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Talk Nation Radio for January 30, 2008

Alexander A. Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut’s Voter Center on Memory Card Studies, the Diebold AccuVote OS Voting Machines

Produced at WHUS at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT
Producer/Host Dori Smith
TRT: 29:36
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport Archive.org or Radio4all.net

Listen here to listen to this week’s show in 64 kbps MP3 14.2M

Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment. I’m Dori Smith

Just days before Connecticut voters head to the polls for the ‘super duper’ Tuesday presidential primary, there’s a new report from the University of Connecticut’s voter center studying security for the state’s voting machines. They found problems with the memory cards for the optical scanners and the report comes at a time when voting rights activists have already been calling on the state to address what they see as an emergency. Joining us to talk about the UCONN report is lead researcher Alex Shvartsman of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. He will describe what the Voter Center found when they tested memory cards sent out for the 2007 State and Municipal Election. There were cards with junk data, cards that had not been properly tested, and other problems.

Meanwhile, we’ve been tracking further violations by staff members and paid technicians of LHS Associates, the vendor for the Diebold machines. The State Election Enforcement Commission has been investigating our complaint that staff members of LHS violated 2006 security protocols when they changed failed memory cards during a 2nd District recount. We also established that LHS committed violations again during the 2007 State and Municipal Election as it took place in New Canaan Connecticut and we will be submitting a further complaint to the enforcement commission outlining the steps taken by LHS staff who conducted a mid election voting machine repair in New Canaan.

The Secretary of the State made public announcements that the University of Connecticut team planned to collect memory cards for a study into the failure rates of the cards. But even so, LHS staff members collected memory cards that failed during the set up and testing phase of the 2007 election. They did this even as the UCONN team was attempting to collect a random sample to test for the number of failing cards and the manner in which they failed. The actions of LHS of replacing failing memory cards during the set up of the election is not outlined in state security protocols and those actions served to remove failing cards from the UCONN study, it ruined portions of the statistical analysis.

I spoke with Professor Alex Shvartsman just as his team was about to release their report which is online now at the UCONN Voter Center. I asked him to describe his new findings:

Alex Shvartsman: We are currently completing two reports dealing with memory cards that were audited for the November 2007 election. We did a pre-election memory card audit and also a more limited post election memory card audit. In order to do the audit we had to reverse engineer some of the Premier Election Systems, formerly Diebold, system and its components as well as try to decipher the contents of the memory cards. As always we try to work without the benefit of any documentation from the vendor or from the supplier so this is all from first principals. I guess in the pre-election memory card audit the most surprising fact was that about 3% of the cards contained as I call it junk data or complete garbage. I think that 3% possibly even 3.4% I don’t have the numbers right in front of me but this is way to high for electronic components. And I would say that these cards need to be better tested before they are shipped to the State of Connecticut. The good news however in conjunction with that is that such cards are readily identified by poll workers so these cards are not usable and they can be detected. *[Professor Shvartsman's Report: Out of the total number of cards, 18 cards, or 3.5% were found to contain “junk” data, that is, they were unreadable, which is easily detected by the tabulators as such, and could not have been used in the election.] http://voter.engr.uconn.edu/voter/Reports_files/audit07mc.pdf

Dori Smith: We talked during the time that you were doing your research about the junk data. But also we found that LHS staff were picking up failing memory cards, and I’ve heard that there were a variety of ways that you got the cards for your test: some of the registrars giving you back up cards rather than randomly choosing one of four cards. So is your study statistically significant now in terms of the number of cards given out overall?

Alex Shvartsman: I concur with you that due to the nature of the markings on the cards as they are supplied to the towns, for example, some cards are marked as back up cards, they are not supposed to be dealt with as back up cards, however, indeed some towns assumed that back up cards are secondary and the selections made was back up cards. And I think this has to be corrected. This certainly does impact the statical validity of the study. The random choice one out of four cards was not entirely random this time. Nevertheless we did learn quite a few things from the audit.

Dori Smith: Can you offer us some insight into the meaning of the junk data? How can we in layman’s terms understand what junk data is?

Alex Shvartsman: Let us assume you open a letter expecting to see written a letter address to you let’s say in English and instead what you see is a random sequence of characters not in any apparent language as if somebody just closed their eyes and randomly hit keys on a keyboard. This is exactly how junk data looks. We do not know yet what causes it. I think junk data on memory cards cannot be caused by damage in transit. We do not believe that, so it is therefore very important that the memory cards are tested before they are shipped and it is very important that they are tested before they are used. The only good news here in this case is that all such cards are rejected by the machine so such cards cannot be interpreted mistakenly as a valid card.

Dori Smith: What about the card that you found that had nineteen votes on it?

Alex Shvartsman: In all likelihood when the district performed pre-election testing they did not use test mode but they actually used an election mode. So instead of running a test election they set the card into election mode and they ran a sample deck through it. They had not cleared the counters and so such a card is potentially dangerous because if it is going to be used the day after or whenever in an election it is going to be starting not with zero but with these nineteen ballots already counted. However, the procedures do require that a zero count report is produced before the election is started. So any diligent poll worker attempting to produce a zero count report will encounter these nineteen votes. However through an oversight this is still an issue to be concerned about. This is one card out of 522 that we tested. Nevertheless this should never appear. I believe it is purely due to the poll workers misinterpreting the meaning of the test procedure.

Dori Smith: I found consistently at the polls that the poll workers still newly using this technology were very dependent on the vendor, LHS Associates to tell them what to do. And so where LHS just said well give me back the card I’ll give you a new one, that may not have conformed to your best case for carrying out your requirements for your test right?

Alex Shvartsman: This should be strictly prohibited and I believe the state procedures prohibit that. It never should be the case of any LHS worker brings any cards to a polling place or substitutes their own cards somehow. Only the cards that were chosen from the four cards originally shipped to the district and pre-tested should be used. So I’m not aware of any reports of that nature. However I do know that in other states LHS follows this procedure. So an LHS person on site seeing a failing machine or a failing card would swap the card and I believe this is not allowed in the State of Connecticut.

Dori Smith: Just to clarify this information I received came from directly from the registrars. They told me they were in process of setting up the election, the memory card failed, they called LHS and LHS took the card and replaced it right away so it would be hard to know exactly what the timing was in terms of when you got your samples versus when the cards were exchanged. But somewhere in there the process was altered. Now in terms of that practice that we are discussing with LHS, one of the big issues that I did find both in Connecticut and New Hampshire was again this dependency or willingness on the part of the poll workers to kind of turn things over to LHS when a machine failed or a memory card failed or any problem came up really. Now I just spent a long time talking with the Democratic and Republican registrars of New Canaan Connecticut and I want to start at the end of that conversation because they told me that after a voting machine broke down during the 2007 State and Municipal Election they did turn to LHS.

LHS basically made the call, and in the end the machines were never forensically studied. In the State of Connecticut have you made any recommendations about whether or not voting machines that fail should go into an automatic mode where they are then investigated for any kinds of problems after the election.

Alex Shvartsman: I think that it is certainly a good idea that if a machine is for some reason taken out of an election for reasons other than for example paper jams then such machines should be examined. We did examine three machines after the election and I’m not sure how representative this set is. One machine had a piece of heavy paper jammed in the reader mechanism, it could be part of a ballot. Another machine obviously had trouble reading ballots and a third machine I do not recall exactly but I think it was also some mechanical failure. In all cases it was obvious that the machines were not operating. I mean paper jams are easily observed. In the case where the machine would not accept ballots well it just would not accept ballots. I think that in general it would be an excellent policy to examine forensically any machine that failed during an election.

Dori Smith: The State revised its voting machine security protocols for 2007 once. I know after the primary for the state and municipal and then just before that race last year the last election of 2007 they did revise those. Are they going to be turning to you for more assistance in revising them again before the primary do you know?

Alex Shvartsman: Absolutely we are in fact discussing how to revise the post election hand counted audit. We have also examined the data from the hand counted audit from November and it is quite obvious that the poll workers completely misunderstood the procedure for hand counting during the audits and in at least 20% of the returns the data was simply wrong. For example, in one case poll workers reported minus three ambiguous votes. Now they probably just subtracted hand counted votes from machine counted votes and obtained minus three. In other words they did not actually find any minus three ambiguous votes. So the post election hand count and audit procedures are being revised right now. I’m not certain they will be in place for the upcoming election, the primary, but they are being continuously revised. We are also thinking about how to insure that the post election memory card audit hits more of the districts where the hand counted audit is performed. For example, one way to do it is to require that we examine memory cards for all districts that are audited in the post election process.

Dori Smith: I think one of the questions here again is about the presence of LHS because they have provided the training so they are a layer, a hands on layer informing or helping to inform these poll workers but also they are available at the polls. So it seems every time I’m asking a question about a problem the person I’m speaking with tells me that they basically just turned to them. So is that part of the problem? Can Connectict pull off an election without them at this point? Or do we have to revise that whole dependency relationship where we set up a newly trained newly skilled team under lets say a whole new division with oversight from a specially trained board like the Voting Technology Research Board like we use to have.

Alex Shvartsman: I think that in principle this is not a bad idea. I think having a very strong dependence on a vendor is not beneficial to our state in the long run. I think that both poll workers and the technical staff and SOTS office people should eventually become less dependent on LHS in this case and develop more in house expertise. I know that there were proposals coming not only from Connecticut but from other states is that perhaps states themselves should assume responsibility for programming the memory cards. I think that alone does not solve the problem because you would still have to have an independent body that oversees the programming of the memory cards. So you always have to have one more organization to oversee the organization that actually does the programming.

Dori Smith: You’re listening to Talk Nation Radio, an interview with Professor Alexander A. Shvartsman about the University of Connecticut’s research into the memory cards for the Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan voting machines in use in Connecticut. In New Canaan, two registrars and the moderator, have agreed that their turning over of responsibilities to an LHS technician fell outside of the voting machine security protocol provided by the Secretary of State. There are mixed reports at this point about whether or not a memory card was handled but when the machine stopped working New Canaan went to a back up machine; then LHS turned the machine off and on again so it came back on line. So they retired the back up machine and went to the machine that had been in use. This protocol more or less made up on the spot. I asked Professor Shvartsman to comment on what we had learned.

Alex Shvartsman: This is I think is unacceptable. Currently I know that there are instructions that require that each individual handling of the memory card has to be carefully logged and certainly if that was the case somebody should be able to examine the log and see what occurred there. Of course there is always human error, people during an election possibly will forget to log some of these events. But what you are describing, I mean this should never occur, this should not be allowed. And the beauty of the optical scan ballots is that if the machine fails during an election the election can still go on. You keep collecting the ballots and you get a new machine that is known to be good and you get a new card that’s known to be good and you run the cards through the machine. It’s that simple.

Dori Smith: That’s the protocol anyway.
Alex Shvartsman: Yeah.

Dori Smith: You mentioned reports. Wouldn’t it be the case that the Secretary of the State’s office would get an immediate report about something like that? (The SOTS was not contacted during the voting machine failure in New Canaan during the 2007 State and Municipal Election.)

Alex Shvartsman: I would hope so. I don’t know. I know that that it is hard for LHS to work in Connecticut. I know that they are not use to this. And I have attended meetings with them and they keep saying that well in other states we just help people out and there are never any problems. We don’t understand why you do not want our help in Connecticut but well if you don’t we won’t help you. But I think it’s hard for LHS to assume this hands off observation role. And it is possible, again I do not have any of the reports, I’m not involved in the elections themselves. But it is possible that LHS does not adhere to the protocol in Connecticut.

Dori Smith: If that’s the case and I think there were some violations of the protocol clearly according to this registrar that I spoke with George Cody. If that’s the case, LHS violated the protocols in 2006 and they admitted it now here we have them again making the decision to turn a machine off, turn it back on again, then go ahead and use it during the election when it powered back on. All of this doesn’t seem to be changing. Can the State of Connecticut figure out a way at this point to let them go and step in here and train an emergency crew to do a better job or is there something else we can do? One of the professors I spoke with Rebecca Mercuri. She testified here in the State of Connecticut recommending these machines, saying at least they have a paper ballot but she is now saying maybe implement a standard recount policy automatically for every election and just go ahead and recount the ballots every time? (Stay tuned for our interview with voting machine expert Rebecca Mercuri coming up next week.)

