The Hot Sheet

Report on Phantom Ballots in Allegheny County available

Now available is our report on the “phantom ballots” that were recorded in Allegheny County in the 2008 general election. PA Verified Voting helped us organize a coalition of voters to conduct the audits of the voting machine logs

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT (pdf)

We discovered that almost 16% of all precincts recorded “phantom” ballots, which means  more votes are recorded than there were voters there to cast them.  We estimate that there were about 400 phantom votes recorded total for the whole county.

This amount of phantom votes isn’t enough to have affected the outcome of the presidential election.  But, since local elections generally have a much lower turnout than a presidential election, a few hundred votes can easily make a big enough difference to sway a close race.

We think voters have a right to know their voting machines are working.  It’s going to open up a whole world of possible contested elections around here until this is fixed.  The next step would be for the county to make the audit logs for the machines available, so that the origin of the phantom ballots could be determined.  Right now the county is not releasing those.  Until they do, it’s going to be hard to address this problem.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT (pdf)

Tags: allegheny county, audit, ballot, cast, electronic, logs, phantom ballots, pittsburgh, voter, voting machines

Check out our 2009 Voter Guide

See candidate responses for Mayor, City Council, School Board, County Council, and even the Judicial races here on our website:

http://pahotsheet.com/2009-voter-guide

We wanted to make sure we got answers from the candidates on important issues, so we collaborated with the Sierra Club Allegheny Group and Planned Parenthood of Western PA to come up with the questions for this voter guide.

Consider this one more tool in your arsenal to elect the most responsive and responsible government possible.  More voter guides are coming from groups like A+ Schools and the League of Women Voters, and we’ll link them here once they’re available, too.

And please join us for our Voter Guide Release Party, Saturday April 4th at Town Tavern on Carson Street from 9pm-Midnight.  A $5 donation gets you in for a make-your-own-taco bar with chips and salsa and also a cheese-and-veggie option, with $2 wine, beer, and well drinks.

Add in a DJ and the chance to meet and chat with some of the candidates, and you’ve got a great night and can help us with our mission to inform and turn out young voters.  (Roxanne and I are guest bartending!)

We’d love to get your feedback, so please leave a comment or send us an email with your thoughts and suggestions.

-Carly

Tags: allegheny county, candidates, city council, common pleas, commonwealth court, county council, election, judicial, local, mayor, mayoral, Pennsylvania, pittsburgh, primary, school board, superior court, supreme court, vote, voter, voter guide

“Unlock the Vote” Poster Contest Winner announced!

Tags: allegheny county, download, election, Pennsylvania, poster contest, unlock the vote, vote for the future of PA, voter rights, Youth

Voting Machines: The Story’s (not) Over

Well, it’s official: The Allegheny County Elections Board has conducted a small random-sample audit of voting machine software. Apparently, they did it last weekend, with no need for a three-month bidding process, nor any guidance from the state of PA with regards to an audit protocol. (Well that wasn’t so hard, now was it?)

This would not have happened were it not for the incredible pressure we all put on the BoE within the last week. Jamming the phones on Thursday must have left an impression, forcing the Board to take action.

Even so, there’s still much more to be done. For starters, the process needs to be far more open and transparent than it was. In this day and age, there’s no reason to only talk about something after the fact, even if it takes place on a weekend — people will disseminate the relevant information virally via electronic communication. We could have known that the audit would take place when it did.

Also, the county needs to go through and check more than 18 out of the 4,700 machines — yes, that’s right, they checked fewer than 0.3% of the machines — that we will be voting on in just one week.

Why is this all so important? The software that our voting machines use was updated a few months ago, but we had no way of knowing that the updated software still complied with state and federal regulations. After a massive public outcry at a County Council meeting in September (see Success!), the Council passed a resolution calling on the Elections Board to audit the software.  The Elections Division, in turn, started stonewalling, claiming that the process would take too long — requiring a three-month bidding process before the audit could even start — and that there was no state-established protocol for an audit.

The moral of this story is that, public pressure prompts elected officials to act and do the work. Even though the method that the County decided to use in “verifying” the voting machine software is questionable and insufficient, at best the County Executive and the Board of Elections demonstrated that decisions could have been made in a more timely fashion, and that now the public has the upper hand in demanding a thorough inspection and testing of the voting machines before THEY are up for election in 2009.

If we can’t be confident that our voting machines will count our votes accurately, what’s the point in voting in the first place?

Tags: allegheny county, election protection, elections, voter rights, voting machines

Check our voting machines before the election!

TOMORROW, Tuesday Oct 20th at 10am there will be a Board of Elections Meeting at the County Courthouse, Conference Room 1. We should arrive en-masse to discuss software auditing as well as any other election issues. No one needs to sign up in advance to speak, but if you’d like to carpool down there or meet up early, email terry@theleague.com!

Tags: allegheny county, election, election protection, pa league of young voters, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, turnout, vote, voting machines, Youth Vote

Write a Letter to the Editor — check our voting machines!

Make sure every vote is counted correctly!

Write a Letter to the Editor urging County Executive Dan Onorato to have the voting machine software verified as soon as possible!

Electronic voting machines have been in PA for a few elections now, but the Allegheny County  hasn’t certified the authenticity of the software, which can be hacked or replaced fairly easily.

