NM vote fraud to be exposed

[Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00067.htm


New Mexico Law Suit Delves Inside Voting Machines

Thursday, 3 November 2005, 12:30 pm
Article: Michael Collins

Election Errors Threaten Future Voting Rights in New Mexico


Major Law Suit Under Way to Open Up "Secret" Workings of Voting Machines
Special Report for "Scoop" Independent Media
First in a Series
By Michael Collins
Nov. 2, 2005


Patricia Rosas Lopategui et al. "wishes to have her vote properly 
counted and weighted in any forthcoming elections."

New Mexico rarely generates much national news. When it does, as in 
the Wen Ho Lee nuclear espionage investigation, it can be explosive.

Now a little-known lawsuit before New Mexico District Court Judge 
Eugenio S. Mathis has the potential to alter the face of American 
elections.

Lopategui et al versus the State of New Mexico is proceeding at a 
surprising pace, with the litigants currently in the "discovery" phase 
of the trial, the point at which lawyers are allowed to question key 
witnesses and dig for facts and opinions with wide latitude. The 
targets of discovery right now include Sequoia Elections, two of the 
big three voting machine companies; Rebecca Vigil-Giron, New Mexico 
Secretary of State; state and local election officials; and officials 
of the state's voting systems support vendor.

Highly disturbing facts and allegations have already emerged in this 
well-run but under publicized case. For example, in one majority 
Hispanic precinct, the voting machines produced exactly zero votes for 
John Kerry. More issues will arise as the Plaintiffs' legal team digs 
deeper into the highly irregular events of Election Day 2004. 
Remarkably, these events occurred at a much higher rate in 
predominantly Hispanic and Native American precincts.


********

The Case

A number of cases are pending as a result of Election 2004, mostly in 
Ohio. Unlike those cases, Lopategui et al is about future elections. 
It is based on the unacceptable performance of voting machines, state 
and local election officials, employees of the voting machine vendor, 
Sequoia, and others.

The suit describes each of the eight parties as a "duly qualified New 
Mexico voter who cast a ballot in the 2004 general election and who 
wishes to have her vote properly counted and weighted in any 
forthcoming elections."

Patricia Rosas Lopategui and the seven other parties are everyday 
Americans who have reason for concern about any future elections based 
on the 2004 performance of New Mexico voting machines, according to an 
array of evidence gathered already.


********

Election Day Fiasco for Some

If you were a Hispanic American or Native American voting in New 
Mexico on November 4, 2004, you may have experienced some of the 
following:

The most likely problem was simply to find out that your vote for 
president or other offices was not counted. Ballots with missing votes 
are called "under votes." In New Mexico there were around 23,000 under 
votes out of a total of about 750 thousand votes cast. That is a rate 
of 3.0% for the state, or six times the expected rate of under votes 
in a presidential election. In Hispanic and Native American precincts 
under votes range from 6% to as high as 49%. One poll worker described 
watching 141 voters come to the precinct, enter the polling booth 
where a voting machine awaited, stay for a short period, and leave. At 
the end of the day, there was only one vote counted for president. 
That's a 99% plus rate of under votes for that precinct.

In another scenario, called election machine "vote switching," one 
voter describes a scene that occurred throughout the state. The voter 
was choosing between Republican Heather Wilson and Democrat Richard 
Romero in the 1st Congressional District, near Albuquerque, NM. She 
recounts the frustrating story as follows:


I voted for Richard Romero. The check did not appear in the box. I 
tried three more times to vote for Richard Romero, making sure that I 
was not touching the screen in any other place. The vote never 
registered. The fourth time that I tried to vote for Richard Romero, a 
check appeared in the box by Heather Wilson's name.

For the next 45 minutes, the voter sought help from an election 
official. None one was available. When help finally arrived, "The 
monitor came and cleared the machine and stood watching me as I voted 
again." It finally seemed to take her vote for Democrat Romero. 
Describing the one hour ordeal to cast just one vote in one race, the 
voter said, "I have no idea if my vote was processed correctly."

John Boyd, a member of the Lopatigui legal team, states that the 
essence of the suit is to determine "whether voters in New Mexico, and 
the United States for that matter, have the right to have their vote 
counted faithfully and properly."

The problems with faithful and proper counting may be linked to the 
new voting technology introduced since the passage of the 2002 Help 
America Vote Act (HAVA). This Bush-administration-supported act 
provides a pool of billions of dollars for states and local 
governments to purchase new voting machines, often the touch screen 
devices called Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines.


********

Disturbing Signs of Bias by Voting Machines

The State of New Mexico saw 245,000 ballots cast on electronic voting 
machines. Optical scanner voting machines accounted for nearly 100,000 
ballots counted. These machines require that the voter fill in an 
optical scan paper ballot with a pen. The ballots are then fed through 
an optical scanner at the precinct, which records and totals the 
votes. For New Mexico optical scanners, the average presidential under 
vote rate was less than 1% of all votes counted. Of every 100 voters 
using an optical scan, 99 showed a vote for president. In general, 
optical scanner voting machines showed no apparent racial bias in 
under voting, as indicated by a study based on the 2004 canvass data 
from the New Mexico Secretary of State (there were notable 
exceptions). The study was conducted by nationally recognized election 
system and analysis experts Ellen Theisen, executive director of 
Voters Unite! www.votersunite.org and Warren Stewart of Vote Trust USA 
and reviewed by John Skelly PhD.