Alex Shvartsman: Well it’s an immense effort to do that. I think as we have witnessed with audits themselves there is a lot of human error and honestly it is not clear to me that having hand counted elections is a solution necessarily. There is the fatigue people want to go home I know that one of the, I suspect one of the reasons audits are sometimes inaccurately done is because people are simply tired after an election and it is hard work. So but having a combination of hand counted recounts and hand counted audits and the machine count at the initial election is a sensible approach. Lifting the roles of the vendor and requiring the vendors to abide by the procedures established by the state, well it has to be enforced. I do not know how to do that exactly but I certainly agree with you on that.

Dori Smith: I want to turn to New Hamsphire briefly. We called City Clerks there just after the Presidential Primary. They’re in charge of the elections there and they said LHS did come out and make mid election repairs to machines. During set up there were memory card changes, some memory cards failed during the election and LHS routinely does change memory cards during elections up there or help at least with that process. And in one case LHS came out and replaced a chip and reader in a machine just a week before the election. Now are these memory card swaps, this chip and reader, are these of serious concern?

Alex Shvartsman: It’s at best a sloppy practice and at worst certainly it’s certainly risky. We do not know what parts
go into the machines we do not know how it may alter the behavior of the machines, after all these are computer driven devices and firmware running on the machine can completely alter the behavior of the machine even though physically it appears to be the same. I think any such practices should be strictly disallowed and the vendor should be limited to just the basic instructions for example how to turn the machine on, if a ballot is stuck half way through, and maybe removing it, but opening machines during elections, swapping cards during elections, has to be strictly forbidden and I don’t think any state should
be allowing that.

Dori Smith: LHS has this great reputation you know among stressed out poll workers because they come and fix things. They make problems go away. But are you saying that the price is too high to pay.

Alex Shvartsman: LHS maintains this view as well is that out of state finds deep involvement of LHS helpful. I think that certainly on the surface it is helpful but I think that when the integrity of the election is at stake through innocent mistakes for through any other error then this simply should not be allowed. When the cards are swapped in optical scans how do we even know that this card corresponds to this election? Maybe it corresponds to last year’s election? When the chain of custody is broken then the value of the cards is compromised.

Dori Smith: One of the strangest aspects to my research on New Hampshire came up when I spoke with Jim Kennedy, an Assistant Secretary of State, and he said he through memory cards wouldn’t be swapped by LHS because under state and federal law they have to be retained for post election analysis. Actually, there are a variety of officials saying different things there about that and it seems New Hampshire cities handle most of the rules making and they don’t hang on to the cards, they rush them back to LHS for re programming after an election for use in other elections. So it’s kind of chaos isn’t it as far as that goes we can talk about how to keep these safe but practice is a different matter isn’t it?

Alex Shvartsman: Yes I agree. I firmly believe we must continue with memory card audits in general and the extent of the audits has to be limited only by what is sensible. I know that following an election people rush to send their cards to LHS because LHS needs them to start programming the next election. This is the case in Connecticut where we have an election coming up in a very few days, a primary coming up in a very few days, and SOTS, the Secretary of the State’s personnel, hand carried cards to us for post election audits to expedite this process. So I know there is this issue. Now one of the problems is that the memory cards are expensive. They are $250 a card so buying replacement cards for hundreds of machines is expensive so that I suspect is part of the issue.

Dori Smith: When you do your studies now what kinds of things are most important for the candidates to know and for voters to know in terms of the way this machine has sensitive operations. Just mention what the GEMS is in a voting machine and what your reports have said about that and also what your reports have said about the specific machines in Connecticut and what types of things voters can do if they want to ask questions and promote safe and accurate elections in their area, how could they participate by enthusiastically helping at the polls and getting to know the state protocols and understanding these machines?

Alex Shvartsman: Well starting with the comment on how could people participate I think that there are many dedicated volunteers working in poll places and I think if people volunteer and show interest through that it will certainly relieve the pressure on the poll workers because they are usually understaffed I understand. Going back to the technology well there are two components in the election system used in Connecticut, GEMS, the election management system that is used to design the ballots and design the program that drives optical scan machines during the election and to program the memory cards. And the second component of course is the optical scan itself that scans voter marked ballots and produces counts. As you know through our previous work and through the work of our colleagues and predecessors in this area, memory cards, whether they are found outside of an optical scan machine or within the optical scan machine are vulnerable to tampering if the machines are left, or the cards, are left unattended for a relatively brief period of time. In our own study we were able to tamper with the programs in the memory cards in under five minutes. So given unobserved access to an optical scan machine with the memory card in it we can alter its behavior. For example, we can force it to shift votes from one candidate to another. That takes minutes. So it is extremely important to maintain a very strict chain of custody for both the memory cards and for the optical scan machines. This is why it is so important that formal definitions are given to the poll workers for how to conduct an election and who is allowed to touch the machines, what are you allowed to do with the machines and what happens if the machine fails or if the memory card fails. I think that vigilance and diligence is an absolute necessity to ensure a vote that has integrity and security.

Dori Smith: What about the problems with these machines that variations between the hand versus machine counts continue to be found. How do we deal with that? What’s in place to address that problem?

Alex Shvartsman: So I think this is a phenomenon that does not entirely depend on the technology. I know that we have seen some sample ballots that are incorrectly marked. For example instead of filling in an oval a voter would put a check mark or a cross through the bubble, through the oval, and how will the machine count these we don’t know. There are also certain examples where a voter would cross out very deliberately all of the candidates they do not want to vote for. Chances are if there are marks inside the oval this will be detected as a vote for the candidate even though the voter intent was to cross out that bubble. So I believe there will always be some discrepancy due to incorrectly marked ballots and due to voters simply not doing what they intended. We are now looking at the post election hand counted audit and as I mentioned already in our discussion it is obvious to me that the poll workers who did the audit either did not understand the instructions or certainly they did not in all cases count votes correctly. As I mentioned already in one case there is a negative count for ambiguous votes. So it is obvious to me that it is important to refine the procedures given to people both doing legal recounts and also post election hand counted audits. So I think we are still early in this process, it is very difficult to ascribe meaning to these discrepancies. So I think we need to do more work and that’s what we are trying to do with each election in the State of Connecticut.

Dori Smith: Professor Shvartsman finally as you work on all of these issues for the State of Connecticut under contract with the State of Connecticut are you finding that your students are nowo taking an interest in elections and voting machine issues?

Alex Shvartsman: Oh I think both the faculty and the students are very enthused about this project. I mean most of our work and certainly most of my research is very long term perhaps looking at perhaps ten to twenty years out and suddenly to be able to do something that impacts us very very immediately is very rewarding. So I think the students are very enthused about it they put in very long hours doing these audits and willingly so. So yes of course.

Alex Shvartsman: Thank you so much for speaking with us again.

You are very welcome, nice talking to you Dori.

Professor Alex Shvartsman is team leader at the University of Connecticut’s Voter Center. You can find their reports online at the Voter Center of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. Listeners can learn more about problems with Connecticut voting machines at truevotect.org or ctvoterscount.org

Voting rights activists have issued calls for a state wide hand recount of the upcoming Presidential Primary race. For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. This program is produced at WHUS at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. WHUS.org to listen live Wed. at 5 PM. Talknationradio.org (or .com) for transcripts, audio, and discussions.

WHUS to listen live Wed. at 5 PM

Talk Nation Radio for January 24, 2008

Diebold’s Optical Scan Voting Machines in New Hampshire and Connecticut

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Produced by Dori Smith of WHUS in Storrs, CT at the University of Connecticut’s Radio for the People
TRT: 29:38
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport.org at this URL

Or try the
Archive.org

We discuss the way New Hampshire’s election and recount have been going and delve into voting machine security issues that cropped up in New Hampshire and CT. Featuring Brad Friedman of Bradblog.com, Luther Weeks of CTvoterscount.org, and Prof Alexander Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut’s Voting Research Team plus Nadia Hijab of the Institute for Palestinian Studies on events at Rafah crossing in context.

During the 2008 presidential primary, poll workers said they allowed staff working for LHS, the vendor for the voting machines the state uses, to make mid election repairs. Several City Clerks in NH agreed that they too would allow to change memory cards or perform other types of repairs. Brad Blog discusses the numbers and the shoddy way that paper ballots were transferred in a van in assorted boxes.

Professor Alexander Shvartsman on New Hampshire practices with the voting machines he is studying for security on behalf of the State of Connecticut. He looks at why it is a bad idea to allow the vendor to have access to voting machines during the election. See too half hour interview with Professor Alexander Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut Voting Research Team on latest research into memory cards used in Diebold’s AccuVote OS voting machines. Professor Shvartsman found some interesting problems including one ballot with 19 votes already on it and junk data. He also confirms our assertions about the vital need to strengthen CT voting security protocols.

In Connecticut Luther Weeks is spokesperson for group that looked into the audits of the 2007 State and Municipal vote. The report compiled by The Connecticut Post-Election Audit Coalition is sharply critical of the Connecticut audit process and has called for emergency changes. see: http://www.ctvoterscount.org/?p=133

Also Nadia Hijab of the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Washington D.C. talks about events in the Gaza Strip where tens of thousands of Palestinians poured through a breach in the wall separating the occupied territories from Egypt in the town of Rafah.
She discusses the way the media in the US has portrayed the event and looks at US policy in the region, the impact of Bush’s trip to the Occupied Territories of Palestine, and the problems of starvation and lack of electricity or other resources in Gaza.

http://www.whus.org
WHUS to listen Live Wed at 5 PM

You can write to Dori at talknationradio@gmail.com and do send along any information you would like to share about the nation’s voting machines.

KPFT Radio Talk Show Host Pokey Anderson interviews Dori Smith on The Monitor
Aired January 13, 2008

The Monitor is produced at KPFT Radio, Houston. Tune in at 6pm Central time every Sunday on 90.1FM in Houston, 89.5FM in Galveston or kpft.org on the web. You can stream the show from the KPFT site if you’re online during broadcast or you can download the MP3 to your favorite device and listen.

To review full transcript of this program go to VotersUnite! here or The Monitor web page here for this and other programming by Pokey Anderson and Mark Bebawi.

A statewide recount of the New Hampshire primary is been scheduled to begin on Wednesday, called for by Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich and little-known Republican candidate Albert Howard. One reason for the recount was the stunning reversal of expectations in NH. Polls, including even the Clinton campaign internal poll, showed Hillary Clinton coming in second to Barack Obama by margins ranging from 5 to 13%. Instead, Clinton tallied a 3% margin over Obama in NH. The pundits and pollsters were flummoxed, and since then have been turning themselves into pretzels to try to figure out what happened.

The Republican side had reporting anomalies:”Two hand count towns reported ‘zero’ votes for candidate Ron Paul to the media, even though they did have votes for him. The town of Sutton reported zero, but had 31 votes; the town of Greenville reported zero, but had 25 votes,” writes Bev Harris ”Red Flags over New Hampshire,” 1-12-08, BlackBoxVoting.org.

Yet in the corporate media, important questions are going unasked: Could the NH primary election tallies be wrong, rather than the polls?

A second intriguing question they’ve not asked is, Who has access to the voting machines in New Hampshire?

A third question has been raised by Bev Harris. Who prints the paper ballots in NH, and were there extra ballots printed?

A fourth question is, should election training, programming, troubleshooting, and more be controlled by companies rather than election officials?

A fifth question has been answered: Was there ever criminal behavior in elections in New Hampshire? Two top people in the chain of Republican command were convicted for phone-jamming in a tight Senate race there in 2002: former executive director of the NH Republican Party Chuck McGee, and James Tobin, the former regional director for both the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. After a $6 million defense of Tobin and the GOP, paid for by the GOP, his conviction was recently remanded on appeal. Still, there’s been no explanation of the phone records introduced at Tobin’s trial showing he made two dozen calls to the White House political office within three days around Election Day 2002, as the phone-jamming operation was finalized, carried out and abruptly shut down. See story here

Pokey Anderson’s guest tonight is Dori Smith, who has been investigating election systems for over a year. Her new article up at BradBlog today investigates the New Hampshire primary and problems with voting machines. Her home state of Connecticut has just started using the same machines, Diebold (now called Premier) AccuVote Optical Scan machines. Dori’s 2006 and 2007 investigation has resulted in an investigation into violations of Connecticut voting regulations which is ongoing. She produces a wide-ranging weekly radio show, Talk Nation Radio at WHUS in Connecticut, and also has produced for Pacifica.

Dori has looked into the little-known private vendor that supplies, programs and repairs voting equipment in New England; LHS Associates. LHS provides Diebold optical scan machines in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and over 80% of New Hampshire. LHS has unfettered access to voting machines before elections. Sometimes, LHS even replaces memory cards DURING an election. Memory cards are the crucial brains of the scanning/counting machine.

