After spending much of yesterday talking to lawyers, we think we have a better understanding of the fight to preserve the ballots from the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election, which Pima County Treasurer Beth Ford has said she is ready to destroy.
We’ll get to the part about how secrets may or may not have been spilled at the Boondocks Lounge in a second, but here’s a bit of background for those who came in late: In May 2006, Pima County voters approved a half-cent sales tax to fund an estimated $2.1 billion in transportation projects over two decades.
Attorney Bill Risner, who has successfully sued Pima County to gain access to electronic databases related to ballot tabulation, suggested last year that the RTA election might have been flipped—that county election officials rigged the computers to show the RTA propositions passed even though voters actually rejected it.
Since then, we’ve had an investigation by Attorney General Terry Goddard (which critics have dismissed as a “sham”) and lots of legal jousting by Risner and the Pima County Attorney’s Office, which reached a climax when the Pima County Board of Supervisors agreed to give up an appeal of the case and turned over the databases to Risner. Or, more accurately, offered to turn them over to Risner, who has been too busy to pick them since winning the case.
You’re probably wondering: Why not just recount the ballots? Because state law prohibits the county from doing a recount without a judge’s order.
We’re almost to the part about the Boondocks, so stay with us.
But before we get to that: Jim March, the tech guy with the election integrity crew, says he’s been working on developing a program that might (or might not) detect any signs of fraud in the RTA database he got from the county back in January. He said yesterday that he hoped to have some results by November.
March made his comments at Risner’s press conference, where the scrappy attorney alerted the public that Pima County Treasurer Beth Ford was planning to destroy the ballots from the RTA election.
As we reported earlier, Ford sent letters to the various political parties informing them that she would be destroying the ballots from the RTA election if no one raised an object by Friday, July 11.
State law requires ballots to be sealed in a vault under the control of the county treasurer and destroyed six months after an election. The RTA ballots are still around because they were evidence in the lawsuit that Risner had filed against that county that has been more or less resolved.
Ford maintains she has no position on whether the ballots should be destroyed.
“It’s fine with me if we keep them,” she says. “It’s fine with me if we destroy them.”
Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry says he wants to keep the ballots to prove the RTA election wasn’t flipped.
Huckelberry and Ford—an elected official who does not answer to Huckelberry—met with lawyers from the Pima County Attorney’s Office last month to discuss the legal options regarding the ballots. Ford says she was concerned she might be in violation of state law if she didn’t destroy the ballots, while Huckelberry wanted to preserve them.
“My instructions to the county attorney were to go to court if necessary to prevent those ballots from being destroyed,” Huckelberry says.
The separate positions, according to Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall and her chief deputy, Amelia Craig Cramer, set up a conflict between the two county departments.
The attorneys asked both Huckelberry and Ford to waive any conflict so they could devise a legal strategy to ask a judge to preserve the ballots.
Huckelberry agreed to the waiver, but Ford refused.
“I’m not real comfortable with the county attorney’s representation of my interest in the first place because if they were looking out for my interests when this case first went to court, they would have addressed it at that point,” Ford told us yesterday. “I wouldn’t even be in this position.”
Here’s where it starts to cost you money: Both Ford and Huckelberry will now have to hire outside counsel to settle the question of destroying the ballots in court. The Democratic Party, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party are expected to ask the court to preserve the ballots.
Risner had a second Big Reveal at the press conference: He produced a affidavit signed by Zbigniew Osmolski, a former county employee who claims that he had a “candid conversation” with Elections Division computer programmer Bryan Crane, who confided to him “that he ‘fixed’ the RTA, or Regional Transportation Authority election on the instruction of his bosses.”
This conversation, according to the affadavit, took place at the Boondocks Lounge, 3306 N. First Ave., while the two stepped outside for a smoke.
The Tucson Citizen’s Gary Duffy reports that Crane denies making a confession to Osmolski in the shadows of the Boondock’s giant wine bottle.
Risner said that Osmolski was more interested in talking to Attorney General Terry Goddard than to the press; we haven’t yet vetted his credibility.
Risner hopes the affidavit is enough evidence of potential criminal wrong-doing that Goddard will come down to Tucson and order the ballots to be counted again, which would either prove that the election was rigged or remove the cloud hanging over it.
Huckelberry says he’d like to run the ballots again, too.
“We could have saved $250,000, $300,000 in attorney’s fees and all the aggravation we’ve gone through over the last two years if we would have been just allowed to recount the ballots,” he says.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2008.
