In this article you will find tools to help you analyze the numbers as
 they come in from Kentucky and Oregon's May 20 primary elections. New
 info: 2008 Tool Kit: https://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.html. You can
 find more Oregon & Kentucky tools, and discuss here:
 https://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/74040.html

Kentucky is a big problem, Oregon is just plain strange. I'll start
 with Oregon's all mail-in voting system before I tell you the news about
 Kentucky. In Oregon, 100 percent of votes are absentee, or mail-in,
 although citizens do have the option to take their mailed ballot to an
 elections office to drop it off. 

OREGON'S SURPRISING ELECTION DATA* 

*Source:
 https://www.eac.gov/files/Eds2006/eds2006/Copy%20of%20eacdata(3).xls (Excel spreadsheet, huge mamajama, allow time to download. And
 see end of this article for tips on how to use.) 

1. EVER WONDER ABOUT SIGNATURE VERIFICATION? Here's a little pop quiz:
 Out of 1.4 million Oregon votes in 2006, and knowing how people's
 signatures change over the years, how many signatures would you expect to
 mismatch? 

ANSWER: Out of 1.4 million, the state of Oregon claims that 29 counties
 had ZERO mismatched signatures, and in the 10 remaining counties that
 reported mismatches, the grand total was (drum roll please)..... 34
 ballots. 

Yes, out of 1.4 million, just 34 signatures did not match. With those
 figures, it seems equally plausible that the dog's pawprint that made it
 through a couple election cycles in Washington State as would have
 fared just as well in Oregon. Heck, a scribble drawing or a blob of
 spaghetti might work fine too, we just don't know. 

But what we do know is that according to data submitted by the state of
 Oregon to the EAC, Clackamas County had 146,968 ballots cast and not a
 single signature was too squiggly, scrawly or tilted to mismatch, and
 that Oregon has one of the lowest signature mismatch rates in America. 

We're not wanting to disenfranchise people, but accepting every
 signature that floats in the door may not be a good thing. It puts extra
 pressure on the validity of the voter registration database and the postal
 delivery system, that's for sure. 

2. FALSE: Oregon's claim that forced mail-in voting gives them higher
 turnout figures is simply not true. Oregon is squarely in the middle of
 the pack when it comes to voter turnout, when compared to the other 50
 states in the same election. 

3. MIRACLE POST OFFICE: Oregon also has a remarkably, some would say
 impossibly effective postal service. Here's what I know: Black Box Voting
 does periodic mailings, and we consider a mailing of 8,000 pieces to
 be spectacularly large, for us. Thirty-one of Oregon's counties mail
 more ballots in every election than we ever do, yet they never seem to
 have ballots arrive late or flop around battered and bruised, to be
 returned months later. 

That's not our experience. Some of our mailers arrive late, some
 probably not at all, and a few look like they've taken a bruising trip to
 Mongolia before they belatedly return to us. 

Yet out of 2.5 million ballots mailed out in the 2006 general election,
 Oregon reports ZERO ballots returned undeliverable, and only 54
 reportedly came in after the deadline. Oddly, 44 of those were in one county.
 (Not Mulnomah, the biggest county, where Portland sits. It was
 Washington County). 

4. VOTING MACHINES: Contrary to many citizens' beliefs, Oregon uses
 computerized voting machines statewide, almost all ES&S scanners, and if
 you'd like more information on the hackability of those, check out the
 EVEREST Report, choose the 334-page Academic Report and look up Election
 Systems & Software. Every component of the ES&S machines were found to
 be tamperable. 

MOONSHINE MATH IN KENTUCKY 

Kentucky never has accounted for its 2006 election math, as can be seen
 by examining the data reports published by the Election Assistance
 Commission (EAC) in the above link.* 

(*See end of this article for hints on how to use the two EAC Inspector
 Gadget obstructo-matic secret decoder rings needed to make sense of
 this file) 

That file contains the raw data submitted by each secretary of state,
 with details right down to the number of absentee ballots in the wrong
 envelope and the reasons voters were taken off lists. What it DOESN'T
 contain, however, is the number of votes counted in Kentucky in the 2006
 General Election. When you search the minimal information presented in
 news reports back then, you see a glimmer of a hint that Kentucky had a
 statewide voting computer meltdown in 2006. 

Kentucky submitted thousands of data points for the EAC 2006 survey for
 every one of its 120 counties but omitted -- you guessed it -- the
 votes. Results have been posted on Web sites, but I find myself wondering,
 given the all-too-real 2006 meltdown of the voting tally system in 96
 counties, whether people in the Kentucky Secretary of State's office
 may have been reluctant to sign a federally required report committing to
 those very problematic results. 