It was a Diebold optical scan machine that Harri Hursti famously hacked without even entering the room, using a programmed memory card, in front of Leon County, Florida election official Ion Sancho. Both Hursti and Sancho have been on The Monitor; Hursti told us that there is an executable program in the memory card, and that “once you change that program, you can do a lot of other stuff. … Since that same program will report your totals when you close the polls, once you control the program, the totals will be exactly what you want them to be. “ A memory card can be preloaded with votes or negative votes that could change the outcome. It could be programmed to credit one candidate for another’s votes, or countless other tricks. (See the Hursti hack at http://youtube.com/watch?v=J36Jfkxd1vA )

In a recorded interview with Dori Smith in 2006, LHS’s director of Sales and Marketing Ken Hajjar admitted that LHS routinely replaces voting machines, and the crucial memory cards, during elections.

Though such replacements go against strict laws in Connecticut, Ken Hajjar told her, “I mean, I don’t pay attention to every little law. It’s just, it’s up to the Registrars. All we are is a support organization on Election Day.” He described keeping three memory cards in the trunk of his car during elections and, in the event they had to be used, he argued, the chain of custody issues wouldn’t matter since, “once you run the [pre-election] test deck through, you’re golden.”

“We would have a whole bunch of machines in the trunk in the car and we hope the phone doesn’t ring, but if it does somebody tells us where to go, we replace the machine and then we go on our merry way,” said Hajjar. Hajjar has recently been discovered to have a 1990 conviction for narcotics trafficking.

Dori recently spoke with Town Clerk Linda Hartson of Exeter, NH. In Exeter at least, a memory card failure on Election Day could very well result in a switch being made by LHS.

Dori Smith: Let’s say the back up would fail what would they do?

Exeter, NH Town Clerk Hartson: LHS provides back up memory cards. But if a memory card failure were to occur during the election the vendor would arrive with another memory card. This is from LHS that I’m getting them and they are providing the back up. If they bring you another one, you just put it in. There’s no problem.

Smith: And it wouldn’t be a problem if that happened during the election?

Hartson: Nope nope nope nope. Because you could run the report off the machine and then just put in the new memory card and it would keep on going. That’s my understanding.

But, you don’t have to be an election vendor — an average person with $12 worth of tools and a little time alone with a Diebold opscan machine could remove the memory card, too. Which raises the big question … just how secure, accountable and transparent are elections in America?

“Diebold Voting Machine Failures Found Across State During New Hampshire Primary:
Election Officials Confirm that Employees from LHS Associates, Diebold’s Sole Programmer, Vendor, and Service Provider in NH, Were Allowed to Access Vulnerable Optical-Scan Systems Throughout Election Day”
January 12, 2008 by Dori Smith
BRAD BLOG
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5553

“Diebold Optical-Scan Failures Reported in Florida May be Affecting Connecticut As Well:
Faulty Memory Card Connectors, Undisclosed by the Company or the EAC, Discovered in Recent Election” November 20, 2007 by Dori Smith Brad Blog http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5320

Talk Nation Radio for January 16, 2008
Gareth Porter discusses US Policy toward Iran and Iraq

Produced by Dori Smith
TRT:29:05
Download at Pacifica’s audioport here
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Listen to the broadcast here

Gareth Porter believes US attack on Iran is off but says the Israelis may still do it. He discusses what he has learned about the region. In previous programs International Law expert Francis A. Boyle argued US may be planning an attack and Bush trying to shore up support for that in Middle East. Did that fail? We will be looking into that during upcoming broadcasts.

The Historian and national security expert talks about what really happened in the Strait of Hormuz, assessing the Pentagon version and reviewing media accounts primarily on CNN. Then we look at US policy in the region, Saudi support for Iraqi Sunnis who were fighting Al Qaeda, the US misrepresenting the success of the surge policy in Iraq.

The Bush and Olmert administrations continue to saber rattle towards Iran and the media has been making it sound as if we are on the brink of war. Yet, just this morning NPR [Gates: No Immediate Military Threat from Iran, See this link http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=3] aired their interview with Deputy Director of Defense Robert Gates. He has downgraded Iran from a “threat” to a “concern” he said, admitting that Iran poses no military threat to US forces. Prior to these statements Gareth Porter explained the strange history of statements coming from the US Military commanders in the region including those who sourced CNN on the Strait of Hormuz incident.

Are we at war or is this politics? In one sense the bombing of Iraq under “operation phantom phoenix” and the dropping of some 40,000 pounds of bombs in 10 minutes, may have been characterized in such a way that it was propagandized. Yet, Porter argues it may also have been a matter of the US Military doing what it does…using a military response.

He helps us try to understand the shifting and volatile US policy initiative in the Middle East.

From Intro: On January 12th Bahrain time, US naval ships encountered much smaller Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, a water way that is key to oil trade in the Middle East. CNN was soon falsely conveying information about urgent danger to US forces aboard war ships, reporting that acts of war nearly occurred between Iranian and US naval forces. Historian and national security policy analyst Gareth Porter joins us to talk about what really happened and discuss foreign policy in Iraq as well. His latest book is, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.”

His recent articles about US policy in the Middle East have helped debunk one lie after about the threat posed by Iran through weapons of mass destruction and Iranian efforts in Iraq. His reports have appeared in Inter Press Service, Global research, the American prospect, and other publications. His November 10th story was titled, How Cheney Cooked the Intelligence on Iran. Prior to that he wrote of tensions between the White House and top military officials such as Admiral William Fallon, who was at one time George Bush’s nominee to head the Central Command (CENTCOM). Fallon was against the present US naval build up in the Persian gulf.

In his August 2007 story, The Iran Attack That Wasn’t Gareth Porter described how US reporters trumped up a story about Iranians killing Americans in Iraq. His report in Inter Press January 11th was titled, Iran: Bush’s Tonkin Gulf Tale Unravels. The reference is to the gulf of Tonkin incident, a similarly exaggerated encounter said to have helped justify US air strikes and an invasion of Indochina during the 1960s. Gareth Porter is an expert on Vietnam history and has been tracking similarities in us policy in the middle east.

More info.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10089.html

http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=11926

Listen to Gareth Porter on Democracy Now at this web page. See transcript too

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gareth-porter/cheney-lieberman-and-ira_b_60705.html

Burnt Offering
How a 2003 secret overture from Tehran might have led to a deal on Iran’s nuclear capacity — if the Bush administration hadn’t rebuffed it. Gareth Porter | May 21, 2006

Transcript of Talk Nation Radio interview with John Silvestro

“You have employees in Connecticut who were doing recounts and as a matter of fact a couple of the people who were there were not even in Connecticut for the election. They were people who were in other states for the election in November and because of the resources we had uh had to be dispatched to Connecticut or the recount at the request of the Secretary of State OK? So there were people who may have been confused about protocols between New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. I mean I do support you know five states and they may have spoken to you about the average or the way things are done in other states which is different than the way it’s done in Connecticut. So I mean it’s not like its a uniform protocol between all of the states. Some of the states allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states do not allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states allow their local people on site to open the ballot box. Other states do not allow them to open the ballot box without calling in to the Secretary of State’s office first. So I mean there’s different protocols. We are allowed in New Hampshire, you know, in New Hampshire to do one thing that we are not allowed to do in Massachusetts. We are allowed to do some things in Massachusetts we are not allowed to do in New Hampshire”.

In August of 2007, just prior to a meeting between LHS President John Silvestro and Connecticut voting officials within the Secretary of the State’s office we phoned Silvestro to ask him about violations of CT election law.

Our call was made from Radio Station WHUS at the University of Connecticut where the computer science department has been looking into problems with the Diebold AccuVote Optical Scan Voting machines Silvestro conveyed to the state as vendor for Premier Election Solutions, a subsidiary of Diebold.

This is Dori Smith. I’m a radio reporter and I’ve been doing a story about the new voting machines that the state will be using in upcoming elections provided by LHS.

John Silvestro: Mhmmm.

Dori Smith: I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions. We’ve been doing reports on this and would like to share your thoughts with our listeners.

John Silvestro: Sure.

Dori Smith: OK. Now I’m taping is that all right?

John Silvestro: Well I’d rather do this in person as opposed to on the telephone.

Dori Smith: Well I mean you have the right to tell me that something is off the record and it will be so.

John Silvestro: OK.

Dori Smith: Now we are working on a story that has to do with both the machine technology and protocols for using it and we’ve been in touch with the University of Connecticut’s Professor Alexander Shvartsman who talked with us about all that. I just wanted to go over with you the role first that LHS might play in the upcoming elections in the State of Connecticut. I know some of your staff played a role last time.

John Silvestro: Let me ask you a question. I saw that you sent an email off to Leslie Mara (Deputy Secretary of State) and rather than supersede your questions to Leslie and me answer them I would like I guess seeing as Leslie is the contact person in Connecticut at in the Secretary of State’s office. You kind of asked her the questions and now you are asking me the same questions as opposed to getting her to get my answers from me and routing them to you.

Dori Smith: I think that’s one way of looking at it. When did you get a copy of my letter to her?

John Silvestro: Well you sent a letter asking questions about the voting equipment and you know I don’t have a problem. It’s just that there is a protocol on how they should be responded to as opposed to arbitrarily me answering them when you asked her those.

Dori Smith: Well I must say that your company granted me interviews in the past.

John Silvestro: Yeah and I’ll tell you what LHS does. LHS is a, we are a service provider, that’s what we do. We provide services and the service we provide mainly is to municipalities. We do a number of things. We started out doing (cox?)…billing many years ago and then we got away from cox billing and we started doing census processing in Massachusetts. And that led into voter registration back computers were not readily accessible. We’ve been in business since 1972 I believe, we’re in our 35th year, and to a progression of what we were doing. We ended up in the election services business. We started selling optical scan machines in New England in 1985. Since 1985 we’ve just been selling optical scans. We at first were a representative of a company called Business Records Corporate which currently I guess would have morphed into ESS.

We were a distributor for Sequoia Pacifica which now is Sequoia Voting Systems and we were a distributor for them for I don’t know six or seven years, in the punch card business. And then in 1991 we signed on with global election systems and have been selling the Accuvote since 1992 and we currently have, I’m going to say approximately 600 cities, towns, school districts, unions, who use our services and our services are to code the memory cards and we provide ballots. We also provide the support services of repairing equipment if the equipment malfunctions. And that’s kind of like what we do and that’s what election day is all about here.

All we do is we do the coding and prepare the memory cards. We have nothing to do with the pre-election testing. That’s all the responsibility of the local election officials be it the registrars or the town clerks in Connecticut. We print the ballots and we send those off and we have nothing to do then with the pre-election testing. We don’t pre code ballots to a predetermined count or anything like that. They are all blank.

The clerks or the registrars in Connecticut then mark up the ballots and do logic and accuracy testing to insure that the equipment is performing the way it should and the logic and accuracy test is to mark the ballots, hand count them, put them through the machine in all different variations, face up, face down, head first, foot first; print the results and then validate them to the hand count. Once you have done that, and that’s a prescribed protocol by the Secretary of State’s office. Once you have done that you seal the memory card in the machine and then you seal the machine in the bag. So you put the two zipper ends together which have grommet holes in them and then you put a number seal and that’s prescribed with the recommendations from Professor Shvartsman from the University of Connecticut.

Dori Smith: I guess the question we’ve been raising has to do with what if something goes wrong, you know during an election or any other procedure having to do with elections where…

John Silvestro: …Yeah but the beauty of the optical scan machine I mean from the perspective of what is, you know, what does an optical scan machine do for you that you don’t get in any other thing. Well an optical scan machine is just an automated way of hand counting paper ballots. And the beauty of the optical scan machine is that you have the paper ballots in the ballot box and at any time you can go back and recreate the election from the first voter who showed up at six in the morning to the last voter who showed up at eight o’clock at night. You have checks and balances through the system of the check in total, the check out total, the number of ballots used, and the number of ballots that are deposited through the scanner which is you know a number that comes up. Now you know that being said these are hardware, they are equipment; there are things that happen on election day. And throughout twenty years of doing this I mean we’ve probably encountered just about every situation that you can come up with. Every state has its different set of protocols. What do you do when something happens, if the machine stops taking ballots. Some states allow us you know as a service to bring a back up piece of equipment to the site, and this saves the communities money because they don’t have to buy their own back up equipment. They take the memory cards with the number of ballots that were cast through it, and you have to understand the whole process. The whole process of what goes on in a machine, and you know I’m not a technical person by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m not a computer science expert. I’m the President of a computer services company that provides services.

