[Tfug] Got a text formatting/database question - the political backstory

[Jim March]

Remember that this is a PIMA county problem, but the AZ AG's office
has hired the Maricopa county elections office to do the recount in
Phoenix.

It's the Pima County elections office that has screwed the pooch.

Incidentally (and somewhat on-topic) using...

cat VHISTORY.csv |awk -F"," {'print $2'} |grep -c 170

...I was able to confirm that the Pima Recorder's office says there
were 120,499 votes cast - fractionally under the report by the Pima
Elections office (300ish votes over for some reason).  I can't say the
difference indicates anything just yet, I'll be calling the recorder's
office tomorrow AM to see if there's any rational reason for the small
discrepancy.

I will say that to my knowledge and experience, Pima Recorder F. Ann
Rodriguez has always acted honestly and professionally.

Pima Elections director Brad Nelson has consistently acted like a
lunatic...and Nelson does NOT report to Rodriguez.  Both are involved
in elections...basically Rodriguez takes in the mail-in vote (handing
it off to Nelson for counting) and does other record-keeping, but
Nelson runs the elections.

Jim

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Eric Cope <eric.cope at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you get me more details, I'll put it on my blog, and forward it to a few
> of my blog-friends.
>
> Eric
>
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Jim March <1.jim.march at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It appears that I've got what I need among the various answers :).
>> Thanks guys, I'll report back in a bit on how it went technically.
>>
>> Politically/legally, here's the backstory:
>>
>> The 2006 RTA election (dated 5/16/06) was fishy from the beginning.
>> It involved a $2bil transportation bond.  It smelled bad right from
>> the get-go, then various things happened over the next two years(!)
>> that made it stink even worse.  I could go on for days but some
>> snippets would include:
>>
>> * On election night, observers spotted an MS-Access manual being
>> referred to by the lead operator.  MS-Access is banned from voting
>> systems (ain't approved) and the Diebold central tabulator database is
>> in MS-Access format.  If you get to it with Diebold's front-end, it
>> looks secure enough.  Get to it in Access and all security falls apart
>> completely...you can do anydamnthing you want.
>>
>> * When we got the audit logs in December 2006, there was what appeared
>> to be data manipulation plus they had peeked into who was winning and
>> losing based on the mail-in vote five days *before* election day.
>> This was illegal as hell, and they did this consistently across most
>> elections - not just the RTA.
>>
>> * We fought a public records suit, won, and found yet more rotten
>> stuff including a lot of memory card re-uploads, more than any normal
>> election ever.  I'll go into details if anybody wants but let's just
>> say, it looked bad.
>>
>> * The same attorney for the Pima Democratic Party who fought the
>> public records suit went back to court to get the end-of-day printouts
>> from the voting systems and the pollworker's end-of-day reports.
>> These were stashed with the actual paper ballots.  A judge ruled that
>> we couldn't get access to the actual ballots but the end-of-day audit
>> stuff was public records.  It was obvious we would soon get access to
>> those.
>>
>> * A week after the judge says we'll get it (in Feb. 2009), the Arizona
>> Attorney General's office grabs the ballots from Pima County (where
>> they were stored at a private document storage place called Iron
>> Mountain) and hauls them to Phoenix to an undisclosed location.  April
>> first they moved them to the Maricopa County election department and
>> investigators from the AZ AG's office monitored the Maricopa elections
>> office as they did a 100% hand-count.  I was the designated observer
>> for the Libertarian Party, there were also observers for the Dems and
>> GOP.  The AG's office did their damnedest to prevent us from getting
>> totals as to how many ballots were processed or what the outcome was.
>> Despite their best efforts, were were able to determine that there are
>> WAY fewer ballots present than there should be.  Our best guess is,
>> they're 15,000 ballots short and it could be higher.
>>
>> Upshot: the AG's office has acted improperly in being secretive about
>> this whole mess.  They've decided to reserve the right to mis-report
>> what's going on.  They blew an earlier round of investigation in 2007,
>> blew it bigtime, and it's possible they're going to blow off this
>> round.  The observers have a duty to make sure the AG's office can't
>> cheat by doing our own counts and checking their work.
>>
>> The GOP observer reported to Pima Board of Supervisors member Ray
>> Carrol what he saw in terms of missing ballots, and Carrol went on the
>> John C. Scott radio show.  So the cat's out of the bag and it wasn't
>> my doing...which is why I'm fine reporting this level of detail here
>> on these lists.
>>
>> Meanwhile, we have reports in .CSV format from the Pima Recorder's
>> office (who are separate from the Pima Elections office and the
>> Recorder's office has *always* acted honestly) so we can trust that
>> data as to how many people voted.  We'll then cross-reference that
>> against our estimates of ballots present and the number of ballots the
>> Pima Elections office says are present.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Jim March
>> ---------------------------------------------------
>> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
>> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
>> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>