I think it is outrageous that Bill Risner had over 300k of legal fees paid by the taxpayers for this bogus witch hunt. Just take a look at this election integrity conspiracy theory group. John Brakey is one of the most misguided individuals around this valley, and he will stop at nothing to validate his conspiracy theories. If I am wrong and the vote was flipped, I will admit it once the ballots are recounted. Which by the way is a good idea at this point.
But shame on Bill Risner for charging these ridiculous legal fees to the taxpayers. Thanks to him, the Food Bank and other entities got a reduced contribution this year while he got a fat paycheck. Nice.
The county should have been open with the election results in the first place and saved taxpayers money. Transparent democracy is a good thing.
Anyone who attended or has examined testimony at the RTA trial will know that the Pima Elections Department operated without any real security and far outside the bounds of acceptable practices during the RTA and other elections. As things stand, the same incompetent employees and supervisors will oversee our national election in November. It is impossible to trust the results Pima County reports without further investigation. An outside agency with the power to prosecute crimes must be brought in at this point. The RTA ballots must be counted again in an absolutely transparent fashion. If we can’t trust that our votes count, we no longer live in a democracy.
Wallace, I think it is outrageous too that over $300K of our tax dollars went to attorney fees, however, your anger is misdirected. You should be angry at the Board of Supervisors, Jan Brewer and Barbara LaWall’s office for playing obstructionists to the Arizona citizens (along with Huckleberry and the Elections Division). Whether there was fraud or not (I believe there was), the issue is really about transparency and who owns our elections…the people or the corporations who can fix them. This is just one election. The likelihood is that flipping votes and fraud has been going on for many years and many different elections.
If you think this is all just “conspiracy”, then why not let the process go forward? Were you one of the ones who pressured the Board of Supervisors to turn over the data so we could avoid having to pay all the legal fees of our hard earned tax dollars over to the county and the Democratic attorney? If not, then you really don’t have a leg to stand on. Be part of the solution or get out of the way is my motto.
It sounds more like you do believe someone tampered with it but you have a personal interest in the RTA passing and therefore attack activist groups. The same “conspiracy” label was given by Jan Brewer and against activists across the country, even when time and time again fraud is shown. Have you bothered to read the documents? Why did the county order all that equipment before the election if not to flip it? Why were internal polls still showing the tax increase was failing on the ballot? Are you happy about pay more taxes so developers can trash our environment even more with no real transportation solution?
Answer this, if these activists are just a bunch of paranoid freaks, then why go the great lengths to prevent the information from becoming public and doing a recount? Frankly, even if they get the ballots there is not guarantee the ballots have not been tampered with and switched out. Other than of course those who marked theirs and scanned them before mailing in, which everyone should do.
In 2004 in Ohio and Florida, there were more ballots cast in at least two large precincts than total number of people even registered in those precincts. The fact that neither the Democrats or Republicans cried out fraud and demanded the results be tossed shows how entrenched the main parties are and how corporate controlled. The Libertarian and Green parties are usually the only ones who fight for real transparency. It is pretty amazing that this local group of Democrats even took up the issue and are fighting it because the state Party would rather they just all go away and do business as usual. Terry Goddard cares less about being a Democrat and about representing the people of this state then being beholden to the corporations to make his career. He and Janet have been good little pawns helping to give away billions of our tax dollars in corporate welfare. THAT is what you should be outraged about in terms of our wasted tax dollars. Meanwhile, the small business owners who make up over 90% of the Arizona economy do not get that welfare and struggle to keep afloat.
Wallace, like it or not they (activists) are fighting for YOUR rights. Like true patriots do.
An earlier Citizen post by Jim March:
A lot of things don’t add up during the RTA race in particular.
PARTIAL list:
* During the period when mail-in votes were being scanned days before the election, one entire day’s worth of data was destroyed by over-writing the next day’s data over it. This didn’t destroy votes if everything else was done right, but it did destroy a “snapshot” of the votes for a given day’s scanning. This was consistent with data being copied off the system, manipulated elsewhere, loaded back in an overwriting a record the false data might otherwise have disagreed with. The county describes this overwriting as “accidental” yet it took multiple commands to accomplish this (canceling operating system warnings). The system operator was Bryan Crane, the same gent claimed to have confessed to tampering.
* Within 15 minutes of the “accidental” data overwrite, the same operator printed two copies of the reports showing how the vote was going – pre-election when this was grossly improper at best. This is consistent with making sure a vote-hack worked. The county describes this too as “accidental”. Even once would be puzzling. Twice? Somebody was very interested in that data.