We don’t do software development here? None of my employees have computer science degrees, graduates, graduate students or anything like that. We’re just people who do a job based on a software that we have that allows us to code an election and create that coding on a memory card. And it’s really a fill in the blanks. What’s the date of the election, what type of an election is it, what’s the ratio coding, what are the names of the people, and you fill in the blanks and the number to vote for, number of write ins. It’s a parameter driven software that the end result is you create a memory card which then has to match the configuration of the ballots and count. So if you look at an optical scan system you need a memory device, whether it be a memory card or a memory pack. You need an optical scan machine which can read ballots. You need a ballot box to deposit the ballots in and you need the ballots themselves.

Now the memory card is no good without the machine. The ballot box is no good without the machine and the memory card. And the machine is no good without either one. The only thing that’s good through the whole process which stands unto itself is the ballots. The ballots can run an election with or without a machine. So that being said we do encounter a lot of things. Some states do allow us to, you know if a memory card has a malfunction on election day where it just won’t take any ballots and it just stops, some states allow us to recreate from the coded data base a memory card, take it to the jurisdiction, it requires the jurisdiction to run a pre-election logic and accuracy test again on that memory card; and once it passes that logic and accuracy test it’s allowed to be put in the field. All of those jurisdictions, whether it’s Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Massachusetts or Connecticut; nothing can be done without talking to the Secretary of State’s office. So they are in the loop and they know what’s going on throughout the day.

Dori Smith: Was that the case in 2006 as well?

John Silvestro: Yes. I was actually the person who was the coverage person in Middletown and I was in contact with the project manager at the Secretary of State’s office all day.

Dori Smith: So how many, I know there was a memory card replacement made in Montville and that’s because the one failed in the machine and then one failed that was on site and so LHS on site in Montville provided one according to the moderator there. And I just wondered, first of all…

John Silvestro: That was during the recount wasn’t it? That wasn’t on election day.

Dori Smith: Yeah, so you are saying…

John Silvestro: That wasn’t election day, that was just the recount. That wasn’t election day. That was the recount. I mean I think you know I’ve read some of your reports and I think you are a little confused about what went on on election day versus what happened on election day.

Dori Smith: No I don’t think so sir. I mean I don’t think I’m confused. I will say that when you do a recount you are still waiting for an election result…

John Silvestro: No no no…

Dori Smith: You are still under an election condition.

John Silvestro: No I understand that, I understand that. And you know I’m not confronting you and please don’t get defensive.

Dori Smith: No I’m not defensive but I’m protecting my integrity as a reporter and I spent lengthy time with your representatives getting their point of view and that’s what I’m doing in this case too. I just wondered, you said you were in touch with the Secretary of State’s office so were you in touch with the Secretary of State’s office prior to that switch that was made in Montville?

John Silvestro: I was not but I was told that the Secretary of State was informed (verify) at the count or at the time. (We could not verify that LHS staff called Connecticut officials to speak with the Secretary of the State or her Deputy but they might have spoken with others working on behalf of the State of Connecticut.)

Dori Smith: OK.

John Silvestro: That’s what I was told so I…

Dori Smith: And how many of those had to be made, I mean during the recount or the election?

John Silvestro: If it happened in Montville then it’s the only one…I believe..no there was another situation where a second memory card was used but I don’t remember which town it was in and I remember reading the report about it because the, during the recount when they were putting the ballots through the machine they dropped a patch of ballots and they fell into the counted bucket as opposed to the uncounted bucket and they didn’t know what had been through the machine and what didn’t so rather than zero out that memory card and start again they started with a new memory card.

Dori Smith: OK, well anything that you could provide me with. I can give you my address and anything you can provide me with as far as records on this would be greatly appreciated because what we are trying to do is help voters maintain some transparency about elections. And obviously this is because of what has happened in not just Connecticut but in various settings all over the country.

John Silvestro: You know and I agree with that and one of the things that I agree with wholeheartedly and I’ve been very encouraged by the State of Connecticut doing it. I reinforce any Secretary of State who does it. I think the random auditing of ballots is a superior method of instilling voter confidence whether it’s 2% in Vermont or 10% in Connecticut and you know we are going to have some meetings prior to the September and November elections to put together a formalized plan for how we process, handle, any unforeseen circumstances that arise on election day and we will try to think of every one of them. But you know I think Connecticut has basically taken the lead, and I mean they are not the only ones, but they have actually passed legislation which is ahead of the Holt Bill, whether you agree with the Holt Bill and all of it’s components or you don’t, the Holt Bill does contain a post election audit piece that I think needs to be done. I mean it just needs to be done and I think the industry needs it as far as the people who are in the business like myself and I think the voters need it and you know I think it really will help provide that level of confidence in no matter which voting machine or system you are using and the people who are running your elections.

Dori Smith: Mr. Silvestro can I ask a question too, I know as you are aware probably, Professor Shvartsman and others at Uconn have just released their report on Diebold’s machine. Of course the last time we spoke with members of your staff it was because of their report on the memory cards as the vulnerability, the chief vulnerability that they could identify with the AccuVote machine made by Diebold, (in use in 25 towns in Connecticut during 2006) but their most recent report is about another machine that I believe you provide?

John Silvestro: No I don’t sell those. I mean Diebold does but I don’t.

Dori Smith: Oh. OK. I just.

John Silvestro: I have never sold a TSX machine or a touch screen machine in our existence as a company. We don’t sell them. We could have. But we have not sold one. We don’t support any. You know we run, occasionally we will do a union election if someone would give them a choice of whether they want paper ballots or electronic but there are no touch screen machines that LHS supports used in the field for municipal elections.

Dori Smith: Now you know when you go to your web site there is a product list. It says, ‘chose a product’ OK?

John Silvestro: Mmhmm.

Dori Smith: …And there is a drop down list and the second…

John Silvestro: We sell them. But we have never sold one.

Dori Smith: OK. So it says Accuvote TSX?

John Silvestro: Right. We have them available for sale but they are not certified in any state in our region so we can’t sell them.

Dori Smith: I see.

John Silvestro: And I mean I can tell you. You know I mean what I can tell you is a few other things, I can tell you about the initial report about the Accuvote OS and I can tell you about what is available today versus what was provided two years ago or eighteen months ago or whenever it was when we took it down to Uconn. I mean there is a new certified version of the software and firmware which has a digitally signed encrypted memory card on the Accuvote OS and Professor Shvartsman will reinforce this. They have that. They are doing their research on it. And hopefully we think it will pass, hopefully it will pass muster with them and then that will be installed in the machines in Connecticut. But you know that’s down the road.

Dori Smith: I see. And as far as the TSX you, do you have any plans to discontinue selling it?

John Silvestro: No. I mean I can’t sell it if nobody certifies it in New England. It’s really, I’m a Diebold dealer and it’s a Diebold product but I can’t sell it unless somebody certifies it and Massachusetts has not. Actually they conditionally certified it but I don’t think I’m going to sell any because everybody purchased the Automark? And Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have not certified it and Connecticut didn’t. I can’t see myself selling any.

Dori Smith: You say you are a Diebold dealer. The contract that Connecticut wrote. I guess it’s like a twenty year contract?
That’s with Diebold?

John Silvestro: That’s correct.

Dori Smith: And what kind of contract do they have with LHS. Is it going to be to help on site again?

John Silvestro: LHS doesn’t really help on site. In the contract that the state signed with Diebold there is a requirement for us to train what use to be, every town needs to have an on site coverage person for two elections. OK? And when we do the training we actually, when we did the training last year and its in the training material, I mean it actually says that although you are being reimbursed for your time by LHS Associates you are actually an employee of the registrar. They are not really our employees. They are to report at 6:00 o’clock in the morning and they are to leave when the registrars tell them it’s OK to go home. And for the entire day they work at the discretion of the registrars. They are under their direction. If there is a problem, and they are trained on how to solve minor problems that they don’t know how to solve or even if they do know how to solve; all problems have to be called in so we can keep a record and a log of what’s going on. Any issues that come up. Broken locks. You know anything that happens. And their job really is to serve at the direction of the registrars. So although they are reimbursed that’s part of the contract? (Funding for these employees comes through the LHS contract with Connecticut voters. There are in fact some local people being trained by LHS who may wind up working in various towns and they could be independent of LHS in the future.)

Now most of the people who worked last November were actually residents of Connecticut, citizens of Connecticut, there were, I think there when I looked at the list there was, during the election not the recounts, during the actual election day there were twenty five people and I think five of them were employees of LHS and twenty of them are actually Connecticut residents who we had, either former mechanics in the towns they came from where they use to maintain the lever machines and their names were given to us by the registrars when we trained them on how to handle and how to you know put ribbons in and how to take out the paper tapes, change the paper tapes when printing the reports, how the ballot boxes work, how the connections work to separate the write ins; we gave them a two and a half hour training session at the State House lobby room, not lobby room I think the Legislative Office Building.

And you know gave them all of that stuff and sent them on their way and they called in the morning when they got there and they called in at night when they went home and there were a number of them that we never heard from throughout the day because there were no issues in their locations. In some of them there were.

Dori Smith: Now did you guys provide training for election procedures in Connecticut after that?

John Silvestro: After that?

Dori Smith: I mean have…

John Silvestro: Well there is more training coming up, there is more training scheduled.

Dori Smith: I see.

John Silvestro: For the September and November elections, municipal elections, there is more training being scheduled as we speak.

Dori Smith: Now when, I know that LHS was represented at the audit that was held at 2006?

John Silvestro: Mmhmm. .I don’t know if we were there. I don’t believe so. We had nothing to do with the audit.

Dori Smith: Well someone told me that there were LHS people there. I just wondered if they were like being asked questions or if they were working again for the state?

John Silvestro: No they were not working. They weren’t. As a matter of fact for the recount we were not working for the state. We were asked to attend the recount, you know having people at the recount is not part of the contract. It was done because we were requested to please provide somebody because it’s the first time we’ve gone through this. So we didn’t charge anybody for that. We did it because we felt that the state requested it and we responded and said we would. That’s the only reason people were there was to answer questions.

Dori Smith: Now could you sell, like if someone for example, wanted to look at a machine, could you sell them one of Diebold’s voting machines?

John Silvestro: No.

Dori Smith: They have to be sold to a state official?

John Silvestro: They have to be sold to a municipality that’s licensed.

Dori Smith: I see. Has it made you wonder about, I mean you say you still have the TSX available were it certified federally and also… it is federally certified right?

John Silvestro: Yes it is.

Dori Smith: So then it would have to be certified in each state, um if I understand correctly the reason that Connecticut’s computer scientists found these flaws had to do with the fact that that particular machine was submitted for as part of an official process of legal procurement?

John Silvestro: There was an ADA component of the RFP to provide handicapped accessible voting equipment. Specifically visually impaired voters would be allowed to vote from an audio ballot that was supplied as the response to that request.

Dori Smith: So that was a consideration as an additional machine that was available?

John Silvestro: It was.

Dori Smith: Oh OK. Now again given that…

John Silvestro: The state chose the IBS voting system which is the fax back voting system. That’s what they chose in replacement to that.

Dori Smith: It’s able to be faxed?

John Silvestro: Do you know what the IBS voting system is?

Dori Smith: No I don’t.

John Silvestro: Well, I mean, the State of Connecticut has a telephone voting system that they use for visually impaired voters and handicapped voters at the polling place and I think you should call them and ask them about that because I didn’t provide it.

Dori Smith: I see, OK fair enough. Well I just wondered, overall are you satisfied with Diebold’s product at this point?

John Silvestro: Well I have, I am, I am very satisfied with their product. I have as a company we’ve been doing this for fifteen or sixteen years. We have had I’m going to guess somewhere in the vicinity of twelve to eighteen hundred recounts. We have had surprise audits. We had Ralph Nader in 2000 and I don’t remember if it was 2004 or 2000, I think it was 2004, actually pay the State of New Hampshire twelve thousand dollars to randomly select fifteen precincts that were using optical scan equipment and hand count the ballots; and after someone (seven?) canceled the recount because there were no changes. I mean I’ve had, you know, I’m very confident in the equipment. I you know thousands of re, thousands of re, at least a thousand recounts if not more. My own town uses it in Londonderry New Hampshire, and last year we had an election where two town counselors finished dead even on election day. Did a recount. Finished dead even on the recount. Did another recount and finished dead even on the recount and it was tossed, won by a toss up of a coin. So I mean I’ve seen it hundreds if not thousands of times and I have never seen a problem with optical scan voting from Global Election Systems slash Diebold Election Systems.

