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SMART Elections is focusing on nonpartisan election observation to monitor, protect & verify the vote. Join our vibrant and fascinating monthly forums!

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We are building bridges and lasting partnerships that can produce significant improvements in U.S, elections. Our elections must be both inclusive and transparent to be meaningful and trustworthy.

We focus especially on election security because that is our area of expertise, and we know that if security is not addressed - and votes are not counted accurately - then all other reforms are at risk.

SMART stands for:

  • Secure

  • Marked* & Audited by Hand

  • Accessible & Accurate

  • Registration for all eligible voters

  • Transparent

*(for those who are able) 

Please make a donation today to so we can continue this critically important work.

Canova / Wasserman Schultz Handcount

I am re-posting the link to the statistical research that I did on the results of the August 30th 2016 primary between Tim Canova and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. 

Tim Canova is running against Debbie Wasserman Schultz again for a seat in congress.

Tim Canova is running against Debbie Wasserman Schultz again for a seat in congress.

After almost a year of protracted and contentious negotiations with the Broward County Supervisor of Elections office, we have finally gained permission to copy the ballots in 12 precincts of the 2016 primary race between Canova and Wasserman Schultz. We had to take them to court in order to do this. We now have 2 days assigned, November 1st & 2nd when we will have permission to make copies of the ballots. After that we will count them by hand.

The statistical analysis of this race raised red flags, and it is important that we look at races like this to see if the results are accurate. The only way to know is to count the ballots by hand. If you believe this is important work, please support this project. We need your financial help to get this done. Please give as much as you can today. Here is the Gofundme link where you can contribute.

Wasserman Schultz has been embroiled in a series of scandals this year.

Wasserman Schultz has been embroiled in a series of scandals this year.

2 Tier Approach to Election Audits

Robust audits are the single most useful tool we can use to ensure the accuracy and security of our elections. I have written a proposal for a realistic approach to implement audits in as many counties as quickly as possible. The basic concept is to do 100% hand-count audits in places where it will not be burdensome, such as smaller jurisdictions, and those with simpler ballots. In larger jurisdictions, and those with more complex ballot content, risk limiting audits can be implemented; but it would be advisable to additionally audit one randomly drawn race on every ballot, and all races closer than 1 % with 100% hand-count audits.

I have presented this paper at 3 conferences now. The Electoral Integrity Project Workshop in San Francisco in August, The People's Convergence Conference in September, and the Take Back the Vote Conference this past weekend in Berkeley. The response has been very positive.

Below is a link to the complete paper. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

If you support the work that I'm doing, please show that support by making a donation to my GoFundMe today. I very much need your help right now in order to continue.  Thank you to everyone who has donated so far, and thank you for the work that you are doing to move this issue forward! 

 

Click on the photo to read or download the complete paper.

Click on the photo to read or download the complete paper.

What to investigate?

Here is where I am today on evidence of Russian involvement in our elections; what is a valuable use of time; and what is less so.

- There is a lot of evidence that Donald Trump has been doing business with individuals associated with the Russian mob and money laundering.
"...for more than three decades the FBI has had Trump Tower in its sights. Many of its occupants have been targets of major investigations ... One thing many of them have in common is deep ties to organized crime — including the Russian mafia."

- The Clintons seem to have compromised themselves by donations from Russia and various business associates surrounding a uranium deal with Russia.

Why many progressives are more interested in the Clintons' ties to Russia than Trump's ties I don't understand.

Louise Mensch apparently says that Russia is connected to everything. So eventually, with any luck, she may be right about something. Could be Trump.

All of this for me, is a distraction from the real issue, which is how are we going to establish accurate, secure election protocols by the 2018 mid-term elections. Anyone can hack our elections right now: The Russians, Iran, China, Karl Rove, The DNC. Alex Halderman has said straight up that he could do it, probably most of his grad students and the girls from black girls code could as well. It is infinitely more fascinating to speculate on who may have been doing it than to do the nitty-gritty, tedious work of how to prevent it. Yet, that is where we need to put our attention. We have an incredibly narrow window in which to do this work before it will simply be too late to make changes to voting sytems prior to the election. Already Chicago and Maricopa County AZ are in the process of making these decisions.

There are a number of really important areas that need to be researched. If people are interested in assisting with this research - it would be really useful!

1) We need an excel sheet of the laws pertaining to how ballots are counted in each state.  Many states have outlawed hand-counting and we need to know which ones, and what the specific regulations are in each state. Someone could start this in a google spread sheet, and others could add in information. 

