On 4/7/11, Rick Hasen <hasenr@gmail.com> wrote:
I think I may need to take back the last line of my most recent post.
Apparently Michael Moore and Daily Kos are raising the possibility of
election official fraud as well. Sigh.
The Capitol Times in Madison is calling for a full federal
investigation. See
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/editorial/article_be206ecd-4b8d-571a-9fa2-cb4e5bf8e668.html
Michael Moore and DailyKos, while tradition "liberal suspects" have
traditionally been among the last to cry out for transparency or
investigation. For years, DailyKos kicked people off who asked for
that regarding the 2004 presidential race, despite criminal
convictions of two election officials for tampering with the recount
in Ohio. It might be fair to say that they are coming around in terms
of seeing the problems.
The Capitol Times of Madison takes the useful approach of putting the
shoe on the other partisan foot and imagine Democrats doing the same
things as happened in Wisconsin. See
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/editorial/article_be206ecd-4b8d-571a-9fa2-cb4e5bf8e668.html
Paul R. Lehto, J.D.
On 4/7/2011 5:48 PM, Paul Lehto wrote:
On 4/7/11, rick.hasen@lls.edu<rick.hasen@lls.edu> wrote:
http://www.jsonline.mobi/news/statepolitics/119410124.html?ua=blackberry&dc=smart&c=y
A couple months ago, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported some
important context to the admission of Waukesha Clerk Kathy Nickolaus
that "she failed to save in her computer and then report 14,315 votes
in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial
tally released after Tuesday's election [giving] 10,859 more votes to
Prosser from Brookfield and 3,456 more to Kloppenburg."
Nickolaus has insisted on keeping all the data on a single old
computer only she has access to, then "finds" this data two days later
after the election. "Failed to save" means that files dated Thursday
April 7 (which could be fraudulent data) are explained away as
"failing to save" on election night....
The January 11, 2011 Milwaukee Sentinel reported:
"[Waukesha County Clerk Kathy] Nickolaus said she decided to take the
election data collection and storage system off the county's computer
network - and keep it on stand-alone personal computers accessible
only in her office - for security reasons. [...] Because some of her
equipment is so dated - such as an 11-year-old modem for transmitting
data over the telephone and 1995 software no longer supported - and is
not routinely getting security updates, her election systems are not
connected to the county's system but are on stand-alone equipment.
[...] Although it was not among the audit recommendations, the
clerk's decision to no longer report municipal election results on
election night, as many other county clerks do, was questioned by
Supervisor David Swan of Pewaukee. "I'm personally disappointed by
that," he said."
Much more at: http://www.jsonline.com/news/waukesha/114014589.html
Nickolaus happens to be very partisan and to have database
professional credentials, but blames it in on her "human error."
Every line of programming code written, and every action taken by the
operator of a computer is "human error" so the "human vs. machine"
distinction is ultimately meaningless, except that only humans
intentionally act, while computers simply do as their told by anyone
who speaks their computer language and has access to them.
Paul Lehto, J.D.
PS The fact that a single Democrat admits in the link above that the
"numbers jibe" is hardly proof of a clean election. (I take this to
mean that the numbers of voters equal the number of votes, and the
like which would be a minimal requirement easy for even a stupid
cheater to satisfy.) There have been countless demonstrations on
video of how easy it is to change election results with as little as a
few minutes access to a single computer. This database analyst had
days of access, based on her personal insistence that she have sole
access to the data on her computer. Nobody who knows computers could
vouch for that short of an extensive forensic investigation, and even
with that, if she's really good, forensic investigation will come up
empty.
If anyone doubts the above, would they bet entire personal wealth and
assets on this question of whether a computer professional with days
of sole access to all the computerized election data can come up with
numbers that "jibe," and yet are fraudulent in fact? I think anyone
would be a fool to accept such a bet as against a computer
professional with days of sole access to the data. It follows that it
is even more foolish to bet Wisconsin's democracy on such things, much
less the nation's.
That being said, election contests (I've done both state and
congressional ones) are so difficult and fraught with traps that I'd
concur that Democrats probably won't challenge. The federal
government's own attorneys have stated that it takes 6 months to
investigate and charge a computer crime in elections. There are no
election contest statutes of limitations that are anywhere near that
long.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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