By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
November 12, 2004, 5:30 p.m. -- -- Last
week's weblog
Nader staffer: N.H. recount 'is on'
Ralph Nader has followed his request for a recount of selected New Hampshire
precincts with a $2,000 filing fee and a promise to pay the cost of the process,
and expects a hand recount of selected wards to begin soon, according
to campaign spokesman Kevin Zeese.
"We're on -- the check and promise to pay have been delivered," Zeese wrote
in an email timestamped 5:05 p.m., in response to an inquiry. "The state was
asked
to start asap -- they will let us know next week."
An accompanying press release noted that Nader had received "more than 2000
faxes from citizens concerned about the vote count who urged the campaign to
request a hand recount in New Hampshire."
The recount will begin in areas where the vote favored President Bush
in anomalous ways.
Some facts
at last: It's a Jon Stewart moment.
Inference is not evidence. Party registration does
not predict future behavior.
On the other hand, we don't accept election totals on faith without testing,
investigation or evidence. Especially now that vote totals can be edited by
modeming into hackable computers and playing with the numbers in a spreadsheet.
Recounting by hand is a traditional safeguard. Now we know there will be some
of that, and we will have some evidence -- one way or the other -- about the
accuracy of the count for at least a small slice of the vote.
That's not sinister,
it's The American Way.
Related: Nieman
Watchdog: Questions the Press Should ask: Some good reporting now could
bring integrity to voting and help make it more tamper-proof.
Link
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November 10, 2004, 4:50 p.m.
Nader has till Friday to pay $2,000 filing fee to launch
N.H. recount:
Independent Presidential candidate Ralph Nader has
until Friday
to
pay
a $2,000 filing
fee to request a recount of New Hampshire votes and to pledge to cover the
costs of the count.
Kevin Zeese, a spokesman for Nader's campaign, said that N.H. Secretary of
State Bill Gardner, a Democrat, has agreed to the new deadline.
Nader held
a press conference in Washington, D.C. this afternoon to confirm his faxed
request for a recount, filed one minute before last Friday's 5 p.m. deadline.
Zeese
said Nader will ask that votes be recounted in particular
wards -- urban areas
where 78 percent of the votes were cast using the Diebold
AccuVote system.
Zeese, reached by telephone this
afternoon, said the recount would begin as soon as possible after these conditions
were met on Friday.
A press release offers details including,
On November 5, The Nader/Camejo campaign filed a challenge seeking a hand
recount of the New Hampshire ballots at the request of numerous voting rights
advocates. Striking inconsistencies exist between the vote as reported on the
AccuVote Diebold Machines and exit polls and voting trends in New Hampshire.
These irregularities in the reported vote count favor President George W. Bush
by 5% to 15% over what was expected. Problems in these electronic voting machines
and optical scanners are being reported in machines in a variety of states.
Nader says major electoral reforms are needed to ensure that every vote
counts, including the most unlikely to be counted – those of third
party and independent candidates’ votes. Reforms should ensure that
all voters are represented through electoral reforms like instant run-off
voting, binding none-of-the-above options, and proportional representation;
that non-major party candidates have a ballot access chance to run for office
and participate in debates; and that public elections be publicly financed.
Zeese said he didn't know how much a recount would cost -- it depends on the
time involved and at what point they stop the count -- but that they were soliciting
donations at votenader.org. Those who
wish to contribute can click on a Recount
button there that
ensures these
funds are kept separate from campaign donations.
The press release also notes pointedly,
Nader called upon John Edwards and John Kerry to be serious about their
pre-election and post-election promises: “Our offices are being flooded with faxes
and e-mails asking for assistance in resolving these irregularities – a
lot of them are citizens who voted for you. You must now take action to give
our nation the fair accounting it deserves from the 2004 election and to
protect democratic processes in future elections. Although your party extended
considerable
funds and manpower to unconstitutionally drive us off the Ohio ballot, in
the spirit of good government, I urge you to make this effort now.”
Here's the press release.
Zeese confirmed that voting activist Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org also
spoke, mentioning suspected problems on the central vote-counting servers.
He said Harris's group would also be soliciting donations for
the recount.
Updated: Here's another donation link at Help
America Recount. You may use
PayPal from this link.
Related: Voting activist Ida
Briggs has analyzed the New Hampshire results
and offers voting results,
data and charts. An somewhat shorter version can be found at the National
Ballot Integrity Project Discussion Forum.
Related: Congressmen send second letter to GAO requesting investigation,
detailing voting complaints: Congressmen John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI),
Robert C. Scott (D-VA), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Melvin Watt (D-NC), Robert
Wexler (D-FL.) and Rush Holt
(D-NJ) have sent the following to Comptroller General David M. Walker at the
General Accounting Office:
...we indicated we would follow up with additional information as it becomes
avaliable. To that end, we would also request that you review and evaluate
the following:
More than 30,000 complaints have been noted on one website: http://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapNation.
We request that you evaluate a sampling of these incidents.
Enclosed are more than 265 specific complaints. These can also be found
at: http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp?
offset=240&catid=&showall=&sort=date. These include the following:
In Sarper County, Nebraska, a computer problem doubled the votes in
half the country's precincts, adding 3000 phantom votes to the totals.
In Guilford County, North Carolina vote totals were so large that the
tabulation computer threw numbers away. Retallying changed two outcomes
and awarded
an additional 22,000 to John Kerry.
In Broward County, Florida, at least 21 voting machines malfunctioned
There's more Here's the complete letter in pdf format.
Link
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Updated 12:26 p.m. Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org is
to join Nader for the press conference below.
12:07
Nader
to hold press conference on his N.H. recount request at 1 p.m.:
November 9, 2004, 7:31 p.m.