2) We need to research about 7 different emerging voting technologies that are coming on the market. I support hand-counted paper ballots in as many places as possible. Probably that will be in jurisdictions with on average 50,000 votes or less — and not too many referendums on the ballot. Other locales are going to need some kind of mechanism, and it would be good to compare emerging technologies and see which ones offer the most transparency and ability to verify the vote. 

Someone could start a google spread sheet and begin listing the parameters that can be compared for each system. This would be tremendously helpful! We can crowd-source this research and get it done more quickly and more thoroughly than anyone could do it on their own. If we can get a spreadsheet in place with basic information and websites of each option — we can take this to a team of computer scientists and ask for more in-depth vetting of the systems. 

If you start a spread sheet, please lmk via my website or DM and I will send you an email to add me. Here are the systems that I am aware of currently. 

o   Clear Ballot – Mark Earley &  Ion Sancho may be a source of information on this company

o   Clear Ballot has partnered with Voatz – (supporting internet voting- quite risky)

o   Galois

o   Jim Keller’s system (photographer/inventor from San Antonio Texas)

o   STAR – Travis County election officials & Rice Univ

o   Mitch Trachtenberg / Humboldt County system

o   TOBI – The open ballot initiative - Ray Lutz, Citizens’ Oversight Projects

o   Trust the Vote – Open Source – but available for commercial development

o   Some jurisdictions may be developing their own systems- LA & San Francisco are

o   A simple off the shelf system that would scan or photograph ballots that could then be counted via spreadsheets, in a system developed by the Michigan Election Reform Alliance, or a slide show method that has been developed by the Wisconsin Election Integrity Action Team, or another protocol.

Thoughts? Willing to help? Please let me know!!

 

Building Momentum

We had a great conference call today with about 50 people on the line. Our focus is on making our elections accurate, secure, transparent & fair. I'm having these calls so that organizers can connect with each other and activists who want to get involved can find a group to work with. This was today's call. Information about who was on the call and how to reach them is below

 

We will have another call or live stream at the same time next Sunday at 3pm. 

Next week's call will feature:

Laura Pressley who has been working on cleaning up elections in Texas

Don Ford - documentary filmmaker What's Next

Today's speakers included: 

Tim Canova - Progress For All
Carl J. Romanelli - Pennsylvania Green Party
John Brakey -  Election Nightmares
Ray Lutz  - Citizens' Oversight Projects
Jim Duffett - National Election Defense Coalition

facilitated by lulu Fries'dat - Electoral System in Crisis

At Electoral System in Crisis we need people with math, research and data entry skills  - please let us know if that's you - by entering your email here:  Holler Back - [not] Voting in an American Town. Please also enter your email if you'd like to just stay in touch or know about upcoming calls and events.

I will send an email with how to contact organizers directly.

Emily Levy from Elections at Risk says they are creating a list of projects that people can volunteer for. If you need help, send her information about your project: info @ electionsatrisk dot org.

Thanks so much to everyone who participated!! Take action now. Please put any comments or questions you had from the call into the comments. Thanks again!

 

2016 GOP Presidential Primary Shows Evidence of Manipulation

This blog post is updating information from the report, An Electoral System in Crisis. Our data indicates, that as Trump has suggested, it is likely that the vote counts were not accurate in the 2016 Republican Primary. In the large precincts Trump's percentages go down, as other candidates' percentages go up. We were unable to find a demographic explanation for this. It is possible this is an indication that the vote count is being manipulated through the electronic voting equipment in the large precincts. We identify the electronic voting equipment as a potential source of the problem, because we do not find the same suspect pattern in the hand counted precincts that we examined. The Wisconsin graph demonstrates this. Graphs by Phil Evans &  Anselmo Sampietro. @luluFriesdat For a more detailed explanation, we encourage you to read the full report. www.electoralsystemincrisis.org #ESIC

How Far Off Are the Election Results…? It Could be a Lot.

We are starting to release our estimates of the differences between the expected statistical patterns and the reported totals in the 2016 presidential primaries. These are the percentages that our research indicates the official results could be off by.

In our report, An Electoral System in Crisis, released with the support of Election Justice USA, we provide considerable evidence that the vote totals from the 2016 primaries are in all likelihood not correct, and that the most likely explanation for a pattern to have this widespread of a presence is some kind of manipulation of the totals.

