Voter's Watchdog - Protecting Your Right to Vote

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By Miriam Raftery

“We know where the fix is in this year.  If I were in San
Diego, I’d be afraid. I’d be very afraid.” – Bob
Fitrakis, national election integrity expert

New law bans voting machines from being online
Assembly Bill
3026 by Lori Saldaña (D-San Diego) will prohibit Internet
connections to voting machines, including wireless transmissions.

“This law will help prevent hackers from attempting to alter the outcome
of elections,” Saldaña said.

In a prior interview with Voter’s Watchdog, San Diego’s former
Registrar of Voters, Mikel Haas, admitted having the county’s central
vote-tabulating machine hooked up to the Internet—a report confirmed
by an eyewitness. 

While the new law is an important step, many believe it does not go far enough
in protecting San Diego County residents’ votes.  

Lawsuit filed over San Diego election issues
El Cajon resident
Linda Poniktera, a member of San Diego voting rights group, Psephos, has filed
a lawsuit August 8th asking a judge to order tougher enforcement of anti-fraud
measures in San Diego County, after learning that County election workers accepted
unsealed, unsigned boxes of ballots for processing.    In
addition, the number of signatures in the voter log book at one precinct did
not match the total number of ballots cast.  Attorney Ken Karan, co-founder
of Psephos along with Poniktera, filed the suit on her behalf.

The County’s explanation was far from reassuring.  “We goofed,” said
a poll worker, Associated Press reported.  San Diego Registrar of Voters
Debra Seiler has acknowledged that mistakes were made but said there is no
evidence of fraud, the San
Diego Union-Tribune reported
. .  

National election expert believes “fix is in” for fall
2008 election in San Diego
Your Voter’s Watchdog tracked
down one of the country’s
foremost election integrity experts for comments on this and other issues regarding
San Diego’s Registrar of Voters.   Bob Fitrakis is executive
director of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, editor of the
Columbus Free Press and winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award at Columbus
State Community College.   He is also the author of three books alleging
theft of the 2004 presidential election including his most work, What Happened
in Ohio? – A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election. 
Another
book, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging
2008
, presents disquieting evidence suggesting that Americans’ votes
are still not secure.

Told of the lawsuit filed in San Diego, Fitrakis observed, “We had those
same problems back in Ohio in 2004. We were told not to worry about those things.”  One
county reported a 95% voter turnout, but an inspection of voter log-in books
revealed that far fewer people had signed in. “We found this pattern
all over Southern Ohio,” said Fitrakis. 

Asked if this could be happening in San Diego, Fitrakis replied, “Yes.”  He
added that in some areas of Ohio, thousands of names were mysteriously added
to voter rolls on election day – a full month after the registration
deadline closed.

Fitrakis express shock upon learning that Michael Vu, who oversaw elections
in Cuyahoga County, Ohio during the disputed 2004 presidential election, has
been named Assistant Registrar of Voters in San Diego County.  San Diego
also recently hired Debra Seiler, a former sales representative for Diebold
Election Systems (now called Premier Election Systems), as our county’s
Registrar of Voters.

“We know where the fix is in this year,” Fitrakis said.  “If
I were in San Diego, I’d be afraid. I’d be very afraid.  These
are the key operatives who helped hijack the election, particularly in terms
of Vu in Ohio.”  [editor’s note:  While Diebold has been
implicated in questions involving the Ohio election, Seiler represented Diebold
in California.  The Registrar of Voters’ office did not response
to an e-mailed request for comments from Vu and Seiler for this column.]

Fitrakis offered additional comments on Vu’s tenure running elections
in Ohio.  “Two of his people were convicted for tampering with the
[presidential] recount.  Vu was run out of Cleveland,” the journalist/author
recalled.  “If somebody hires Vu, it’s a payoff for the dirty
tricks in did in Ohio in 2004.” 

San Diego County Administrator Walt Eckart defended his hiring decisions at
a May 22, 2007 Board of Supervisors’ meeting, stating that  he believed
Seiler and Vu “served honorably in their prior roles.” Eckart has
refused prior requests from Voter’s Watchdog to answer additional questions
on this topic.