Death
masks: Thanatos.net
has a collection of masks made from plaster casts of people soon after death.You
can browse the gallery but the index link doesn't seem to work.
Teresa
Nielsen-Hayden has made an
index of her own to some of the more famous characters.
This technology goes way back, so you'll see some people dead a very long
time, such as Napoleon
Bonaparte, at right. (I rotated this one; it's nose-up
in the gallery.)
Link
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Polar Express: One of the reasons for the
brief blogs this week (besides Frank, my right-hand man, being on vacation)
is a special section I've been
producing
on Polar
Express,
the movie made from the 1985 book of the same name by Providence's Chris Van
Allsburg. The cutting-edge 'toon opens tomorrow.
If you'd like to take a peek, here's a
slideshow desginer Beth Heaney put together. As I write this (but probably
not
when
most
of
you read this) our Polar
Express page lacks
a link to Michael Janusonis's
review,
coming tonight, but the rest of it's there, so feel free to be the first on your
block...
Interesting: A 1998 story (Proving
Grounds: Motion Capture Technology Seeks Broader Application) about the
"future uses" of performance capture technology, the special effects
that let Tom Hanks play several characters in this 'toon. It seemed too techy
a link for the movie's page, but not for this blog.
Link
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Mark
Cuban: When will the music industry do it right? Dallas Mavericks owner
and blogger Cuban offers commerical advice to the RIAA and the labels.
How about some music by people with talent?
Link
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The whole world is watching: Or may be, soon. Here's
a transcript of
Keith Olbermann's show last night, in which he addressed voting irregularities.
By the tme you read this, he'll have done yet another episode of what promises
to be a serial. The blog is worth tracking.
Speaking of Ohio, here's a bit of news from Wapakoneta. The
Evening Leader in St. Mary's, Ohio reported
before the election,
...In a letter dated Oct. 21, Ken Nuss, former deputy director of the Auglaize
County Board of Elections, claimed that Joe McGinnis, a former employee
of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the company that provides the
voting system in Auglaize County, was on the main computer that is used to
create
the ballot and compile election results, which would go against election
protocol. Nuss claimed in the letter that McGinnis was allowed to use the
computer the
weekend of Oct. 16.
Nuss, who resigned from his job Oct. 21 after being suspended for a day,
was responsible for overseeing the computerized programming of election software,
according to his job description. His resignation is effective Nov. 11. ...
We hope they get back to this with more details.
This could, of course, be huge, or not. Until there are facts, we jump to
no conclusions. If that happens, we have a stash of links to knock your socks
off.
Link
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November 8, 2004, 7:50 p.m.
Busy day wearing my other hat -- the producer hat -- so the blog gets a lick
and a promise.
Somewhere between investigative journalism and a tinfoil
hat: Keith Olbermann: George,
John, and Warren:
... Richard Nixon may have phoned John Kennedy in November, 1960, and congratulated
him through clenched teeth. But if the FBI had burst into Kennedy headquarters
in Chicago a week later and walked out with all the file cabinets and a
bunch of employees with their raincoats drawn up over their heads, nothing
Nixon
had said would’ve prevented him, and not JFK, from taking the oath
of office the following January.
This is mentioned because there is a small but blood-curdling set of news
stories that right now exists somewhere between the world of investigative
journalism, and the world of the Reynolds Wrap Hat. And while the group’s
ultimate home remains unclear - so might our election of just a week ago....
...We will be endeavoring to pull those stories, along with the Warren
County
farce, into the mainstream Monday and/or Tuesday nights on Countdown.
I've been saying all year -- very publicly on journalism panels, and in this
blog -- that the campaigns, the votes, the dollars would all be a charade if
somebody
modemed
into the vote-counting servers and changed the
numbers in the Microsoft Excel files. (Yes, it's that easy. Bev
Harris of Black Box Voting showed Howard Dean exactly
how to do it.)
There's a lot more out there along these lines, but until Black
Box Voting releases whatever evidence they might turn up, we're all in
the dark. Ohio hasn't started counting those absentee and provisional ballots
yet, and won't until Nov. 11, so there's still time for John Kerry to unconcede,
should the count prove to have been swelled by large numbers of voters
whose legal residence
is a graveyard.
Meanwhile, Ralph Nader has asked for a recount of N.H., which John Kerry won,
to get a look at real numbers. (His request arrived at 4:59 Friday, but the
accompanying
fax
of a
check to pay for it allegedly jammed. There is precedent for granting a recount
in N.H. when the check jams, however, so it may be happening.)
Everybody should welcome whatever recounts emerge. Faith in the integrity
of our voting system is at the core of our democratic system. If anybody
messes with the results, it damages us all. It's not fair, and could make
voting in America no more reliable than in a tinpot banana republic.
And if the numbers come out roughly the same, half the country
won't have to spend the next four years saying, "We wuz robbed."
Away from
the pressure of election night to deliver
a speedy count, we might get
a truly
accurate
count.
But we really need secure, open-source, voting software. As computer scientist
and Maryland election judge Avi Rubin wrote last week, "If we continue
to use the kind of insecure DREs that were used in this election, it is only
a
matter of time before somebody exploits them. And the worst part is that we
may never know it."
No folks, it's not quite over yet.
Related: The
coolest election map of them all.
Link
to this item | Comment
Hasidic reggae: Matisyahu Miller is an Orthodox Jew who loves reggae, and
describes his music as "combining the sounds of Bob
Marley and Shlomo Carlebach."
You can listen to some clips
here, but there's a nice NPR interview by Aaron
Hagin for The Mark Stein Show on NPR affiliate WYPRthat mixes Matisyahu's story,
his music, and the reactions of the reporter who went
to
one of his shows.Aaron Hagin for
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