Fritz Scheuren, a member of the statistics faculty at George Washington University, and a former president of the American Statistical Association agreed. Dr. Scheuren has been a collaborator in our research, and is quoted in the report. Examining the data from the study, Scheuren said, “As a statistician, I find the results of the 2016 primary voting unusual. In fact, I found the patterns unexpected [and possibly even] suspicious. There is a greater degree of smoothness in the outcomes than the roughness that is typical in raw/real data.”

We got some email questions asking what the [ ] indicated had been changed from the original quote, so here is the quote exactly as Dr. Scheuren emailed it to me.

"In fact, I found the patterns unexpected. Suspicious even?"

I am in regular contact with Dr. Scheuren who has vetted much of our data. In one of our recent phone calls, he confirmed that the analysis strongly suggests that the results are not accurate, and weighed in on how close this election might have been if the votes had been reported accurately.  He said, “It would have been a lot closer and Sanders might have won.”

In Louisiana, the data indicates the results could be off by as much as 36%.

In the graph above, we see not only an unexpected dip in Sanders percentages in the large precincts, but also an implausible dip in the percentage of all the less-established democratic candidates on the ballot. We received screen shots (below) from one of the less-established candidates Roque De La Fuente that corroborate the idea that those candidates are having their vote totals depressed, deleted, or transferred in some way. In Travis County Texas, with almost 10% of the votes reported, De La Fuente had over 8000 votes. But by the time 50% of the votes were reported his total had been reduced to 105 votes.

De La Fuente ends the race in that county with 138 votes. The race in Texas above is a tight race. Sanders wound up winning Travis county 51% - 48%. But the candidates were fighting for every vote here. So votes that may have been available from less-established candidates could have been useful.

In Illinois we see a change in the percentages in the large precincts, so great that the winner of the race would be reversed if the percentages from the small precincts were maintained in the large precincts. This suspicious increase of Clinton's, and other candidates' percentages in the large precincts, is the thrust of our research. We were unable to find a plausible demographic explanation for its presence in state after state. The analysis indicates that the results could be off by as much as 9% and that in this state, it would be large enough to change the outcome.

There are many other states that had suspect patterns this large or larger. We will be releasing more graphs soon.

Dr. Scheuren and I discussed what actions need to be taken in regard to this data. He suggested, "At least two states where these issues are evident should be manually counted – if there’s a meaningful difference between the official count and the recount, then maybe more states should be counted," and he emphasized again, "because it could change the outcome.”

As Hillary Clinton said tonight, "Our democracy isn't working the way it should."

NEVADA DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS - 2 SIDES

CNN spent a lot of time last night on what they described as the crude, disrespectful and incendiary behavior of Sanders supporters at the Nevada caucus.

"'I was not able to stop these people for doing what they did,' Boxer, a Hillary Clinton supporter, told CNN. "Apparently they've done it before. .... This group of about 100 were very vocal, and I can't describe it -- disrespectful doesn't even explain it, it was worse than that."

Boxer is hardly the lone Clinton supporter to experience such harassment on the campaign trail. Several top Democrats told CNN publicly and privately that the energy and enthusiasm of Sanders supporters has at times descended into incendiary attacks that threaten to tear apart efforts to unite Democrats against Donald Trump. Several female senators told CNN the attacks have been misogynistic."

Behind the Scenes in Nevada

However if you read Tom Cahill's post from April 3rd, you'll get a very different impression of what was going on. He describes behind the scenes maneuvering to leave Sanders representatives out of the loop, and attempts to remove credential committee chair Christine Kramar behind her back for providing Sanders team with equal information. This led to a standoff where Kramer sat down on the floor in protest. The video has 85k hits on YouTube. At the bottom of the post, you see the entire floor erupt in cheers when Sanders wins.

Reminds me of the John F. Kennedy's quote, also used in a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

 

 

A VOLATILE NIKO HOUSE AT NYC BOARD OF ELECTIONS

Niko House channels New Yorkers' outrage about the irregularities in the 2016 NY Primary, and demands that the certification process be stopped. Problems included over 100,000 people purged from the polls, party affiliations changed, and a 12% discrepancy between the Exit Polls and the reported total.

The petition below could help stop the election from being certified, by demanding a hand count prior to certification. A hand count would also reveal whether or not the machines are counting the votes accurately. Please sign and share. 

#StopCertification We need #HonestElections. SIGN|SHARE for a #NYHandCount https://goo.gl/vpBhOl