But Fitrakis countered, “What is his [Vu’s] qualification? Keeping
people waiting in line for hours? Purging a quarter of the voters in Cleveland?  And
in some districts, he purged 51% of all the voters.  Having chaos and
confusion and emergencies where polling sites were moved with Cleveland Public
Schools at the last second?”  Vu has never provided a satisfactory
explanation for the purgings, according to Fitrakis.

Diebold “accidentally” purged 10,000 voters in Cleveland because
Vu had contracted out the board of elections to run the County’s electronic
poll list, he said.  “It sounds like they’re probably going
to play the same game out there,” Fitrakis cautioned San Diego voters.  Fitrakis
charges that purges were done systematically in precincts with mainly poor,
minority and predominantly  Democratic voters.  “None of the
GOP counties were purged,” he added. 

Asked what citizens can do to prevent such occurrences here, he replied, “Immediately
go down to the Registrar of Voters and demand under the public records law
to know who has been purged and why.  You need to call these people and
reregister them to vote immediately, because these are deliberate campaigns.” He
questioned why anyone should be purged unless there is proof that a voter has
died or moved out of the county.  “In Ohio, we found 80% still lived
in the county, and over 20% still lived at the same address,” he added.  Fitrakis
also urged election integrity advocates to seek records of which technicians
have access to voting machines. 

McCain advisor/security expert turns whistleblower, alleges election
tampering by GOP
Leading cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore
has come forward as a whistleblower alleging election tamperng in 2002 and
2004 elections, giving new life to a civil rights lawsuit filed against Ohio’s
former Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell.  “The suit is essentially
claiming there was a deliberate pattern of disenfranchising minority and student
voters in the 2004 election,” Fitrakis explained.  New developments
implicate former White House advisor Karl Rove:  www.bradblog.com/?p=6189

Spoonamore works with major credit card companies running programs to detect
fraud. He also consults with the U.S. Department of  Homeland Security,
worked on IT encryption for the military and a Mars mission, and has worked
as an advisor to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign.  After
reviewing records in 14 Ohio Counties using Triad voting systems in 2004, Spoonamore
concluded that such results would “instantaneously launch a credit card
fraud investigation or a banking settlement investigation.”

Spoonamore, a life-long Republican, believes the evidence indicates vote-tampering
in Ohio as well as in  2002 Georgia races where patches were installed
personally by the CEO of Diebold.  (Note, this reporter, in a CityBeat
article that won a San Diego Press Club award, has previously interviewed a
Diebold whistleblower who alleged election tampering involving the Georgia
patches: www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/?id=3674

Spoonamore, who found no different between the purported patch and the original
code, has turned his evidence over to the U.S. Department of Justice.  But
just how diligently will the Justice Department, already exposed for firing
U.S. attorneys for partisan reasons, investigate allegations of vote tampering
by the GOP or its supporters?

Watch a full series of interviews with Spoonamore here (segments listed at
right):  www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTBLfgos5b8&feature=related

Election integrity advocates in the Ohio lawsuit now seek to depose Michael
Connell, a prominent Bush family supporter now working as McCain’s IT
developer.  Connell conducted computer work in both the 2002 Florida and
2004 Ohio elections.  “Connell’s Repubilcan internet development
company, New Media Communications, developed a program to `tune’ election
tabulators in real time,” said Fitrakis, adding that Connell’s
company was behind the Swift Boaters for Truth campaign against Senator John
Kerry in 2004.

During the final hour of the 2004 election, Blackwell ordered an overload,
meaning votes Ohio votes were counted in Tennessee—and a surge of Bush
votes during the last hour changed the outcome of the presidential race. “Kenneth
Blackwell outsourced the hosting of vote counting, which was on the same server
as the GOP IT systems,”  Fitrakis reported.  That server hosted
hundreds of partisan sites---including JWB43.3, which has been identified as
the site where hundreds of missing e-mails from Rove originated.

