Excellent insight!!  

------------------------
Keith Smith


--- On Sun, 8/30/09, Jim March <1.jim.march@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Jim March <1.jim.march@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Politics/Ethics: Operation PinWale - Obama Administration Seeks  Emergency Control of the Internet
> To: "Main PLUG discussion list" <plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
> Date: Sunday, August 30, 2009, 3:17 PM
> Yesterday I attended a court hearing
> that in my opinion, directly
> relates to this thread.  Let me tell you about it.
> 
> At issue was the proposed destruction of paper ballots from
> a 2006
> Pima County bond election that "smells fishy".  I
> won't go into all of
> the details but...it doesn't look right.  The state
> attorney general
> had recently grabbed these same ballots and hauled them up
> to Phoenix
> to be hand counted.  In my opinion, that hand count
> was flawed in a
> bunch of ways...I can even make a pretty good case that the
> hand count
> was deliberately bungled.
> 
> So now the ballots are back under the control of the Pima
> County
> treasurer's office, "sentenced to death" by a state law
> requiring
> destruction of old ballots.
> 
> Lawyers for the Republican party took the lead in arguing
> in favor of
> their destruction, stating that the legislature wanted to
> make sure
> elections are not challenged outside of the sole challenge
> structure -
> a five-day window after each election during which
> candidates or
> parties can file challenges if they have reason to think
> the election
> was flawed or fraudulent.
> 
> Lawyers for the Democratic and Libertarian parties argued
> otherwise.
> They (and I) believe that despite the destruction law,
> basic fairness
> says that at a minimum, political parties should be able to
> look at
> those ballots.  Political parties in AZ are the
> independent oversight
> for elections - not the public as in some states including
> California,
> and not the candidates as in Tennessee and elsewhere.
> 
> The problem with the five-day challenge window is that in
> electronic
> voting, it's not possible to do the analysis that
> quickly.  In fact,
> the Democratic party filed suit in 2007 for electronic
> copies of the
> raw data files in MS-Access format from that same 2006
> election and
> others.  We (despite being Libertarian I was the tech
> consultant on
> the case) didn't get them until a year and a half later and
> when we
> did, there was fishy-as-hell stuff in there.  No
> "smoking gun" but a
> lot of suspicious stuff - like repeatedly reloading memory
> cards days
> after the election, and a failure to make daily snapshots
> of the data
> on election night and several days after.
> 
> So, the Democrats argued before Judge Harrington that their
> role in
> election oversight found in AZ law means they need to have
> the ability
> to really check out even old elections, especially when the
> same
> election officials and staff from that election are in
> charge now.
> 
> The Republicans (and of course Pima County) claim that
> casting doubt
> on past elections "undermines the public's perception of
> the system" -
> they seriously argue that it's BETTER NOT TO KNOW about
> election
> fraud.
> 
> So I'm in a situation where, in open court, my county's
> government is
> saying that data found on my laptop, and on the server at
> the
> Democratic party's attorney Bill Risner (which I'm sysop
> for) contains
> data about election issues that it's better people not know
> about.
> 
> Now ask me again if you think I want the gov't poking
> around MY data.
> Ask me why I'm using whole-disk-encryption, or why Bill
> Risner's law
> office is protected by a heavy-duty hardware firewall I
> installed?
> 
> Some people DO criticize the government, with damned good
> reason.
> When we do, we have to be able to protect our data from the
> government
> or we're just not going to be effective.
> 
> Jim March
> Member of the Board of Directors, http://blackboxvoting.org
> Member, Pima County Election Integrity Commission approved
> by the Pima
> County Board of Supervisors (Libertarian party appointee)
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