And I’ve you know again I haven’t had any experience with the TSX’s. I do know that, you probably won’t like this response but it’s true. You know all of the stuff that gets done by these, you know, by the computer scientists at colleges? It is legitimate, I mean obviously its done and I don’t believe that they would, you know stretch the truth. But it’s done in a controlled environment. It’s done in a closed room. The claim that software has not been seen and source code has not been seen is a fabrication.

When you go for federal certification though the EAC Federally Certified Labs you don’t supply compiled code you supply source code and it is reviewed by a number of people who can see it. And source code is also made available you know for review through that process and some states require source code to be provided as part of their certification versus some states do not. But the federal certification definitely requires source code and it is reviewed by independent people so you know I am not saying that post election audits should not happen, I’m I’m a big proponent of those because I think that’s what the industry needs to be able to put a lot of the stories that are kind of stretches and far reaching to rest and the only way you can do that is after the fact to go back through and say; if we find a discrepancy someone’s going to jail.

Dori Smith: Can I just ask about all that, um, the one thing that they did say is that you know a malicious insider would be the person they would worry the most about obviously. Now there’s only so many people who would be in that position to either work with the moderators or registrars or poll workers at any given time with this equipment. That would be either state people hired for the job or it would be in this case in 2006 it would be LHS staff people right?

John Silvestro: No because we don’t, we don’t have unfettered access to the equipment. All the access we have is in public view or in the view of the moderators or the registrars.

Dori Smith: But you had to be there because these folks didn’t really have a grasp of the technology and didn’t have technicians so…

John Silvestro: Well I mean there are things that you write up and the state wrote up for them. You know how are you going to recount the ballots when you do a recount, you are going to look at every ballot and you are going to feed every ballot that’s properly marked through the machine and the ones that are not properly marked by the voters you are going to put in a pile and you are going to take those and you are going to hand count them and that’s the process and the procedure for running a recount. And we had had other communities in the past run recounts without doing that process, with just taking all of the ballots and feeding them back through the machines.

Well you know when somebody mis-marks a ballot, puts an x in part of the oval instead of filling in the oval you know there are tolerances and the machine can read it in one direction and maybe not read that mark in another direction which is why you take those ballots to get a 100% accurate count. And you put them in a pile and you hand count them. So…

Dori Smith: Now that’s part of the protocol today and I guess what part of the effort you know to document all of this and again make it transparent is to make sure that protocols be set up that can last for decades and that the technology will be secure through all of that time. And again speaking as someone who could come in and let’s say bring a back up machine, bring a back up memory card, if that’s the vulnerability and you do have someone who wants to you know see let’s say a Republican in instead of a Democrat or vice versa then theoretically if you are talking about thousands of ballots and you are talking a protocol that could at any time in one town let’s say break down. I mean this is what we have seen and time and time again in Florida, in Ohio, and so on. So it is a fragile system. Let’s face it. That’s why we are having this conversation. And what I’m saying is if someone is bringing in this back up equipment, bringing in back up memory cards; yeah I mean you say that the card that they made a replacement used in the recount was coded for the town of Montville?

John Silvestro: I’m not quite sure which town it was. I saw it the other day but I don’t remember so I’m not going to, I don’t remember I really don’t.

Dori Smith: All right.

John Silvestro: If you knew me you would understand one of the things I’m very good with instances, but I’m not very good with names. Names are very difficult. I’m one of those people who can add up numbers in my head without a calculator but I am not (illegible) at remembering names.

Dori Smith: Chuckles. Well in any case I mean let’s just say if the technology is understood by someone who is bringing back up equipment and it’s not understood by the person who is there in particular, they have the same kind of problem, they understand theory and philosophy, that’s their specialty, but they don’t understand technology let’s say.

John Silvestro: Right.

Dori Smith: And they don’t know what this person is doing, and this person is putting a different machine, a different memory card….

John Silvestro: Right but the beauty of the system, the beauty of the election system; I’m not talking about Diebold, ES&S, I’m just talking about the system, and the system particularly in New England is the system here is not in control at a local level down to the point of districts or precinct. So unlike a lot of the other parts of the country where it’s county controlled and the data comes into a central location at the county and that’s where all of the results are, all of the totals and everything is printed, and you have a single point of failure because you follow everything from every precinct into this one place; as opposed to what we do here in New England which is by the precinct level or the district level and you produce totals at a district, precinct level, which are then put on the wall for public view and create an audit trail which allows you to track back the totals from that point back to the town clerks office, or the city clerk’s office; from there it goes to the Secretary of State. But totals are created and an audit trail is created all the way back to the Secretary of State’s office. So you know I mean when you talk recount, and I can’t think the recount was I think Congressional District 2? Is that what it was?

Dori Smith: Yes it was. The election was decided by less than 200 votes.

John Silvestro: Right. OK. But it was spread over I believe twenty, twelve towns, ten towns? I can’t remember how many towns there were total. But they were of the twenty five that used Optical Scan, I think it was ten Optical Scan towns and I don’t know how many of the other towns there were.

Dori Smith: Mmhmm. There were twenty five towns and ten of them were in the 2nd District is the way I recall it.

John Silvestro: And then there were you know there were other towns in the 2nd District that were using the lever machines.

Dori Smith: Well let’s say then hypothetically we are looking at a federal election run in the State of Connecticut OK? You know, you wouldn’t have to alter the vote by that much theoretically and unless someone recounts every single vote in the state by hand they might not pick up on a discrepancy that was actually intentionally caused let’s say by someone who made a switch here or there or changed a memory card or what have you?

John Silvestro: Right but you would have to have you know I mean again you can create audits for every situation. So let’s just say for the example that a memory card needed to be changed because both memory cards failed OK? And your choices were either A) create a new memory card, put it through the pre-election testing and put those ballots through or B) a hand count. And let’s just say you chose the replacement memory card. Then automatically in my mind that precinct should come into the post election audit OK? And that you know although you are going to select 10% that one precinct may end up being, and it should, end up being one of the automatic entries into that 10% post election audit. And that’s the beauty of post election audits is that you can take situations that arise on election day and say OK. We want to do 10% of 793 with whatever that comes to, 79 or let’s call it 80 precincts. But we had problems in precinct you know A, B, C and D or E and F and whatever. Eight precincts? Those eight are already included and the other 72 are going to be randomly withdrawn. And that’s how I believe you would do this. That’s how you insure that no matter what happens that post election audit would be used to tell who is ever doing the election, and I don’t care if it’s LHS, I don’t care who it is, that at the end of the day we are going to make sure there was no, you know, jury rigging monkey business, OK so that’s you know what I think is a good solution to the problems that arise. That’s why I’m a big proponent of post election audits. It can be used to solve a number of issues that may or may not be expected on election day. And go back to the voters and say even though all of this happened when we counted those ballots they were the same today as they were on the election day.

Dori Smith: But I must say finally that the Secretary of State’s office was not aware, you know in my interviews with them, they said they were not aware that this memory card switch had been made. Given that that was the direct information from their computer expert they hired to go through the security measures for the machine, and they didn’t seem to know about this…

John Silvestro: Well there was a number of people who work in the office though.

Dori Smith: But I’m just saying…

John Silvestro: Who was working that Sat. or that Thurs. or whatever day it was. I have no idea, I know that at the time there were people there who could be contacted. And I’m just going to say I wasn’t there Dori so I really, I’m going to tell you my employees told me that they did contact the Secretary of State’s office.

Dori Smith: So what this raises though is the whole fact that it was up to them to do so and again when you are talking about an election….

John Silvestro: Well there is a meeting scheduled for August for us to go through and do a meeting on situations that can arise and the protocols for those situations so that we can you know document… and the other, whether you want to, you know take it for what it’s worth OK? We did last November’s election and there were things that you know the recount came up and the recount, we put the protocols together probably the week prior to the recount if it was even that far out. It might have been three days before OK? And we did the best we could to train people for those recounts. And you know we got through it you know? I don’t think you saw any big swings in polls. There was one community that was eleven votes short and two days later called and said you know we weren’t eleven votes short so I don’t know of any instances that came up that was not reported to anybody. I mean calls the calls were made and people were told and the information and the communication lines were open.

Now does that mean that a person who took the call relayed it to everybody else? I don’t know. I can’t answer for everybody through the process….

Dori Smith: Well it’s sort of…

John Silvestro: I have documentation here from my employees here from what went on at every one of those recounts. I have a folder and I have in it what went on OK? So I know what my employees put into our computer system as to what went on. I don’t know anything else. I can only speak for what I know here.

Dori Smith: Theoretically….

John Silvestro: Mmhmmm.

Dori Smith: Do you think that it is sound protocol for a state to purchase a machine from a vendor that is in this for profit and then also hire them to do training and then also hire them to be present at the polls and then to get information from them on which, you know, maybe certain numbers of results could hinge, and then at the end of everything, work with them on continued evaluation of those protocols and machines and so on. I mean do you think this is a kind of privatization of elections?

John Silvestro: No it’s not. It’s totally public. Everything is done in a public venue.

Dori Smith: One minute they are working for you the next minute they are working for the registrars?

John Silvestro: They are not working, who whose, the people who are there they work for the registrars now. Most of them are mechanics. Most of them are people that who have been supporting your lever machines for the past 35 years.

Dori Smith: No I’m I was speaking of the ones that you know do work for LHS and then work for the registrars of Connecticut and go back and forth that way. I’m just asking your opinion. Do you…

John Silvestro: My opinion is yes because I feel very confident that the process itself is better left in the private thing than it is in the public venue when I see the influence that each political party can put on people and make things happen in this country whether right or wrong, I mean if you think about it and I’d ask you the same way. Would you like politically connected people to vote parties, to be in charge of running you know the process of creating voting machines, counting ballots and you know would you like that? I don’t know…

Dori Smith: Well I can’t vote for you.

John Silvestro: What?

Dori Smith: I can’t vote for you can I? I mean you’re….

John Silvestro: No but if I do something wrong you can put me in jail..

Dori Smith: Well not easily but I mean I’m just saying I think the political system hopefully in a democracy is accountable to the public and…

John Silvestro: It’s exactly, accountable to the public. Absolutely.

Dori Smith: OK. So.

John Silvestro: I believe that totally.

Dori Smith: And I mean just for what it’s worth in terms of what corruption is about if you are talking politics usually there is money involved right?

John Silvestro: Right but I have, I find it you know, I mean I do find this kind of incredulous if you think about it. You have had a voting system in place in Connecticut for the better part of fifty years that has not produced one ounce of paper. Not one paper, auditable paper trail for fifty years. And the Secretary of State in my opinion, and you can say that OK I might give you this opinion or not but in a lot of people’s opinion you can go out and look at the research, you can look at the CalTech Survey, I mean you know that was done, and when they recommended that Optical Scan with a paper based Optical Scan system is the best voting system for you to chose for security, reliability, and audit ability.

And the Secretary of State in Connecticut took something that was basically ‘trust me’ voting, pull the lever and we hope all of the bands in the back were working and the counters are changing, and replaced it with an auditable paper based system that provides back end auditing for the integrity of the election to both the voters, the public and for the politicians who are running. And then turns around and it seems to be creating more of a conflict than there was before. You know probably a lot of the questions you should ask you should ask the people who get elected and lose the elections….

Dori Smith: Can I just a question, I mean in this state there were a lot of voting activists and I spoke with some of them about the process they were involved in prior to the selection of the machine and have you ever met with voting rights activists who have worked on you know helping select which voting machines are going to be chosen and how they get submitted and all of that?

John Silvestro: Like have I worked with them?

Dori Smith: Have you ever spoken to them, met with them and do you understand that in this state of Connecticut part of the reason that the Optical Scan with the paper ballot system was chosen was that people advocated for it. So I just was curious if you knew them or knew of their efforts?

John Silvestro: I know of I think it’s Verified Voting Connecticut?

Dori Smith: Well there are several yeah.

John Silvestro: I mean I think I have. I mean I’ve discussed, um I’ve had discussions with Bill Bunnell on the day the announcement was made. And somebody else was with him and I don’t remember who that was.

Dori Smith: But so they are kind of in a way they are simpatico with what you are saying and I’m not you know trying to represent their views but from what I’ve heard in speaking to people that have done that advocacy work I understand that they are very interested in having a paper trail ballot that’s verified by voters and that’s verifiable after the election. I will say though that they are also equally concerned about protocols now and I read their material on that before I did any interviews and that one of the concerns was that, you know one of the concerns was the lack of investment in time and validation or certainty in the protocols that exist between the Secretary of State and other state offices versus the various towns carrying out the elections; what their understandings are and what your understandings are.