Average Presidential Under Vote Rate - All Optical Scanners

%

Native American precincts

0.33

Hispanic precincts

0.86

Anglo precincts

0.48

When the other 150,000 voting machine results are examined, a 
troubling trend emerges, one which seems to indicate systematic under 
votes by voter ethnicity. These machines are either push button or 
touch screen DRE's.


Average Presidential Under Vote Rate - by DRE Vendor

Sequoia Advantage Danaher Shouptronic ES&S iVotronic %

Native American

9.10

8.00

1.54

-------------------------- Hispanic

6.24

8.39

NA ----------------------------- Anglo 3.24 3.18 0.75

Of optical scanner voting machine precincts, Native American precincts 
have the lowest under vote rate followed by Anglo and Hispanic 
precincts. All optical scanner precincts have under vote rates below 
1.0%. The DRE precincts with Sequoia and Danaher equipment show a 
constant Anglo rate of 3% under votes. Remarkably, Hispanic and Native 
American precincts show rates two and three times that high.

While optical scanning voting machines performed better in general, 
there were exceptions that show the inability of voters to have their 
ballots cast for president. Each under vote represents the failure of 
a vote to be counted.


Dona Ana County Under Votes

Precinct Ethnic Makeup % Under votes

13

Hispanic

98

13.84 --------------------- 28

Hispanic

75

11.15 --------------------- 38

Hispanic

75

9.95 ------------------- 59

Anglo

95

19.71

-------------------- 60

Hispanic

85

49.47 ----------------------------

There is no comforting explanation for this.

The final count for New Mexico 2004 had Bush over Kerry by 376,930 to 
370,942 votes, a difference of 5,988 votes. The under votes in just 
the Sequoia and Danaher precincts may have made the difference in the 
outcome of the presidential race. They certainly made a difference in 
the outcome of each voter who lost his or her vote on that day.


********

The Vigorous Pursuit of Election Integrity

Lopategui et al vs. Vigil-Giron, et al (New Mexico) was preceded by a 
law suit to secure a recount in the state after the 2004 election. 
That effort failed, but those who fought the legal and political 
battle began amassing evidence of widespread voter disenfranchisement.

A nonprofit organization, Voter Action, www.voteraction.org, was 
formed. The organization is dedicated to providing financial, legal, 
research, and logistical support for grassroots efforts, with the goal 
of ensuring the integrity of elections in the United States. Its main 
project now is the Lopategui suit to insure that future elections 
result in the intention of voters, namely that their votes are counted 
regardless of the method of voting. Holly Morris Jacobson is co 
director of Voter Action. She is a former project manager and 
marketing communications professional who now devotes her time to 
election reform and voting rights causes. Ms. Jacobson resides in 
Seattle but grew up in New Mexico.

The Voter Action legal team includes San Francisco Bay area attorney 
Lowell Finley, an experienced litigator in civil and election rights 
cases. Mr. Finley is co director of Voter Action. He is also one of 
the very few lawyers to win a victory over a voting machine vendor 
when his client, Alameda County, CA, received a refund from Diebold 
Inc. for problems with their voting machines. Finley also successfully 
blocked California Governor Schwarzenegger from using campaign 
contributions to repay a $4 million personal loan to his campaign. Two 
distinguished New Mexico attorneys, John Boyd and David Garcia, 
complete the Voter Action litigation team. Boyd has extensive 
experience in civil rights, first amendment, constitutional, and 
election law. He is currently litigating a religious freedom case 
before the U.S. Supreme Court. Garcia has extensive experience in 
election law and served as co-counsel in the 2002 redistricting trials 
in New Mexico. Garcia is active in New Mexico politics and bar 
activities.


********

Will My Vote Count?

The problem of vote switching, losing your vote based on the type of 
machine you use and, perhaps, your ethnic identity and location, is 
troubling in a nation where universal access to voting was once 
thought to be the political gold standard. In this case, the more 
things change, the more they seem to come undone.

The Help America Vote Act was heralded as the solution to the problems 
that emerged in the Florida 2000 presidential contest. Hanging chads 
and endless recounts of flawed punch card ballots would never occur 
again, we were promised. In point of fact, the real scandal of Florida 
2000 was not the hanging chads; it was the racially based "felon 
purge" conducted by Secretary of State Katherine Harris' office. This 
resulted in the denial of voting rights to 57,000 black Floridians, 
Floridians who had committed no crime but were wrongly identified as 
felons. That "purge" was a race crime, denying one ethnic group its 
right to vote.

The problems in New Mexico represent the automated version of 
ethnically based voter disenfranchisement. Now, instead of tens of 
thousands losing their rights all at once, the votes are being denied 
to tens of thousands of minority voters' one precinct at a time.

The voter who took 45 minutes to make sure her vote was cast in the 
New Mexico 1st Congressional District summed it up nicely:


If I were an elderly person, or a young first time voter, I might not 
have known what to do, or how to take the actions that I took. I might 
have simply gone forward with the voting process, and thought to just 
let that one vote for Heather Wilson go unnoticed as well as the 
malfunctioning machine.


---------------------------------------------------------
Evan Ravitz          303 440 6838           evan@xxxxxxxx
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