Pottawattamie County Open Records

I have received 3/4's of the records I requested from Pottawattamie County, Iowa. I requested machine tapes reports, test ballots, sample ballots and ballot definition files (as defined by NY election regulations).

I received the first 3 of these 4 items for each of the precints in the county.

I will post more when I complete going through the recived records.

I Failed to Make the Cut for Jeopardy

I tried out for the contestant search for the Jeopardy game show this last weekend.

I made the first cut with the 10-question pre-test. This winnowed the field from 1500 applicants to 80.

The 80 of us were then invited to take the 50-question the following day. I failed to make this second cut.

The 50-question test winnowed the field to 13. These 13 are effectively in the contestant pool.

I did well enough so that I cannot try to be a contestant on Jeopardy for a year.

I Need Actual November 2, 2004 ballots

I need 7,000 to 10,000 or more actual November 2, 2004 ballots.

I would like to know one way or the other if this sort and weigh proposal will work:

http://www.washburnresearch.org/HandCountingPaperBallots.htm

Does this work? Work fast enough? Work with multi-race ballots? Have sufficient check and balances and security to minimize fraud? 

I want to get real world, empirical evidence of the viability of this proposal (or lack therof).  I want to video record the whole 6-7 hours to DVD.  The availability of the raw video as well as 30 second, 1 minute, 10 minute, and 30 minute versions is to blunt claims I have presented this in an out of context way.

I have a scale company here willing to lend me a $1500 high capacity, high sensitivity counting scale for nothing more than prominent product placement in the resulting video.

I have a film crew available (camera, lights, sound, and director) willing to donate the equipment and time in exchange for the copyright to the result and credit toward there film degree.

What I don’t have is a set of realist ballots to sort, weigh and count.  I have 60 pound card stock and I could print a couple thousand mock ballots to test with.  But, I thought I could use real ballots. The 22 month retention period for the November 2, 2004 election materials expires on September 2, 2006 .  What is more realistic than actual ballots as marked by actual voters?

Unfortunately, my county clerk is adamant that no original ballots from any municipality in Washington County, Wisconsin will be released to any private citizen, let alone me. I am contacting the clerks of other counties.  But, I thought I would throw the request out further.

What I need:

1)      7,000 or more ballots from November 2, 2004.  The ballots:

a)      Need not all be from the same jurisdiction.  I was going to combine the ballots from the 4 polling locations in Germantown for a total of 11,557 ballots.

b)      Must have the same ballots structure; i.e. the same set of races with the same set candidates printed in the same order.

c)      Must be printed on discrete, uniform pieces of paper; the heavier the better.  Optically scanned ballots would be best.  But ballots from a Populex systemor Proofs of votes from an AccuPoll system would work as well.  VVPAT toilet paper (Not discrete) or cut and dropped VVPAT will not work (not cut to uniform lengths).

d)      Have at least 8 races on it.

e)      Be interesting.  I settled on GTown because it had 5 parties for party preference voting, 10 partisan races (some unopposed) and 4 non-partisan ballot referenda.

Can anyone help me find a jurisdiction with ballots from polling places which meet my selection criteria? On September 3, 2006 ballots from jurisdictions all across the country will be in dumpsters.  I would like to rescue some of this trash and put it to good use.

Add a comment if you know of jsut a jurisdiction.

Fraud Vitiates (Corrupts) Everthing

Why Diebold DRE’s have no valid NASED numbers.

The centuries old legal principal, Fraus omnia vitiate, “Fraud vitiates everything” renders the following NASED qualification numbers
N-1-06-12-12-002,
N-1-06-12-12-003,
N-1-06-12-12-007,
N-1-06-12-12-009,
N-1-06-12-22-008,
N-1-06-12-22-010,
N-1-06-22-22-001,
N-1-06-22-22-002,
N-1-06-22-22-003, and
N-1-06-22-22-004
null and void. Thus, for Wisconsin and 37 other states1, these Diebold systems identified by the qualification numbers above are not certified for use in the state because the required2, legally valid NASED qualification number does not exist. In particular, the certifications for systems N-1-06-22-22-001 and N-1-06-22-22-004 are now void in Wisconsin.

Here is a link to the complete article.

I will be prssing the Wisconsin State Elections Board to recognize they also have fallen prey to this fraud and must, in the interest of Justice, recind the certification of any Diebold system which includes either of the untested DRE touch screen offered by Debold Election Systems Incorporated.


Here