Now you can say a lot of things about the reports I did. But you can’t say that I didn’t learn clearly at the polls that there is confusion there. I mean I don’t think the confusion was mine. I think the Secretary of State told me they sent you a protocol that said don’t handle the machines. I think everybody from LHS I spoke with said their protocol was to handle the machines and they said they saw that protocol from the Secretary of State. So there was a difference there wasn’t there?

John Silvestro: I really um again I wasn’t there on site and I’m going to have to say if you are telling me that then I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Dori Smith: But I mean I did transcribe my interviews with them. I…

John Silvestro: According to my employees I mean your transcribed interviews were in some cases taken out of context. Now I’m not going to challenge you on that. I mean you produced a report and you have every right to do that and you talked to my employees and…

Dori Smith: I don’t think they want me to air the whole time I spent with them.

John Silvestro: No I wouldn’t think so where they talked about do you want me to. You have employees in Connecticut who were doing recounts and as a matter of fact a couple of the people who were there were not even in Connecticut for the election. They were people who were in other states for the election in November and because of the resources we had uh had to be dispatched to Connecticut or the recount at the request of the Secretary of State OK? So there were people who may have been confused about protocols between New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. I mean I do support you know five states and they may have spoken to you about the average or the way things are done in other states which is different than the way it’s done in Connecticut. So I mean it’s not like its a uniform protocol between all of the states. Some of the states allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states do not allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states allow their local people on site to open the ballot box. Other states do not allow them to open the ballot box without calling in to the Secretary of State’s office first. So I mean there’s different protocols. We are allowed in New Hampshire, you know, in New Hampshire to do one thing that we are not allowed to do in Massachusetts. We are allowed to do some things in Massachusetts we are not allowed to do in New Hampshire….

Dori Smith: Well one thing I will leave you with…a thought here…

John Silvestro: …This was the first election and the first recount we had in Connecticut and we learned from it and we will make the proper adjustments in the future to make sure that the things that may have been improperly, I don’t even want to, I don’t want to use the word improperly; things that were not understood correctly in last November will be understood correctly in the future and will be handled properly and the protocols will be read, signed off on, and enforced, and adhered to. So if they weren’t in November it will not happen again in the future. And that I can assure you.

Dori Smith: Well I appreciate your saying that and especially to me under these circumstances. And I also appreciate the fact that your employees were willing to take the time to speak with me and that they followed up and that they told me to the best of their knowledge what they were there to do and what the circumstances were and I really valued their openness actually.

John Silvestro: And that’s what I’ve always told them unfortunately I mean my employees have always tried, look I am a customer service business and every one of my employees is a customer service representative. And when you are a customer representative, customer service representative, your jobs is to do the words h.e.l.p. And it’s to help people either understand the process, tell people how to use the process, help people to learn how to use the process, it’s always to help, so my employees are very helpful I mean and that’s what makes them the good employees that they are and that’s what makes them valuable to the company and it also makes them valuable to our customers because they are always willing to help. They are always willing to (illegible) you would be surprised at the number of letters I have of emails I have from registrars in Connecticut or clerks in New Hampshire or clerks in Maine about how my employees go above and beyond what they are expected to do. Unload trucks when they weren’t needed to. Carried stuff in when they weren’t need to because they were there. Explained things beyond what they needed to explain. So that’s what my employees do. And unfortunately Dori I mean they can sometimes be overly helpful. It was a new process in Connecticut and they were trying to educate as well as help. And you know maybe they can be overly helpful sometimes.

Dori Smith: Um. I’ll interpret that the way that I think it should be interpreted after I’ve had a chance to reflect and listen to this whole conversation again. But what I will say to you to is that I would like to speak with you again after the Secretary does get back to me and I’d like to do that if possible under more public circumstances where I’m not the only one asking questions because I think one of the things that people are concerned about is that they hire you know various people to work for them in their lives or they purchase products at a store and they know the system when it comes to purchases, when there is money involved; they know that system. But I think a lot of people are under the impression that when they vote that’s different. That doesn’t have anything to do with money. There’s nobody making a profit who stands to lose if they describe something that went wrong. And that’s very much on the minds of voting rights activists now who are looking at the privatization process as you know–you can say what you want to about the way states do elections but we do need to talk about the pros and cons in a democracy of hiring people to do these tasks on which democracy depends.

John Silvestro: But you always have hired people. I mean some people have not. I mean however you look at it you know whether it was Connecticut whether it was Missouri I don’t care where it is. I mean even today people who are hand counting paper ballots are being paid whether they are local citizens they are still being paid.

Dori Smith: But they don’t have multi million dollar contracts at stake.

John Silvestro: Well they don’t have multi million dollar contracts at stake and that’s you know that’s correct, they don’t. But you also have you know the issue of support and service and longevity and you know that’s one of the things that you get with privatization. That’s you know why doesn’t the Military make their own planes? You know you can go in and look at privatization and say why are a lot of these things done, you know, and on the other side why are they not? Why is health care not, why is is privatized why isn’t it public? I mean you know it’s a discussion of this country and I think it’s a good discussion. I mean it’s beneficial to have these discussions, to talk about what should and shouldn’t be done. How things should be done.

I’m very concerned. This is me, this is not as a President of LHS Associates so if you want to talk about this or quote it or anything, I’m just as concerned that the Parties would be involved. The Parties would actually be involved with election process if it wasn’t privatized.

Dori Smith: Well it’s a good point. It’s a kind of a separate discussion unless you want to talk too about the party affiliation of any of your staff who might work at an election site or at a recount site.

John Silvestro: And that’s of it is because that if you, I don’t even know the party affiliations of my staff, but if you went and polled them you would probably get the same breakdown in my staff that you get in the rest of the country. It’s that you have Republicans working for you…

Dori Smith: But my point is you don’t remove the problem OK by having LHS represent the process and we’re….

John Silvestro: I don’t represent the process. All I do is provide a service. All I do is provide the ability to code a machine on a memory card which then once it leaves it my possession becomes the possession of the election officials on the location and it’s their job by protocol to ensure that I have done everything in my power to do it right and that they’ve checked and double checked and rechecked and then you have post election audits and you do all of that and you’ve… what have you left me? I mean I never would but what have you left me? There’s nothing I can do, there’s nothing LHS can do, there’s nothing Diebold can do, because once it hits the registrar’s hands the election is run by the registrars. It’s not run by me you know? And I don’t run anything on Election Day. I provide a service of support on Election Day. I don’t run anything. I don’t swear any people in. I don’t count any ballots. I don’t go through and review, oh look what you did wrong. I don’t make voter determinations on Election Day. I don’t help voters understand the system. I don’t, you know, I didn’t make the instructional DVD to help voters learn how to use the system. I don’t do anything on Election Day. All I do is support the process up until then but on election day, I don’t do anything, you know, you make it sound, you don’t make it sound, you are insinuating that I actually count the ballots on election day and I don’t.

Dori Smith: No I’m actually just saying that the election machines that are provided by Diebold through you had their memory cards coded and set up by you and your office has provided training. Those are three very crucial steps to the operation of that machine before it ever hits the polls and then when it gets there if your staff is there you are playing a role. And let me just add that one of the things that has concerned people about these specific kinds of machines rather than let’s say the lever machines or what have you, the new interest is largely because many votes at one time can be changed in some settings with some machines; maybe this one maybe not. But in general the concern is that votes can be changed and not ever able to be discovered and I’ve read and I’ve interviewed…

John Silvestro: Doesn’t the post election audit solve…

Dori Smith: Well you could have said ‘post election audit’ in Ohio. You could have said ‘post election audit’ in Florida. The point is…

John Silvestro: What happened in both of those places?

Dori Smith: There was fraud committed. There was fraud committed in Ohio.

John Silvestro: Who went to jail I mean other than I know who went to jail in Ohio OK? Who, which, and I’m not even going to defend any one particular manufacturer of voting machines, which voting machine manufacturer went to jail in Florida and Ohio?

Dori Smith: You know you raise an interesting point. I don’t think that should be the measure. I think having, I think having a voter, um, let’s see. I think having an Election Day protocol intact and the most secure standards for every machine possible on Election Day is what we are going for. And so if anything is a problem in there that’s worth noting.

John Silvestro: Absolutely.

Dori Smith: The committing of fraud is only to, you know noting that, is only serve as a reminder that these things do happen. That they involve individual human beings who make mistakes or who commit crimes willfully what have you and that because it’s a human system we need to do our job of….

John Silvestro: It’s a human system and it has been and prior to voting machines and prior to voting machine companies the process was paper ballots and you, I’m sure you have read history and you know the paper ballots were manipulated…again…

Dori Smith: Absolutely, oh none of this is new….

John Silvestro: Again you know through the ages and actually machines, if you read responses from people at state levels. In New Hampshire I was at a meeting where the Secretary of State attested to the fact that the machines were more accurate because Connecticut, New Hampshire is a split state. They only have a hundred communities that use voting machines and two hundred and twenty communities hand count paper ballots. Same thing in Vermont. Same thing in Maine. And they all will tell you the same thing. Is that the machines are more accurate than the hand count paper ballots…and they…

Dori Smith: Well accuracy is what we are going for…

John Silvestro: And they leave less probability of fraud because you an have one or two people in a polling place just move fifty votes from one stack to the other an impact an election whether it’s done intentionally by hand or whether it’s done by accident. One stack of fifty of counting paper ballots and saying OK if this fifty belonged to candidate A and it really belonged to candidate B and went to candidate A’s pile and got counted as a fifty and impacted that count and it’s simple to do. It’s just moving a stack of fifty papers from one stack to the other. So I mean you know it’s not anything new and originally I think voting machines were a solution to the human part of hand counting paper ballots and now you know Dori I don’t disapprove you’re doing what you are doing and I don’t disapprove of anybody who has been a voting activist for being involved. I just want them to be reasonable and understand the system and I want them to take everything in total. That when a voting, you know I read the Uconn report. I read the Uconn report that said a voter could put a sticky memo paper on a ballot and pull it out and vote it three or four times. Well I’d like to know how you are going to stand in the middle of a room with twelve to fifteen people standing around and voters backed up behind you and you are pulling the ballot out and nobody is going to see you. There’s a lot of things that could be done but in the real world you can’t do them. In the real world in an open room with open people and moderators and check list people and other voters you can’t do that stuff. But you know it’s in the report. OK it looks like wow it’s a flaw in the system but at the end of the day even if you could do it you only had a hundred and ten people check in but you’ve got a hundred and thirty five votes in the machine. You know what you are going to do? You are going to identify that and you are going to hand count that precinct to find out what the heck’s going on. The checks and balances are there and they are there for reasons and you know I personally have full confidence in them and I would do everything in power to educate the public to have the same level of confidence that I do. And people will look at me and say well you have confidence because you make a living at it. Well yeah that’s true. I’m not going to deny that but I have also a level of confidence in the system. I am a voter. I am a citizen. It concerns me. I’m concerned about the country. I’m concerned about the people who are in office and I would not do anything to circumvent the process because it’s worked really really well for a long time. But I think people need to be educated and understand how they work, what you can do what you can’t do, what real life is; why do you put seals on memory cards? Why do you put seals on bags? Why do you make people sign for the sealed numbers before they go out and they come back, and yes they are equipment just like the lever machines were equipment and bands broke and machines had to be taken out of service and counts were lost. The beauty of an optical scan system is you never lose the count because you have the paper ballot whether you hand count them at the end of the day or whether you put them back through a machine you can count them, recreate the election, get an accurate count of what the voters intended and then you have the ballots to also audit on the back end. I can’t explain it simpler than that.

Dori Smith: Are you going to be holding any kind of educational effort yourself? I mean are you going to be doing any of the training yourself?

John Silvestro: Probably after I retire. I’m going to run around the country and talk to people.

Dori Smith: Chuckles. Well let me just add…

John Silvestro: And I’ve only got a couple of years left so…

Dori Smith: OK. Well I appreciate your spending this time. You know I was curious. I mean I would like to attend a training. I’ve heard that they are pretty, you know, pretty advanced and I’d like to see what goes on.

I’m here to do the story as it unfolds. To tell it like I see it and as it appears to me to be.