The Everest Report, commissioned by the Ohio Secretary of State, showed that these voting machines have almost no security features.  The voting machines are stored in an unwatched and unlocked warehouse, where it wouldn’t be hard for someone to tamper with them.  If we can’t have a paper trail, THE LEAST we can have is the assurance that our electronic voting machines have been checked by a third party for software authenticity.

County Executive Dan Onorato is on the three-person county Board of Elections for Allegheny County.
The other two members have publicly stated that they are in favor of certifying the software.

Follow this link to send a Letter to the Editor
encouraging Mr. Onorato to get our voting machines verified!

Read more:
Debate hot over e-vote security, Tribune-Review, Oct 6, 2008
County says it can’t audit voting machines, Post-Gazette, 10/4/2008
Trusted votes: The public needs confidence at the polling place, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 23, 2008

Tags: allegheny county, election protection, Letter to the Editor, paper ballot, voting machines

Registering Voters makes the News!

We got a spot in the Post-Gazette for our jail registration work in conjunction with Just Harvest; Goodwill of Southwestern Pennsylvania; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN; the Community Voters Project; Work for Progress; and Duquesne University nursing and political science students last week!

“Spearheaded by inmate program director Jack Pishke, it was the largest registration effort to date at the jail and the only one jail officials knew of statewide, in anticipation of the last registration day: Oct. 6.

In a dizzying two hours, the group helped to complete 456 new registrations and about 700 absentee ballot applications.

Unlike most of the younger volunteers, Ms. Rabinowitz, 67, of Park Place, had been in jail before. She was locked up with a group of organizers for two separate stretches in 1963, after the group was arrested for registering rural black voters in the south with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Those voters, she said, were scared because “they’d never had the right to vote before and we couldn’t tell them it wasn’t dangerous.”

The jail inmates today were just eager. And hopeful.”

Read the full article

Tags: allegheny county, Allegheny County Jail, disenfranchised, election, ex-offenders, inmates, pa league of young voters, pa league of young voters education fund, Pennsylvania, registration, unlock the vote, vote, voter, Voting

It’s a new record!

Roxanne Banks-Williams and Terry Griffin (and former League interns Justin Witmer and Moshe Sherman) and about 50 more amazing volunteers registered the inmates at the Allegheny County Jail today — and came back with 456 new voter registrations!

Now don’t you wish you were there?  Volunteer to help copy and stamp all of these so we can turn them in to the Division of Elections!

Tags: allegheny county, disenfranchised, election, inmates, jail, pa league of young voters, pittsburgh, unlock the vote, vote, voter, voter registration

Canvassing Schedule!

With the election steadily approaching and the state and national economy in near collapse, it is more important than ever that we get out there to talk to as many voters as we can, and we need your help! We will be knocking on doors and calling voters based out of our headquarters in East Liberty and our field office in North Versailles all week long, and until we get out and make our voices heard on November 4th.

THIS WEEK:

Tuesday: 3:30-8, North Versailles

Wednesday: 3:30-8, North Versailles

Thursday: 3:30-8, North Versailles

Friday: 3:30-8, East Liberty

Saturday, two shifts, 11-3 and 4-8, East Liberty

USW District 10
1945 Lincoln Highway
North Versailles, PA 15137
The North Versailles field office is in USW District 10 Headquarters on Route 30.

PA League of Young Voters
6101 Penn Avenue, Suite 302
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
The League office in East Liberty is on Penn Avenue in the Liberty Bank Building. Use the door next to H&R Block to call up to be buzzed in.

Holler at Mac (mac@theleague.com) or Terry (terry@theleague.com) if you can make it out this week,
and together we are going to work for the future of Pennsylvania!

Tags: allegheny county, canvass, East Liberty, election, north versailles, schedule, vote, voter outreach, voter registration, westmoreland county

Lobby the County to Protect our VOTES!

If you’re gonna do all that work to get people registered to vote, to learn about their candidates, and get out to the polls, then you’ve gotta take it that last step of ELECTION PROTECTION to make sure that all those votes get counted.

That’s why we’re going to be at the County Council Hearing TUESDAY to encourage them to look into the authenticity of the new electronic voting machines’ software.

JOIN US TUESDAY and let officials know that the voters in their county want their votes counted!

Audit Our Voting Software

County Council Meeting - Tuesday at 5pm, Sept. 9th

4th Floor, County Courthouse - Gold Room

Sign up to speak to council before Monday at 5pm with this link here:
http://www.county.allegheny.pa.us/council/meetings/recomm.asp

We’re asking everyone who works downtown to pop over for the meeting after work! Stay long enough to miss rush hour, and contribute to the collective concern represented there to our elected county officials.

LEARN MORE:

Excerpt from VoteAllegheny’s press release:

“Because the ES&S iVotronic voting machines used in Allegheny County provide no way
for voters to personally verify that their votes have been correctly and accurately recorded,
voters must trust the iVotronic program code to be correct. The inspection and certification
process carried out by the Secretary of the Commonwealth is meaningless unless the County
ensures the machines run exactly the same program the Secretary certifies.”

“Election Commission Bails Out Voting Machine Maker In Time for May Primary,” March 11, 2004
“EVEREST: Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards, and Testing,” Sections 6.3 and 7.2.2

See you downtown!
PA League

Tags: accountability, allegheny county, county council, election, protection, Upcoming Events, volunteer, vote, voter