of tripods! Obviously the tripods allow us to steady the camera and zoom in on something meaningful. Her first excuse was "it makes the workers nervous"; the other day it was "it's a safety hazzard - people could trip on it".

9. She has waited until an hour before an observable event (the 1% tally of the absentee ballots) to notify EOP members of the event, knowing some live an hour or more away. This was after she instructed us to make repeated calls to her office at 8 am, 10 am, 12 noon and 2 pm to finally learn they would start at 3 pm.

10. It would appear from the March 22, 2006 Addendum from the NASED that she violated items #1 and #4 and therefore, the federal qualification of the Riverside County, CA system is effectively revoked. (Lost control of the memory cards and failed to print results before removing the memory cards from the voting machines)

Is the election therefore null and void, per the NASED directive?

I don't know, it kind of looks that way. Opinions...?

P.S. The more stories like this get published (and these are all verified by up to 70 volunteers working on the project), the more likely it is it will be taken seriously, and something done about it - BEFORE the November 2006 General Election.

Yes, I would also very much like someone to explain New York. Once again, New York anyone? Please. Someone?

And, I am so glad that he (Mark Lindeman) brought up the following issue. I haven't had the patience or energy to do it but appreciate very much seeing it here because he's right:

(quoting Mark L) Freeman’s correction of Manjoo’s hypothetical response rate numbers completely misses Manjoo’s point: higher response rates in “Bush strongholds” don’t entail higher response rates among Bush voters. Social scientists are trained to beware the “ecological fallacy” of inferring individual characteristics from aggregate statistics; oddly, Freeman does not even acknowledge the problem. Freeman’s efforts to estimate the actual completion rates of Bush and Kerry voters in “Bush strongholds” rest on multiple faulty assumptions...

borduins states, in support of an election-fraud-evidence-denial position:

"I have learned to accept and act upon the most probable explanations, even if they are emotionally unsatisfying."

The problem with this is, every single time you come across the less probable explanation in fact being the truth, you will be wrong. But, you will never realize that, because you convince yourself that if it's more probable, THEN IT'S TRUE.

The paragraph that this quote comes from sounds like fatherly advice, to whom it's directed I am unsure. You mention your master's in mechanical engineering. but that is matched by my co-author's Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Your business experience is largely irrelevant to elections and politics, I'm a business lawyer. Your organization "democracytalking.org" would be of interest in that it helps people dialogue with respect but so far you've not read the actual evidence or study I'm talking about that I wrote, you simply restate your belief in the more probable thing being the one you teach yourself to accept. That's an interesting thought for someone who testified on behalf of Microsoft to have, since most people would think it far more probable that Microsoft violated antitrust laws than that they didn't, but I doubt you taught yourself that belief. You would necessarily have been exposed to a lot more information at Microsoft, but here you're avoiding that information in an area you profess an interest in for over a year. To create some tension, in your other salon letters you restate your commitment to analysis and evidence, which, if followed, will often lead one to a complicated or even improbable truth.

You're saying I'll get the last word, and I'm Sorry to see you go, since I thought democracytalking.org would be about talking about democracy ... or reconsidering... and what better subject for democracy than election integrity. Since democracy is pure procedure (via elections) if we don't have integrity of those procedures we don't have a system that even claims legitimacy ON ITS OWN TERMS, it simply collapses without criticism, since we're never promised that democracy will substantively give us a just election outcome, it merely produces the "consent of the governed."

At my request, you've roughly defined what you've reviewed and read, so it's clear that you have a belief that's based on a limited data set relative to mine, but still you're not interested in talking. In response to my posts, you've twice now done ZERO additional research and simply restated your belief.

That leaves me with a less probable but still possible situation here. And that is that we've got people running around (1) regularly claiming technical knowledge like master's degrees in engineering, and (2) claiming to have followed this issue for quite a while, and looked at it, and (3) claiming here on salon to be committed to dialog among neighbors via democracytalking.org which implies a deep commitment to process and mutual respect for others' ideas (4) stating here on Salon to agree with virtually everything Elizabeth Liddle has said, and her work is foundational to the exit poll critique, and yet...

WHEN IN THIS VERY THREAD OF LETTERS Liddle herself writes that there's no basis for confidence in American election results, you're signing off, see ya later, syonara, and you're obviously not going to read a whit more because you're mind's already made up.

Something's not right here. I think Manjoo, whom you've endorsed generally, has buried some real B.S. in his arguments, but you appear here to swear by it along with your commitment to democracy. But you don't even DEAL WITH IT when one of your

"idols" says there's no basis for confidence in american election results.

This is democracy (we're) talking, here Scott Borduin. Are you going to tell me that this issue is not important to you? Not worth your time? I will have people who saw their votes switched CALL YOU if you want. Affidavits? Do you need them? Databases of complaints about the 2004 election? If so, I just want to know why you called your organization democracytalking.

I will tell you that, starting but not ending with my study at www.votersunite.org/info/SnohomishElectionFraudInvestigation.pdf there is every type of evidence of vote flipping you can really have: ((1) eyewitness evidence (2) circumstantial evidence (3) statistical, non exit poll evidence, (4) admission by conduct. (5) what other kinds would you like?

So, as far as vote switching goes, lets focus in on this one county for starters, then move on from there to the national study. I am shortly going to be litigating an election contest regarding vote switching on touchscreens and I've clients from both parties, about fifteen of them all CONVINCED that this is real and this is not in my home county or state.

Would you give any credence to what i'm saying if only I had a master's degree in mechanical engineering? Or if I used to work for Microsoft? I admit that when people profess to be swayed only by facts don't even consider the facts when they are offered on a silver platter, it starts to make one wonder what is going on.