Now Connell claims his company has penetrated firewalls of Congress as his
servers have set up sites for the House Intelligence, Ways and Means, Judiciary
and Administration committees.

Fitrakis says the public should question why major exit polls were off for
the first time in history when a former CIA director’s son, George W.
Bush,  ran for president—twice.  “There’s been
a long history of the CIA itself tampering with elections in the third world.
They’ve admitted that before Congress,” he said.  “My
belief is that that which was done covertly before in the third world is now
happening overtly here in the U.S.”

He urged people to contact the House Judiciary Committee and urge them to
review impeachment articles 28 and 28 submitted by Congressman Dennis Kucinich,
which address inquires into the 2004 election.  “Why not put Mike
Connell and Steve Spoonamore under oath and ask them if the apparatuses in
place in Ohio—and throughout the nation—can be used to rig elections
or hack the vote?” he asked.

Voting Machine Issues
Serious problems were found in Ohio
with both touch screen voting machines (which have been decertified in California
after a hack-test ordered by Secretary of State Debra Bowen found numerous
vulnerabilities to electronic hacking) and Diebold Optical Scan voting machines – the
very same systems slated for use in our November election. 

Touchscreens were found to be miscalibrated so that the screen would light
up when touched, leading voters to believe their votes had been counted.  But
the mechanism for voting was actually just outside the box.  To have your
vote count, “you’d have to have a really fat finger,” Fitrakis
quipped. 

Ohio’s Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner announced plans in August
to sue Diebold to “essentially remove all their machines because they
don’t count correctly,” he said. 

Ohio also had “tremendous problems” with Opti-Scans used in 2004.  “There
are literally to this day thousands of people who used them and never had their
votes counted,” said Fitrakis, who objects to private technicians from
voting machine companies such as Diebold accessing machines with memory cards,
ostensibly to recalibrate machines.  “In 2004, you had memory cards
with no votes on them,” he said.  “Also if a machine is too
sensitive, it doesn’t read the actual voter-verified paper ballot.  Thousands
of them were just taken and stuffed underneath bins by election officials and
never counted to this day.”

Fitrakis advocates paper ballots (not paper trails), hand-counted at precincts
and witnessed by members of the public and representatives of each political
party.  “Ninety-five percent of democracies in the world vote on
paper,” said Fitrakis, who has served as an international election observer. 

San Diego election integrity activist Brina-Rae Schuchman agrees, and further
calls for citizen hand counts and audits of absentee ballots by citizens.  “We
need Secretary of State Bowen and California Attorney General Jerry Brown to
do what is right; to examine the machines and to sue for our taxpayer money
back for every infraction,” she wrote in an e-mail to the Voter’s
Watchdog.  “The e-voting machine vendors and America’s election
officials seem to have forgotten that they must work” in the public interest.”

Schuman said she is “very worried about San Diego elections” because
Diebold central tabulators and Opti-scanners are still inn use here.  “No
one can be sure what secret instructions are buried in the programs that count
the votes,” she added.

“Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, the vast
majority of people want transparent, fair elections,” Fitrakis concluded.  ““People
should care because they are Americans and believe in fundamentals of Democracy.”

Domentary film on election fraud showing in San Diego Sept. 24
Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections will
be shown on Wednesday, September 24th at 7 p.m. at UltraStar Cinemas-Mission
Valley in Hazard Center, 7150 Hazard Center Drive.  The film by Emmy award-winning
director David Earnhardt presents factual and startling proof from computer
programmers, statisticians, journalists election officials of fraud in recent
elections—and just how easy it is to change election outcomes in the
U.S. 
Film Director David Earnhart and voting rights activist Brad Friedman of  the
BradBlog.com  will be on hand.  Reception to follow film.  Advance
tickets and information: contact Mike Copass  (619)665-9415 or California53@gmail.com

Next month:  Voter’s Watchdog will investigate the disenfranchisement
of military voters.

Miriam Raftery, editor of East County Magazine,  is a 25-year
journalist who has won national and local awards for her investigative
reporting and community journalism.  If you are indicated in syndicating
or reprinting this column, please contact editor@eastcountymagazine.org.


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