John Silvestro: And I have a lot of experience with these because I’ll tell you a story. I have also um I was you know a local activist if you want to call me that in my town. I mean I’ve been on the budget committee and the finance committee and I’ve been a town counselor and I’ve had to run for election in my own community using the voting machines that my company sold. So I’ve taken a lot of the questions and I’ve fielded a lot of the information and I’ve taken the hits and I’ve got some pretty thick skin. But I tell it like it is and, and I tell it from a rational I think point of view. The people, a lot of this you know if you are an activist and you don’t want to believe what I say there is no point in me talking to you because you are not going to believe what I say. If you listen to what I say and you understand what I say and you understand how the process works and you’ve worked at a poll, and you’ve seen what the moderators do and you’ve seen what the registrars do and you understand their responsibilities and you’ve seen the checks and balances of the check in list and the counts and the number of ballots that are printed and the number of unused ballots and you do the math that if I give you a 1000 ballots and you have three hundred people on the check list there had better be 300 votes in the machine and there had better be 700 ballots that weren’t used.

That is all part of the process that you can’t arbitrarily make up numbers and stick them in. You have no idea prior to Election Day how many people are going to vote in each precinct. That’s the randomness of it. You have no idea. If you had a, you know, I read about a group of people who manipulated the Thomas Jefferson election back in whenever, well (in principle?) you know it’s very good to do that when you knew what the results were. I can probably manipulate anything in hindsight once I know what the results were. But when you have no idea what the voter turn out is going to be, what the percentage is, how many voters are going to show up, how many are going to go in one direction or another.

There are so many unknown variables in an election. That’s the beauty of it. I mean I don’t know if you have ever done a recount. Have you ever, you know witnessed a hand recount?

Dori Smith: Well yeah I mean I was at several.

John Silvestro: No no hand recounts where they actually hand count the ballots…

Dori Smith: They did hand count the ballots.

John Silvestro: Then you have probably seen when you start out the day and you know it’s a fifty fifty election and both candidates have got like 49.9 and one got 50.1. And statistically if I told that to anybody they would think that all of the ballots would be basically fifty fifty all the way through the day but you would go through streaks. I’m sure you saw it where there would be fifty ballots in a row for one candidate and not one for another and you would scratch your head and go how the heck did this end up fifty fifty? Well about twenty minutes later you get a batch of fifty that all go to candidate B and you realize the randomness of people coming in and not you know that’s part of the process.

Dori Smith: It’s a tricky business. I will say someone told me once that an agenda sounds like a kind of negative thing to have but we all have them and he pointed out to me that you know we are not always aware of our agendas. But the most difficult agenda to get someone to understand they have is one where their bread and butter depends on something, but their bread and butter also depends on portraying themselves as open minded and fair minded and even handed across the board. Now that is a conflict right there. If someone says to you you’ve got to represent these machines, and someone says to you well but you’ve got to represent the best possible voting standards in every state you are working in…those are two very different subjects.

John Silvestro: Yeah and I try not to, the only recommendation I have ever made to a Secretary of State’s office, and you can, I’m on record in New Hampshire, I’m on record in Connecticut, I’m on record in Massachusetts, was please pass legislation for post election audits. That’s the only recommendation I have ever made on the process of election day and afterwards, that’s the only one I’ve ever made.

Dori Smith: Well let me just suggest then if that’s your concern that you get very very accurate protocols in place for your staff that if a, as you indicated, if a machine malfunctions, a switch is made, anything comes up that is unusual, that reporting is going to become crucial to any post election audit process. People need to know that it happened, they need to know exact details, and the right people need to know.

John Silvestro: Right and you can’t hide it. There’s nothing you can hide in, in the business I’m in you can’t hide anything because there’s too many, not because you want to but even if you wanted to, there’s too many people involved. In order to run elections as you said earlier you need human beings. And you need a lot of human beings you know and that’s again the beauty of the system is that, not the system that I’m talking about now, when I say system I mean the Amerian electoral process the number of eyes that are involved, especially in New England, I really, I’m glad I live in New England. Of course if you put this on the radio I might have people criticizing me from around the country but you know in New England these small polling places we have, the breakdown of the polling places and the quantity of polling places, I mean you know it’s expensive to do but we don’t have lines that run to or three or four hours as we all read about in 2006. Yeah maybe on Presidential election night you may have to wait 35 or 40 minutes but we don’t do the things here that get done in the rest of the country. I’m as appalled as anybody else. Again, you can say it’s my agenda. It’s not my agenda. I’m a citizen. I’m appalled when I read about people in Ohio having to wait nine hours to get in to vote. That is absolutely ludicrous. That’s ridiculous. That should never happen. That should never even be part of the problem. I mean I can’t believe in today’s world with today’s technology that we have issues like that.

Punch cards. Punch cards were decertified in Massachusetts in 1998 because the Secretary of State, and it was all over the press, knew the punch cards were inaccurate. They were not dependable. You know they would run recounts with punch cards and the counts would change from the first time through the reader to the second time by as much as 20%. Those little chads all over the floor didn’t get counted the first time got counted the second time. And the Secretary of State in Massachusetts, they had it in Fall River, and that was the biggest cause, they went to court and he decertified punch card in 98 and yet in 2000 what did we do? In the rest of the country 60% of the votes were counted on punch cards.

Dori Smith: Well they decertified Diebold’s Accuvote TSX voting machine in California but there it was again.

John Silvestro: Well it was, I don’t know, I mean again I don’t know the instance…

Dori Smith: They decertified it in 2006.

John Silvestro: That’s outside of…I don’t know. That’s, I can’t comment on that..

Dori Smith: I mean you still have it for sale if it were certified in Massachusetts or in Connecticut you would sell it to them right?

John Silvestro: If they certified it.

Dori Smith: So I mean I think I made my point.

John Silvestro: That’s, but that’s the independent part of it. That’s the part that you know that’s not public, I mean that isn’t in public view. The certification process is done by the states who I would hope represent the voters and the residents of their state.

Dori Smith: But the State hired Professor Shvartsman who found flaws in that machine.

John Silvestro: He found flaws in the machine in his situation. He would find flaws in my lap top. And now I’m going to sound like I’m defensive because now you are gonna, you are probably going to portray it this way but I’m not. The reality is it’s a computer. It’s a computer and I’ve got my computer here sitting on my desk and if I gave it and I’ve got all kinds of firewalls and all kinds of stuff built into it and I have no idea how to get into it. But if I took this computer to a computer science department with computer science post graduate and undergraduate students and left it there for a week they would get into my system.

Dori Smith: I’d like to think that a nice looking post graduate or computer scientist, professor, might wind up getting into a position of having their hands on a voting machine prior to an election and that that possibility is what Professor Shvartsman at…

John Silvestro: Well fortunately there aren’t any of them working for me…

Dori Smith: Laughter. But I’m just saying…

John Silvestro: But I’ve had to exclude people. I’ve actually thought about it. I have actually I would not hire, if I tell you this this is true just because of the business I’m in; I would not hire, I would not want the liability of having a computer science degreed person working for me working on computers.

Dori Smith: Well it’s a big responsibility you have sir. John Silvestro, is that the right pronunciation.

John Silvestro: That’s the correct pronunciation.

Dori Smith: Well John Silvestro I am very glad that you were able to spend this time with me and I look forward to speaking with you again.

John Silvestro: Well I hope you understand that I am forthright and I’m not trying to hide anything. It’s just sometimes, and you know I’m going to say it to you because look I’m not a baseball player I’m not a football player, but the Press can be two types of people. There are people who listen and report and then there are people who listen and then take stuff out of context and report. And you know that can be very difficult when you are trying to maintain your position as the President of a company as you know a father and a parent and you know a grandfather and upstanding member of your community which is, I would consider myself to be in Londonderry so. I mean I gave twenty years of public service to my town so I think I’m viewed in a very good light and someone who has integrity.

Dori Smith: Well thank you again for speaking with us. Take care.

John Silvestro. You’re welcome. Thank you.

Revelations about the New Hampshire election are similar to what we learned in 2006 and 2007 as we visited the polls during elections and recounts. Registrars, moderators, and clerks, were under the impression that LHS had the authority to provide mid election memory card changes or repairs as long as they were under their supervision. Actually per advice of the University of Connecticut computer expert Alex Shvartsman who is under state contract to advise on voting machine security, LHS was not supposed to touch machines during the first use in a limited number of towns in 2006.

We established that all three of the LHS staff members we spoke with went to the polls with a very different idea. They had seen the protocols that fall under statute 9 of Connecticut election law but they planned to violate it and had back up memory cards and voting machines with them when they arrived at Connecticut polling places in 2006.

When we informed Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz that they told us they would change memory cards as in other states she replied, “Well I would beg to differ that they would take a memory card out of a machine. There are spare machines that are ready to go if there is a failure of a scanner machine but we had no reports of that and I’d like to put you on the phone with my Deputy for that question if you don’t mind”.

Deputy Secretary Lesley Mara was similarly misinformed about the understanding LHS staffers had. A long saga followed but when the State ultimately failed to provide any consequences for LHS over violations we established we submitted our complaint to the Connecticut Election Enforcement Commission where it is presently under investigation.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=57
Is Connecticut Outsourcing Elections to LHS Associates? Posted on Thursday 16 November 2006

A Talk Nation Investigation Reveals that Poll Workers, Voting Machine Providers, Voting Officials, and Officials at the Secretary of State’s Office, had different ideas about how voting machines were to be handled on Election Day 2006 and during the recount of the 2nd Congressional District.

Interview with LHS Associates President John Silvestro
(Re) Posted on Sunday 13 January 2008
Transcript of Talk Nation Radio interview with John Silvestro

Silvestro explains why his staff violated CT election laws: “You have employees in Connecticut who were doing recounts and as a matter of fact a couple of the people who were there were not even in Connecticut for the election. They were people who were in other states for the election in November and because of the resources we had uh had to be dispatched to Connecticut or the recount at the request of the Secretary of State OK? So there were people who may have been confused about protocols between New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. I mean I do support you know five states and they may have spoken to you about the average or the way things are done in other states which is different than the way it’s done in Connecticut. So I mean it’s not like its a uniform protocol between all of the states. Some of the states allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states do not allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states allow their local people on site to open the ballot box. Other states do not allow them to open the ballot box without calling in to the Secretary of State’s office first. So I mean there’s different protocols. We are allowed in New Hampshire, you know, in New Hampshire to do one thing that we are not allowed to do in Massachusetts. We are allowed to do some things in Massachusetts we are not allowed to do in New Hampshire”.

http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/general_news/connecticuts_elections_are_sti.php
Talk Radio Investigation Into New Voting Technology Reveals Vulnerabilities
by Dori Smith | November 5, 2007 8:56 AM

Are Connecticut’s new electronic voting machines safe from fraud? A year-long Talk Nation Radio investigation found serious security problems when the machines were first used in some Connecticut towns during the 2006 election.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=110
Complaint filed against LHS Associates over Violations to Connecticut Election Laws in 2006
Posted on Thursday 8 November 2007

Talk Radio Investigation Into New Voting Technology Reveals Vulnerabilities by Dori Smith | November 5, 2007 8:56 AM
Posted to General News

Are Connecticut’s new electronic voting machines safe from fraud? A year-long Talk Nation Radio investigation found serious security problems when the machines were first used in some Connecticut towns during the 2006 election.

There was chaos at the polls during the 2nd District recount and LHS Associates, the company that sold the state the new voting machines, were refusing to follow the voting machine security protocols drafted by Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz under Chapter 9 of Connecticut law. A year later the state’s new protocols were are still being updated for the public with the Nov. 6 election right around the corner.

According to LHS staff member Mike Carlson, their bosses, LHS President John Silvestro and Vice President Gary Bergeron, gave them extra memory cards, voting machines and “marching orders” to make switches of the memory cards. They may have suspected the problems with the memory cards for their machines were far worse than the manufacturer wanted to admit.

In 2006 Carlson told us, “Before I left the office in conversation with John Silvestro and Gary Bergeron who are the President and Vice President of LHS in communications with the Secretary of State; we were given marching orders as to how LHS was supposed to conduct themselves during the election.”

We were hopeful when we learned that Connecticut’s Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz responded to information we and others provided about LHS Associates and the need for more clear instructions to poll workers. However, once the new protocols came out we were surprised and saddened. Click here to read more.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=105
Connecticut Regulations Leave Door Open to Fraud and the Further Privatization of State Elections to LHS and Diebold
Posted on Thursday 27 September 2007
Talk Nation Radio for September 27, 2007 Voting Rights Activists in CT Must Struggle to Reverse Privatization and Secure the Vote

http://talknationradio.com/?p=103
Voting Rights Activists Express Disappointment at Connecticut Security Protocols Posted on Friday 21 September 2007
Talk Nation Radio for September 19, 2007

Joining us to discuss the problem is Professor Michael Fischer of Yale University and True Vote Connecticut. Then investigative journalist, attorney, and author Bob Fitrakis joins us to discuss the effort to secure Ohio elections with new security protocols.