THE BULLITT COUNTY MISMATCH WENT STATEWIDE 

Bullitt County, Kentucky citizen Kathy Greenwell could have told you
 that was going to happen. Her husband ran for sheriff in November 2006,
 and while she obtained copies to match up the voting machine results
 tapes with the announced results she discovered they didn't match. None of
 them. 

Here's the article by Black Box Voting on that situation: 
https://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/47065.html - "Elections
 give you: The Judge, the Prosecutor & the Sheriff" 

HERE'S HOW THE KENTUCKY VOTING MACHINES ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK 

Voters cast their votes into paperless touchscreens at the polling
 place. At the end of Election Day, each voting machine spits out a results
 tape. Then, the cartridges from each voting machine are fed into a
 cartridge reader. It reads all the cartridges and transfers the data into a
 tallying program that adds them all up. And that's when Kathy
 Greenwell got her dander up in 2006, because the information coming out of the
 tally system didn't match the results on the poll tapes for any race. 

As the evening progressed, the mismatches began to hop around like
 frogs on electronic lily pads. In addition to wildly fluctuating results, a
 bunch of questionable individuals started wandering in and out of the
 back room, many of whom were related to the Tinnell family, which had
 three members of the family on the ballot (Donnie Tinnell: Sheriff;
 Sherman Tinnell: Mayor; Melanie Roberts: Judge Executive). All the Tinnell
 people won, but none of the results ever did match up. 

Kathy Greenwell keeps demanding answers, but never has gotten any. At
 one point Bullitt County Clerk Kevin Mooney gave her a new results tape
 which, he claimed, made things match up. Unfortunately, this new tape
 only balanced the mismatch out for Kathy's husband Dave Greenwell's
 sheriff's race. All the other races are still out of whack. 

Bullitt County -- and the other 96 counties in Kentucky serviced by a
 voting machine services firm called HARP ENTERPRISES -- claimed that the
 incorrect vote totals were due to a "fusion problem" when the computer
 tried to add up the totals from the old Shoup/Danaher 1242 voting
 machines combined with the new Hart eSlate machines. 

WHAT YOU DIDN'T READ IN THE NEWS ABOUT THIS: 

1. Pennsylvania also has locations that use both these machines, and
 their fusion program works. Or at least so we are told -- Philadelphia
 County got the bright idea to charge the public to look at results there,
 restricting viewing to those who purchase a password, and we don't
 know if anyone did the same thing Kathy Greenwell did, matching up each
 tape to the published results you have to purchase. 

Nevertheless, we have no evidence that Pennsylvania's system, same
 machines as Kentucky, is unable to match its own results up. 

2. Kentucky then "solved" the problem by deciding to stop printing the
 reports so no one can check to see if they match. 

Yes, that's what I said. Kentucky decided to use ONLY the poll tape
 results, hand entering them into a computer in the back room, and never
 put the cartridges into the reader, never generate that second report.
 With only one-half of the check and balance, you can neither check nor
 balance the poll tapes against the cartridge reader. 

For "transparency", at least in Bullitt County, observers wait in a
 lobby with a small video picture of people sitting in a different room
 typing "you-can't-see-what" onto "screens-you-can't-see", with people
 occasionally wandering in and out of the videotaped area into completely
 unviewable areas, carrying items that look like poll tapes. On at least
 one occasion when Black Box Voting was there, they turned off the camera
 for a bit while they did "we-don't-know-what." 

ELECTION WRANGLERS 

They also had the Wrangler active that night. For those of you newbies
 to the activity known as "election monitoring" (also accurately termed
 "smacking into a brick wall") -- well, here's what a "Wrangler" is in
 Election lingo: 

Government insiders, who are in there counting votes in secret on the
 computers they control, have a designated wrangler, or in trouble spots
 a couple of them. Their job is to distract observers if something
 interesting is going on. Blip-lights flicker -- out comes the lady with the
 candy tray. I once watched the "blue screen of death" appear on a
 crashing King County, Washington vote tabulator and while trying to write
 down the time and particulars, was accosted by the Republican Party
 observer who out of the blue left the computer room to engage me in a
 stubbornly aggressive conversation about nothing. In Bullitt County, Kentucky
 it was the candy tray lady, a trick reported by activists in other
 states as well. 

3. And now we get to the best part. Scratch that. The worst part. The
 machines used in 96 of Kentucky's 120 counties, the Shoup/Danaher 1242s,
 can be tampered with rather easily by anyone with access during or
 shortly after the testing phase, but this could be caught -- unless you
 skip the step of loading in the cartridges to produce the tally report. 

