Yesterday I attended a court hearing that in my opinion, directly relates to this thread. Let me tell you about it.
At issue was the proposed destruction of paper ballots from a 2006 Pima County bond election that "smells fishy". I won't go into all of the details but...it doesn't look right. The state attorney general had recently grabbed these same ballots and hauled them up to Phoenix to be hand counted. In my opinion, that hand count was flawed in a bunch of ways...I can even make a pretty good case that the hand count was deliberately bungled. So now the ballots are back under the control of the Pima County treasurer's office, "sentenced to death" by a state law requiring destruction of old ballots. Lawyers for the Republican party took the lead in arguing in favor of their destruction, stating that the legislature wanted to make sure elections are not challenged outside of the sole challenge structure - a five-day window after each election during which candidates or parties can file challenges if they have reason to think the election was flawed or fraudulent. Lawyers for the Democratic and Libertarian parties argued otherwise. They (and I) believe that despite the destruction law, basic fairness says that at a minimum, political parties should be able to look at those ballots. Political parties in AZ are the independent oversight for elections - not the public as in some states including California, and not the candidates as in Tennessee and elsewhere. The problem with the five-day challenge window is that in electronic voting, it's not possible to do the analysis that quickly. In fact, the Democratic party filed suit in 2007 for electronic copies of the raw data files in MS-Access format from that same 2006 election and others. We (despite being Libertarian I was the tech consultant on the case) didn't get them until a year and a half later and when we did, there was fishy-as-hell stuff in there. No "smoking gun" but a lot of suspicious stuff - like repeatedly reloading memory cards days after the election, and a failure to make daily snapshots of the data on election night and several days after. So, the Democrats argued before Judge Harrington that their role in election oversight found in AZ law means they need to have the ability to really check out even old elections, especially when the same election officials and staff from that election are in charge now. The Republicans (and of course Pima County) claim that casting doubt on past elections "undermines the public's perception of the system" - they seriously argue that it's BETTER NOT TO KNOW about election fraud. So I'm in a situation where, in open court, my county's government is saying that data found on my laptop, and on the server at the Democratic party's attorney Bill Risner (which I'm sysop for) contains data about election issues that it's better people not know about. Now ask me again if you think I want the gov't poking around MY data. Ask me why I'm using whole-disk-encryption, or why Bill Risner's law office is protected by a heavy-duty hardware firewall I installed? Some people DO criticize the government, with damned good reason. When we do, we have to be able to protect our data from the government or we're just not going to be effective. Jim March Member of the Board of Directors, http://blackboxvoting.org Member, Pima County Election Integrity Commission approved by the Pima County Board of Supervisors (Libertarian party appointee) --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
