[Tfug] OT: looking for a lawyer who's also geeky...

[Jim March]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 4:15 PM, johngalt1 <johngalt1 at uswest.net> wrote:

> What about Pima County?
>
> On the up and up or what?
>


It's bad in Pima, but not AS bad as Maricopa.

Basically, the strongest election integrity crew in the state is based here
in Tucson, so we've made progress in improving procedures, lots of eyes on
'em, etc.  It's still bad but Maricopa is a complete freakshow...short form
is, they're not even signing polltapes, they're not allowing observation of
the central tabulator, we've caught them with illegal software that has
major security implications three times now and we've been threatened with
arrest for doing so.

I mean...OK, case in point.  2008 elections with Sheriff Joe Arpaio on the
ballot.  They picked which ballots to hand-count via random selection 24hrs
before the count.  That's bad enough.  But the instant they selected them,
they hauled them off to the "recount center" immediately, then stalled the
hand-count itself with a pretty obviously dumb "training session" to do the
handcount.

The "handcount location"?  Sheriff Joe Arpaio's training center, under his
personal control.  Yeah, same guy on the same ballot in that election.

This is known as a "conflict of interest".

But wait!  I can top that.  Swear to God this is true.

So we finally get to the "handcount center".  We check in.  I have to ask
for a locker to hold my 357Maggie.  Which turns out to be a good
thing...because they ran out of locks, so they were using excess ballot
seals to seal the lockers.

Cool.  'Cept for one little detail.  Turns out the rat bastards were buying
their seals in 20-packs without telling anybody, until I noticed what the
hell I was looking at and how similar they were to the ballot bag seals.
That's right - 20 packs WITH THE SAME FRACKIN' SERIAL NUMBER ON ALL 20.

Something nobody knew until then.  In other words, they were all set to pop
open any sealed election record they wanted to, mess with the contents, and
put a matching seal back on.

So I grab one of those 20-packs, muttered something about "oh hell no!",
headed over to the ballot bags and confirmed that the seals in the 20-pack I
was holding matched the sequence numbers of the seals on the actual
ballots.  And then I took pictures.

As far as I'm aware, the dipwads are still doing that.  That's just ONE of
the things we've got to ask a judge to put a frackin' stop to.

Anyways.  Pima is bad.  We know that for years, that elections office would
steal the data on who's winning and losing a week or more pre-election, by
printing out the results of scanning the mail-in ballots that arrive
pre-election.  Can you say "Zogby poll from hell"?  In at least one case one
of these data thefts (as recorded in the audit log) happened on a Saturday
before the Tuesday election, at around 3:30pm.  And then starting around
7:30 that night, a "robocall" went out slamming a candidate in a
nailbiter-close race.  Did the "peek" at the data cause the "poke" into the
results?  We have no idea but shouldn't have to ask.  And while we've
tightened up procedures, the same psychopathic buttholes are still running
elections in Pima.

And with all THAT, Maricopa is an order of magnatude worse.

Grrr...

Jim
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