This is long, yes, but with supporting documents...proof will be noted some of the links.
There’s a small group of activists and computer geeks who have been following election problems since 2003. I’m one of them. We’ve had our successes but honestly, things are getting worse. The latest trend scares me: people in “closed primary” states (where you have to be a Dem to vote in the Dem primary for example) are finding themselves switched from Dem to something else without their permission and often with very crude at best signature forgeries on the false voter registration documents. This is new – it tells us that election manipulation has been going on too long, not enough people care and now we’re seeing “in your face” examples. I’m going to go into the history of the issue and what we need to do to change things.
If it takes me a week or a month or whatever I’m going to answer every question in this thread!
Urgent: one of the people I’ve worked with over the years is John Brakey based in Tucson AZ. The AUDIT-AZ election oversight group he founded is now in the thick of it as Arizona now has two election challenge lawsuits going, one filed by John and one by the DNC (Democratic National Committee). John’s suit seeks to overturn the Arizona election and have a do-over while the DNC wants the court, as a cheaper remedy, to throw out all the Arizona delegates to the convention. John and AUDIT-AZ need funding immediately – more about their lawsuit and donation info (via PayPal) is at: http://electionnightmares.com/ - I'm pictured in there, look for the big guy with the fanny pack with the peace sign on it.
Now let me fill you in on some history of this problem...some of it stuff I was directly connected to.
I’ve been involved since mid-2003. I was brought into this movement as a former IT guy (already turned activist by then) by the work of Bev Harris and I still sometimes refer to myself as one of her earliest lieutenants. Bev was the first one to turn up serious proof of misconduct in vote counting software and systems when in January of 2013 she found an open-access FTP site (online repository of stuff) maintained by Diebold Election Systems and copied all 40,000-ish files off it over three days. This, in my opinion, really jumpstarted the debate over bad voting systems. By 2005 I spent a year in the Seattle WA area working with Bev on election investigations and reporting. Bev and I still talk and collaborate frequently.
Important: the single biggest fallout from Bev’s first reporting, still very relevant today, is that at each county running Diebold voting gear there’s ONE computer where all the precinct and mail-in votes are added up – the “central tabulator”. Bev showed (with basically stolen copies of the Diebold “GEMS” central tabulator software that as long as you deal with the election database with “GEMS” everything appears secure, but once you open the data in an off-the-shelf copy of Microsoft “Access” (a crappy database app included with MS-Office) all the security basically vanishes: you can edit every aspect of the election with no password required, no audit trail entry left and you can even edit the audit trail. When I’ve been involved in forensic exams of voting systems after an election I very, very often find evidence that MS-Access is loaded on there. In a few cases we’ve found proof it was used. Voting system software has to be approved and “certified” ahead of time and MS-Access has never been approved, at all, by any state or at the federal level. When you see that bad boy on allegedly certified voting systems it’s basically a burglary tool for elections.
At one point Diebold denied this, saying that “no human being” can alter the data in this manner...so Bev knew somebody with an honest-to-God chimpanzee and we taught HIM to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4-wQhtRiP8 – behind the scenes note, this was possible because the dang thing was addicted to Menthos[tm].
My reddit username originally matched my real name: James “Jim” March. In 2013 I married another political activist hellraiser, Jill Simpson and took her last name. Jill is somewhat well known as the formerly Republican whistleblower who put a hurt on Karl Rove: http://www.donsiegelman.net/Pages/topics/Players/Heros/heros_simpson.html
Jill and I met doing election monitoring in 2012 for the Obama campaign. This report on the risks of manipulation of overseas and military voter’s intent got a fair bit of coverage and remains of concern, although we don’t think it’s a top avenue of election management misconduct this year: http://electionprotectionaction.org/uploads/MOVE%20Act%20nov%205th%20article.pdf – note that pics of myself and Jill are in there, part of my proof...
In the summer of 2005 I was arrested in San Diego California for trying to observe the counting of the vote as per California law: http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=1685
I was released a week later with felony election tampering charges dropped: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4266418 – if you scroll through the comments you’ll see that I was controversial among some Dems as I was previously best known as a gun rights activist and lobbyist...in 2002 I was thrown out of the California NRA because I was exposing how sheriffs were selling gun carry permits for campaign contributions and the NRA told me to stop complaining about Republican sheriffs doing that. I refused. Yes, I’m still a “gun nut” of sorts. As you can see, some of the folks on Democratic Underground had...issues with all that :). They had issues with Bev Harris for another reason I’ll get to in a sec.
Back to election stuff :).
In 2006 I moved to Tucson AZ and immediately started working with John Brakey who had been tracking election problems since 2002 when he was threatened with assault by pollworkers in Pima County when he realized they were shaving votes. John and I did a LOT of work exposing Pima County’s election problems (2nd biggest county in AZ, where Tucson is) and in Maricopa County (the biggest by far, centered on Phoenix). To give one good example of how shady Pima’s election process is, check out this videotaped deposition of the head election tech for Pima County during most of the last decade and decide for yourself if he’s hiding anything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfPGU4LjN94 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzyxQszono0 – trust me, he doesn’t usually twitch like that :).