And that's just what Kentucky decided to do. In Kentucky, it was
 decided to stop reading the cartridges and use only the poll tape results.
 And this is precisely the check and balance cited to show that these old
 1242 machines are "safe." 

THINGS TO DO TO HELP MONITOR KENTUCKY 

1) Wear a helmet. You'll be running into the brick wall. 

2) Ask the officials to read the cartridges into the cartridge reader
 and print out a report to prove to you that the cartridge results match
 the voting machine results. The cartridges contain what is supposed to
 be the actual vote data. 

3) Ask to inspect or get copies of the "poll tape" results. Ask for
 copies of the cartridge reader results. 

4) Record the order in which Kentucky counties deliver their results
 tonight. Late results -- especially when accompanied by a trend reversal
 -- are associated with fraud. 

5) Get screen shots of any tallies that go DOWN as results are coming
 in. 

6) Hunt for "impossible numbers." Here are examples of impossible
 numbers found by Black Box Voting, the media, and citizen observers: 

a) Barnstead, New Hampshire, 2008 primary. Fifty percent more votes
 than voters in the Democratic Party presidential race. 

b) Election location in Harlem, New York: Obama got zero votes.
 Greenville, New Hampshire: Ron Paul got zero votes, and when citizens came
 forward swearing they'd voted for him, the Town Clerk found the missing
 votes. Sutton, New Hampshire: Ron Paul got zero votes. When citizens came
 forward swearing they'd voted for him, the Town Clerk found the
 missing votes. Note the pattern, hunt out the zeroes, onesies and twosies
 because they happen in every election. 

THE IMPOSSIBLE NUMBERS HUNT 

You can get lost inside that EAC data set for weeks, but in moments
 when you come up for air you'll be able to raise red flags that may help
 prevent problems this fall. 

Black Box Voting is not a fan of the EAC, but the data surveys are
 actually quite terrific. They show that some locations are refusing to
 comply (like the entire state of New Hampshire, which refuses to provide
 even basic numbers like voter registration or number of votes). They
 provide at least the skeletal framework that has potential for quality
 control and fraud research. 

And the data can be used, in conjunction with other data you find, to
 identify potential hotspots for trouble this fall. 

Remember sixth grade math and story problems? The EAC data tables are a
 like a set of Lego's for constructing all kinds of interesting story
 problems. Which counties are most likely to binge and purge voter
 registration lists? You can get a good idea of that using these data tables.
 Which counties appear to have been stuffing the ballot box in the past?
 Yep, that can be divined as well. Hint: Lake County, the Indiana
 location that couldn't seem to find its votes for so many hours in this
 year's primary, is one. 

THE CRACKERJACK EAC DECODER RINGS FOR THE DATA TABLES 

And you'll need them, because they for some reason did not bother to
 put the labels on the columns to define what data each column contains.
 For that, you need to download this file: 
https://www.eac.gov/files/Eds2006/eds2006/Survey_Data_Code_Names.xls
 (Excel file) 

Then you get to do the fun and tedious activity of looking up the
 secret code in the decoder table to insert it on the top of each column. 

But that's just the first decoder ring. Secret Agent Natalie, from
 Black Box Voting, wondered why none of the data could be summed up or
 divided for percentage analysis, and found that the EAC, in its infinite
 wisdom, converted the numeric data to text. What that means is that
 instead of reading the number "5" your computer reads it as text, like
 "f-i-v-e" and since it doesn't know how to perform math functions on alphabet
 letters, you can't perform simple tasks like ranking smallest to
 biggest, or dividing one number into another to get a percentage. 

Black Box Voting has applied both decoder rings to all the data, and is
 providing the complete decoded, correctly labeled, numerically
 converted EAC data table as part of our 2008 Tool Kit 

* * * * * 

More information: 

For more on Kentucky: 
https://www.blackboxvoting.org/moonshine1.pdf 
https://www.blackboxvoting.org/moonshine2.pdf 
https://www.blackboxvoting.org/moonshine3.pdf 
https://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/47065.html 
Print story: The Hunt for Joe Bolton
 https://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/54541.html 
Black Box Voting YouTube video - Kentucky, The Hunt for Joe Bolton:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzahSVY_GM 
Moonshine Elections: Family-run Government
 https://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/54610.html 
Moonshine America: Collapse of the "Trust Me" Model
 https://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/70968.html 
Black Box Voting YouTube video - Kentucky's Kathy Greenwell confronts
 New Hampshire Sec. State Bill Gardner, face to face 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrdzXp3Zbmk 

Black Box Voting 2008 Tool Kit: 
https://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.html 

Oregon tools, thanks to John Howard: 

https://www.bbvdocs.org/OR/state/Oregon-74022.htm

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting

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