Wednesday, December 19th, 2007...6:55 am
Paul Revere and the Raiders Were Right When They Said “The Judge Will Rule”
The judge in the election integrity case gave the Pima County Democrats a partial victory yesterday when he ordered the release of two database files for examination. Blog for Arizona has a comprehensive history of this case here.
I doubt that there was any fraud in the RTA election. One big reason is that the results seemed to track with the polling that was done. Also, the issues in that election had little to do with party. But, that’s what makes this case so important: local Democrats really have no axe to grind in that particular election, so that made this purely an examination of procedures that the county follows in its local elections.
What was found was that the county’s procedures were, at best, sloppy. Some of the things that were unearthed included a county employee taking data home and preliminary vote counts being taken before the polls were closed. There was also an admission of sorts from Diebold’s own expert that hacking the machines is possible.
I attended my district club meeting last week, and we recieved a report from one of the folks on the voter integrity committee. He pointed out that it is unlikely that the county can change from the Diebold machines, but they hope to suggest to the county an audit process on top of what exists now. One possibility is scanning and uploading the ballots to the internet, where they can be easily accessed by citizen groups who wish to conduct their own vote counts. Transparency is the goal here.
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