In 2010 John and I did some digging into election misconduct in Maricopa County: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TKmkSNAkCfOTMzN2YzZTgtNzIyYi00MTcyLTg4YWQtMzY1NzhkMGFjZTQ1/view?ddrp=1&hl=en&pli=1 which became the basis for a lawsuit trying to reform at least some parts of the process. This report in turn was mentioned in an appellate court decision awarding fees to, among others, John and I by name: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/az-court-of-appeals/1596645.html
This was one of the few times this insanity paid anything - $8k each if I recall right? (I’ll have John chime in on this thread if possible...he’s usually not a redditor.)
The main reason I’m posting is that while I’m no longer in Arizona (I moved to Jill’s place in Alabama in early 2013), John is still fighting and in the recent Arizona primary election a whole lot went wrong that John is now suing over. One of Arizona’s problems was a pattern also seen in other closed-primary states where people’s voter registration database entries were altered to deny them the right to vote in the Democratic Party primary. You can see examples from other states here: http://heavy.com/news/2016/04/election-fraud-voter-registration-changed-suppression-party-affiliation-sanders-clinton-ca-ny-az-md-pa-what-to-do/
Specifically in Arizona, Anonymous is claiming the statewide voter registration database is hackable - vulnerable to SQL Injection along these lines: https://xkcd.com/327/ - and that Anon was able to actually test-hack the data: https://anonymousinvestigationsblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/anonymous-report-was-arizonas-voter-registration-database-hacked/
We also know that the number of sites where a voter could in fact vote were radically reduced from previous elections in Maricopa County, from almost 400 four years ago to about 60 now. John has evidence of misconduct at some of those voting locations (for technical reasons, not really “precincts”). We also find it very suspicious that on election day Bernie won the polling place vote by 60% to 40% Hillary but in the mail-in voting the pattern was exactly opposite – 40% Bernie, 60% Hillary. We know there’s enough security holes for Maricopa County election staff to have manipulated it and they have a long infamous history of deliberately subverting security enough to pull it off.
The Democratic National Committee has announced that they too are filing suit in Arizona. They’ll be in federal court. John’s lawsuit is in state court and because he’s challenging the actual outcome of the election (requesting the whole thing be done over!) he is “fast tracked” with his first hearing on the 19th of this month(!). He needs financial support immediately for that case.
John’s lawsuit has a lot more details at: http://electionnightmares.com/ - he is for real and I’d like you to consider hitting the “Donate Now” button. He has a real attorney who we’ve worked with before in Maricopa County. Any help appreciated and win or lose, any and all information he gathers in his suit will be shared ASAP with the public and with the lawyers for the DNC as they follow behind in federal court on a slower timescale (because they’re challenging future procedures, not necessarily the actual outcome. John’s affidavit gives a decent starting point as to his case: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Fh3F6hufhDN296Vm1PNE1UY3M/view?usp=sharing
One other thing...I mentioned controversies regarding Bev. This relates to a problem I’ve seen ever since the debate over voting machines and processes started. In 2004 (a presidential election year) Bev got flooded with donations from people on the left who hoped she’d be able to “save the election”. Yeah...didn’t work exactly although blaming Bev was dumb. Reason being, if you want to save, well, let’s say the 2020 election from fraud, you need to start NO LATER THAN early 2017. It takes time to figure out where the weaknesses are, predict how the next round of hacks will go down and sue over them. Those of us in the election integrity community never EVER get funding in advance. John’s lawsuit in Arizona is very important but what’s really needed is strategic investigation and litigation intended to go to the US Supreme Court. I can tell you for a fact that when the US gun rights lobby went to the Supreme Court twice in 2008 and 2010, the planning for those cases began in 2000 with funding and resources from major organizations and budgets starting at half a mil. The US election integrity movement has never, ever been as well funded and the money that does come in happens in “pulses” every four years.
You can’t protect an entire national election in 2016 when you start in 2016. Ain’t gonna happen.
We need to switch to crowdfunded support and we need to get this idea of well-planned long-term action established. That said, among the “quick and necessary” suits this year that DO have results that can be built on, John Brakey’s case via the group AUDIT-AZ has the best chance of quick action that will in turn support suits across the rest of the election cycle. If you can support his work please consider it
Thanks and AMA!
(I’ll be answering in two-hour-at-a-time blocks at least twice a day – my finances forced me to become a long-haul trucker of all things...)
EDIT: I'll be up again at 9am EASTERN tomorrow (Sunday) for at least a couple of hours...then more across the day.
submitted by /u/JimMarch to /r/IAmA
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