* Testimony under oath from lower level staff in the elections office during the public records case claimed that printing the “who’s winning and losing” reports pre-election based on the mail-in data was common practice, AND that these reports made their way out of the elections office. Printing them would be improper. Distributing them would be a felony. The system audit logs confirm habitual peeking at this confidential data pre-election from 2004 through 2006.
* On election night of the RTA race, the same system admin (Bryan Crane) was seen referring to to a Microsoft Access advanced programmer’s manual, which was photographed and identified later. MS-Access is a piece of software able to bypass all of the security features in a Diebold election database. It’s a known “burglary tool for elections” and is banned from use on any certified voting system in the nation.
* County elections director Brad Nelson maintained that since the RTA race was non-partisan, no observation or oversight by political parties was to be allowed, even to check when basic security issues were visible “through the window” into the elections room. This included data cables running off to God-knows-where-ville. We were barred from checking what else was cross-connected to the voting systems used to tally the RTA race results.
* When Arizona Attorney General Goddard launched an “investigation”, the first expert he talked to (Dr. Michael Shamos of Pennsylvania) told Goddard that re-counting the original paper ballots was the only reliable method of checking the machines – which was the same thing the Pima County election integrity community told him. AG staff lied to Dr. Shamos and said that Pima’s local election observation team had “signed off on” a “database study”.
* We told the AG staffers that if they were going to do a study of the databases, they needed to compare each iteration of the data over time in an automated fashion to spot differences. One possible “hack” would be to change elements of the data that aren’t supposed to change, such as candidate ID numbers. This suggestion wasn’t taken seriously. Instead, the AG’s staff communicated continuously with Pima County’s own tech who reports directly to Chuck Huckleberry; that tech (John Moffatt) told the AG’s consulting tech firm (iBeta) that a portion of the database called the “preference table” would have to be altered to change the elections’ outcome. We see no evidence that’s the sole possible hack location and have done many test-hacks in other areas of the database. We also find it highly unusual that the AG’s office consulted heavily with the suspects in an investigation and allowed them to guide investigators toward an outcome.
* The AG’s consulting firm (iBeta) said that results were inconclusive, and that the databases they examined were horrifically vulnerable to tampering. They believed that any competent tampering would be impossible for them to discover – which is the same thing Dr. Shamos told them from the beginning.
On the Friday the 11th, the ballots are scheduled for destruction. Only Goddard can call for a “stay of execution” and arrange to finally do what he should have done a year ago: count the votes.
Jim March
Technical consultant, Pima County Democratic Party, election observer for the Pima and Arizona Libertarian Party, Monterey County (Calif) Green Party and consultant to the Wharton County (TX) Republican Party. Yeah, I have a hard time keeping track myself sometimes :). Member of the Libertarian Party.
Wallace, none of these attorney’s fees would have been necessary if Pima County had simply complied with the Democratic Party’s request to view the public data. I have no doubt that 100’s of thousands of taxpayer’s dollars were spent resisting disclosure.
Here is the link for the Press conference video from yesterday:
http://blip.tv/file/1066638
Its must see TV and powerful!
Our media still want to say and report “they were differences of options” Lazy to dig for the facts! One side say world is round, other side says it flat. If you dig you’ll find the facts. That why we won the case, we used facts.
Also Folks might want to check the story on Brad Blog about Pima county as well as other election problems nationally. http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6160
Wallace, I’m not a conspiracy theorizeist .
I’m a conspiracy Factualist.
I work with facts.
Waldron, way to go. Tucson seems to be so misguided on the city and county and even the state level.
I have an idea, why not ask state legislator Steve Farley to demand that Attorney General Goddard appoint an independent investigator to get to the bottom of this issue and prosecute any individuals found to have committed election crimes?
Oh wait, that wouldn’t work because Steve Farley sold himself out to the developers by helping to “pass” the RTA and then used the RTA “success story” as a launch pad for his political position.
The reality is that Farley is afraid to discover the truth that his political career might be founded on fraud.
I doubt if Steve Farley has any doubts about what he sold his soul for. And truth didn’t have anything to do with it. I’ve heard Steve tell people exactly what they wanted to hear, regardless of what he should have known to be true. For example, he and I debated the RTA at a Sam Hughes meeting, he told the crowd they should vote for the street widenings in order to get light rail because we could always go back and limit all those lanes to bicycles. Yeah, sure.
On the bright side, Steve was elected in Pima County. That means there’s no reason to believe he actually won the majority of the votes.