Bob Fitrakis explains that in various states it has been difficult to get strong security protocols, and strong enforcement of existing laws. Fitrakis is author of, ‘How the GOP stole America’s 2004 election and is rigging 2008‘.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=101
Talk Nation Radio for September 5, 2007
Privatization of Connecticut’s Election
Diebold Dealer and LHS President John Silvestro on Privatization in CT
Michael J. Fischer of Yale University Computer Science Department is also the President of True Vote Connecticut. He offers Remedies for Poor Security, Questionable Technology from Diebold to Connecticut

Professor Fischer describes the status of Connecticut machines and looks at the twin roles played by the Secretary of State and LHS Associates. Connecticut’s State and Municipal Elections take place November 6, 2007. There are less than two months for poll workers, registrars, and moderators of elections, to learn new security protocols. We pose questions about the role of a private company in the making of State election protocols in addition to supplying machines, providing training, doing the coding of memory cards and printing of ballots and then working at the polls during elections.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=113
Alex Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut’s Voting Research Team reports Team found Faulty Memory Cards in 2007 Study

Posted on Saturday 1 December 2007 Talk Nation Radio for November 28, 2007 Diebold Memory Cards found with Junk Data in CT

Alex Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut’s Voting Research Team joins us to discuss his findings of “junk data” on memory cards delivered to the polls for the November 6, 2007 State and Municipal Election. The team will release their report on the memory card failures shortly.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=111
Raindrops Keep falling on Connecticut’s Diebold Voting Machines Posted on Friday 9 November 2007
Talk Nation Radio for November 6, 2007
2007 Election in CT and Problems with Diebold Voting Machines
Raindrops Keep Falling on my Diebold Voting Machine

We speak with Connecticut Registrars, Deputy Secretary of State Lesley Mara, and True Vote Connecticut member George Barnett. See more download options below.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=92
Diebold’s TSX Voting Terminal Fails UCONN’s Integrity Test Posted on Friday 20 July 2007

UPDATE: Upon learning from UConn’s Voting Technology Research Center that a Diebold TSx voting terminal submitted to the state during a legal applications process in 2006 was easily hacked, we decided to look at the web site of VerifiedVoting.org for their information on which states are using the Diebold TSx. As it turns out a large percentage of voters in the US may be using Diebold’s TSx during upcoming votes.

http://talknationradio.com/?p=58
Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz and Deputy Secretary of State Lesley D. Mara on Talk Nation Radio with Voting Rights Activist Bill Bunnell Posted on Thursday 30 November 2006

We turn to the recount of Connecticut’s Second Congressional District once again with part two in our ongoing investigation into voting machine security at towns using the AccuVote Optical Scan machines made by Diebold. The machines were used in 25 towns, ten of which were in the Second District where Democrat Joe Courtney beat incumbent Rob Simmons by a mere 91 votes.

Talk Nation Radio for January 10, 2008

Discussion about US Primary Races excludes US Foreign Policy
Bush heads to the Middle East

As the US Presidential primary races are in full swing there has been insufficient discussion on US foreign policy, that according to policy expert Phyllis Bennis, a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. and author of numerous books on the Middle East including ‘Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy U.S. Power’, and ‘Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer’. Her earlier works included, ‘Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis’, 2002, and ‘Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN’. (See Interlinkbooks.com)

Professor Francis A. Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois and is a leading expert on the case of Palestinians against Israel over land and the occupation. He sees George W. Bush’s Middle East trip as a way for Bush to shore up support for aggressive policies toward Iran. His most recent book is, ‘Breaking All the Rules, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and the case for Impeachment‘. His many other books on law, justice, and political activism include, ‘Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11th‘.

Listen to this week’s broadcast here

Three Talk Nation Radio specials relevant to US policy, the election, and the Middle East
produced by Dori Smith, WHUS, Storrs, CT

1. Raed Jarrar, of AFSC, Ann Miller of New Hampshire Peace Action, and Iranian scholar Trita Parsi

Listen to the broadcast here

TRT: 29:40 John McCain answers Ann Miller’s question about what the US might be doing in making the Middle East more dangerous. Raed Jarrar discusses early reports about an encounter between five Iranian boats and a US Naval Fleet in international waters in the Strait of Hormuz off Iran. And Trita Parsi looks at the way the US and Iranian leaders have discussed the incident in the Strait, what US media reports have been like, and responds to our questions about the treatement of the incident by Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room. Blitzer noted how ‘scary’ the event was and then turned immediately to his political analysts to ask them which candidate would benefit the most from the incident?

So which of the presidential candidates might get a boost — might not get a boost — from this showdown at sea? CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, January 7, 2008, New Hampshire Primary Voters Get Set to Vote; Iran Confronts U.S. Navy; Interview With New York Senator Hillary Clinton

Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance – The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007.) He wrote his Doctoral thesis on Israeli-Iranian relations under Professor Francis Fukuyama (and Drs. Zbigniew Brzezinski, R. K. Ramazani, Jakub Grygiel, Charles Doran) at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

President of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the largest Iranian-American organization in the US. He is the author of “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.”

2. US Debates, Kucinich left out, Voice of America reports on Democrats willing to Attack Pakistan

TRT: 29:01 Dennis Kucinich is excluded from ABC’s debate. We speak with singer/songwriter Melissa Etheridge and hear portions of Kucinich’s speech at Boston’s Orpheus Theater and then look at the way Voice of America reported on New Hampshire. — Democrats sparring over their records and then coming together in a “group hug” VOA says was ‘designed to show how the American people will support the nominee’. Then VOA cut interesting sections out of the ABC/Facebook speech to share what the Democrats said about attacking Pakistan. Obama and Edwards both said they would target Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Hillary Clinton allowed that after the missiles were in the air she would contact the Pakistanis to let them know they were on the way.

3. Phyllis Bennis looks at George Bush’s Middle East Travel Plans (pending)
29:00..

Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. discusses the President’s trip to the Middle East. We discuss US foreign policy according to Mike Huckabee, the way the surge is being used to try to help pro-Iraq war candidates, conditions in Iraq, and Israel/Palestine. Phyllis Bennis is author of numerous books on the Middle East including ‘Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy U.S. Power, and Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Her earlier workers included, Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis, 2002, and Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN. (See Interlink Publishing)

Melissa Etheridge on ABC TV Network’s exclusion of Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich from their debate.
The singer and songwriter is interviewed by Dori Smith of Talk Nation Radio about Kucinich, big media, and her thoughts that what Americans can do now is fight fear. This is an eight and a half minute preview of a Talk Nation Special that is currently in production.

Click here to listen.

For a wider variety of formats to download this program click here

Dennis Kucinich was excluded from televised debates just prior to the Iowa caucus. He moved on to New Hampshire where he has been getting a lot of attention for public appearances and concerts.

The Kucinich for President campaign filed an emergency complaint with the FCC claiming the ABC TV network is violating its obligation to operate in the public interest by excluding the ohio congressman from their presidential debate. ABC is owned by Walt Disney Corporation whose executives have contributed heavily to the other candidates including Democrats Clinton, Obama, Edwards and Richardson. Joining us to talk about the controversy is singer songwriter Melissa Etheridge who is one of many musicians now supporting Dennis Kucincich.

Melissa Etheridge has two grammys and numerous platium hits over the years for her thoughtful lyrical ballads and stylized rock. She is known for her strong stand on women’s rights, gay rights, and the fight for a cure for breast cancer. Her recent song I need to wake up featured in Al Gore’s Acadamny Award winning film about the environment, An Inconvenient Truth. Her most recent albumn is The Awakening.

Note to stations broadcasting Talk Nation: We will include this in a half hour format as a special on Dennis Kucinich shortly. Please also expect programming with Stephen Zunes and an interview with Phyllis Bennis of IPS.

Press Release from Kucinich Campaign HQ For Immediate Release – Friday, January 04, 2008

ABC Excludes Kucinich from TV Debate Sat. Jan. 5, 2008

Kucinich for President files emergency complaint with FCC against ABC TV Network for excluding the Ohio Democrat from the Sat. debate.

ABC is violating public interest and endorsing ‘chosen’ candidates by excluding Democrat Dennis Kucinich from the Presidential debate, FCC complaint charges

WASHINGTON, DC – The Kucinich for President campaign late today filed an emergency complaint with the Federal Communications Commission claiming that the ABC television network “is violating its obligation to operate in the public interest” by excluding Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich from tomorrow night’s scheduled debate in Manchester, NH.

Further, the complaint charges, the televised event “is not a true presidential primary debate without including all credible candidates, but instead is effectively an endorsement of the candidates selected by ABC.” The filing also notes that ABC “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walt Disney, Co., whose executives have contributed heavily to other Democratic presidential primary candidates, including Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, former Senator John Edwards, and Governor Bill Richardson.”

And, the filing points out, Kucinich “is the only Democratic presidential candidate who has qualified for Federal matching funds who is being excluded by ABC.” (Full FCC complaint.) http://www2.kucinich.us/files/pdfs/4119_001.pdf

“Although ABC would prefer to only report on easily described and well-known candidates, the proper enforcement of the Federal Communications Act ensures America’s voters that they will have the ability to vote for candidates with varied and new ideas and policies,” says the complaint. “ABC should not be the first primary.”

The Kucinich urged that ABC reverse its decision rather than face possible FCC action.

Among the so-called “criteria” established by ABC for inclusion in Saturday night’s debate is a fourth-place or better showing in Thursday’s Iowa caucuses. Kucinich effectively by-passed the Iowa caucuses because the state Democratic Party and other political and institutional interests there excluded him from two earlier debates and from Party-sponsored functions. Instead, the Kucinich campaign has focused heavily on New Hampshire.

To underscore Kucinich’s standing as both a “credible” and “qualified” candidate, the emergency complaint notes that he has campaign offices in Keene, Dover, Manchester, and Concord, paid staff, hundreds of campaign volunteers, and significant financial contributions from residents of New Hampshire. “In addition, Complainant Kucinich has been the winner in national online polls conducted by Democracy for America (receiving almost 50,000 votes while the closest competitor only received 38,000), Virginia State Democratic Party (receiving 30% of the Democratic vote while the closest competitor received 27%), Independent Voters (75% of the Democratic vote out of 80,000 online voters), as well as polls by Progressive Democrats of America and the Nation. In an ABC News poll, Complainant Kucinich received the most support from 42,487 voters (garnering 35% of the vote to 22% for the next closest candidate) who were asked who won the Democratic presidential primary debate on August 19, 2007.”

Also, Kucinich’s “opponents share very similar policy platforms” while Kucinich offers very different positions on issues such as the war in Iraq and health care reform. His exclusion from the debate, therefore, “is contrary to ‘the public interest to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance’.” ABC’s “arbitrary and capricious decision “causes irreparable harm to the public interest by robbing the voters of the opportunity to hear his policy platform, including his pro-peace initiatives,” says the complaint.

Website: www.dennis4president.com

Talk Nation Radio for January 3, 2007

Erik Leaver on the Foreign Policy Questions in the US Elections and John Nurenberg on his walk from Boston to Washington, D.C. to ask Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Impeach George W. Bush

Listen to this week’s broadcast: here

see also: here for Radio4all.net
Produced by Dori Smith, WHUS at the University of Connecticut
TRT: 29:30

Election Related: 2008 Iowa Caucus related

1. Erik Leaver looks at Pakistan and the way US presidential candidates have discussed what to do in wake of Bhutto assassination.

2. Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s call for Iowa voters to pick fellow Democrat Barach Obama as their ‘second choice’ after him.

3. The grass roots are highly active. Gary Indiana voters have passed a resolution that would ensure that no preemptive military attack against Iran will take place. And more..

4. And John Nirenberg is a peace activist who is walking and at times dancing his way from Boston Mass to Washington D.C. where he will try to get the democratic speaker of the house nancy pelosi to put impeachment back on the table. In the interest of full disclosure I should say up front that John Nirenberg was once a DJ at WHUS, the station where we produce Talk Nation Radio. His on air name was The Rockin Rebel.

Erik Leaver is a Research Fellow with the peace and security program at IPS, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC and also Policy Outreach director for the Foreign Policy In Focus project. He appears frequently on US TV news shows in the US and the MidEast. You can find him online at fpif.org He is author with Phyillis Bennis of the report: “Ending the U.S. War in Iraq: How to Bring the Troops Home and Internationalize the Peace,” with Phyllis Bennis, Foreign Policy In Focus.