2016 Recount Effort
Machine Count Not Matching Hand Count - Racine County WI
Machine Count Not Matching Hand Count 0:00 / 3:29In the 2016 Wisconsin presidential recount, Liz Whitlock and her team find an error rate of almost 5% in the optical scanner vote in the Village of Elmwood Park. A similar error rate applied across all of Wisconsin’s 2,976,150 votes – could produce an error of 140,000 votes. Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes.
In the 2016 Wisconsin presidential recount, Liz Whitlock and her team find an error rate of almost 5% in the optical scan votes in the Village of Elmwood Park. A similar error rate applied across all of Wisconsin’s 2,976,150 votes – could produce an error of 140,000 votes.
Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes.
As we show in the piece, Liz and other volunteers discover these discrepancies by counting votes with a hand clicker as the ballots are fed into an optical scan machine. They count 15 votes that are not counted by the machine in Ward 1 of The Village of Elmwood Park. That ward has 310 votes total, creating a potential error rate of almost 5%. Donald Trump's margin of victory in Wisconsin was less than 1%. The team finds errors in other wards as well, but the clerk in Racine County Wisconsin refuses to allow any votes to be counted by hand.
Following this release of this piece, Whitlock and her colleagues conducted a citizen audit that showed the machines to have a 2.5% error rate. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net.... The machines were subsequently decertified: http://www.wisconsinelectionintegrity... Wisconsin election officials said the decertification was in large part due to this video report. This piece is running on alternet.org http://www.alternet.org/new-video-wat... It is part of a series of video reports evaluating the 2016 presidential recount.
See other pieces in the series: http://shugahworks.com/election-cover... Directed and Edited by Lulu Friesdat @LuluFriesdat Camera by Daniel Greinke & Lulu Friesdat Objection hearing footage provided by Jennifer Reddy-Theisen ©2016 http://shugahworks.com/
Court declines to hear appeal on Wisconsin voter ID law before election
(CNN)A federal appeals court declined Friday to hear an appeal before a full panel of judges on the court to Wisconsin's voter ID provision before November.
The decision deals a setback to the American Civil Liberties Union and other challengers to the law. The court said the provision of the law can remain in place for now based on the representation of the state that it had enacted a rule for the next election that requires the state's Department of Motor Vehicles to automatically mail a free photo ID to anyone who comes to the DMV one time and initiates the free ID process. Read the full story here
ELECTION 2016
New Video: Experts Say Wisconsin Voting Machines Can Be Hacked
A Wisconsin election official oblivious to the dangers of connecting voting equipment to the internet said, “I don’t know how hackers could turn it on and off.”
By Lulu Friesdat / electoralsystemincrisis.org
December 29, 2016 Our investigative look back at the Wisconsin recount finds that—despite repeated warnings by computer experts that connecting voting machines to the internet puts them at risk of hacking—the voting machines in some counties in Wisconsin are using wireless modems. This hardware creates a connection that in all likelihood has internet capability, even as the chair of the Election Assistance Commission swears to Congress that the machines are not connected this way. Plus, an international computer security expert shows how the voting machines can be hacked even when they're not connected to the web. Read the full article here
Experts Say WI Voting Machines Can Be Hacked
Experts Say WI Voting Machines Can Be Hacked 0:00 / 5:20
Wisconsin Election Officials Reject Hand Counts After Electronic Scanners Make Big Mistake
"I am just stunned at how inaccurate the whole thing is."
By Lulu Friesdat / electoralsystemincrisis.org
December 16, 2016 The Wisconsin presidential recount may be over, but it revealed how deeply flawed America's voting machinery can be. After Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed for a recount in the state and paid the $3.4 million fee, she went to court seeking a hand count of all paper ballots. That is the only way to tell if the electronic voting machinery is properly reading the ink marks on the ballots. A state judge agreed that was the "gold standard," but said under state law that it was up to county election officials to decide how they would recount the ballots.
Filmmaker Lulu Friesdat went to Racine, where she and a colleague filmed the Green Party's observers catching an electronic ballot scanning error and their failed attempt to convince local election officials to verify the vote count by hand counting one 300-person precinct. They observed one scanner misreading 15 ballots in the Village of Elmwood Park Ward 1, a ward that had 310 votes total. That is an error rate of 5 percent in a state where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 22,000 votes or less than 1 percent of the vote, according to the official count.
This snapshot of the process is a microcosm of what occurs across America, where not only does the electronic voting machinery make mistakes but procedural decisions pre-empt evidence-based verification of the vote.
Lulu Friesdat is an Edward R. Murrow award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She received a Best Documentary award for her first feature-length documentary Holler Back — [not] Voting in an American Town, a film that explores systemic issues in our elections that discourage voter participation.
Clips are available for viewing here. Follow her on twitter @LuluFriesdat.
Destruction Of Key Election Materials Discovered in Wisconsin Recount
Destruction Of Key Election Materials Discovered in Wisconsin Recount0:00 / 3:48 DECEMBER 16, 2017 Contact: RecountNow
Key Election Materials Destroyed in WI Recount
Madison, WI, December 16, 2016 —Forensic investigators from RecountNow.org, an election watchdog group, discovered that some Wisconsin counties intentionally destroyed the records of the vote count produced by optical scan voting machines. Optical scan machines are used to count paper ballots. The machines produce an image of each ballot. According to Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org, another election watchdog group, in some states destruction of ballot images is a felony.
Wisconsin’s Brown and Rock Counties were two of the counties that have admitted to destroying at least some of their ballot images, according to investigators. Both counties had already been identified for other reasons as forensic red flags by analysts, raising concerns that this destruction of evidence may have been for nefarious reasons. “What this means,” explains John Brakey of RecountNow, “is that if the scanners had not been programmed properly—either by mistake or intentionally to manipulate outcomes — there would be no protected secondary record that could be checked as verification of the counting process.
Furthermore, if there had been any foul play with stored ballots during the long period between the original vote and the recount, there would be no mechanism for detecting that tampering either.” For these reasons, say experts, the ability to record and keep copies of the ballot images is a critically important tool in verifying our votes, particularly in counties that have declined to recount votes by hand.
In some states it is the ballot images that are considered the “ballot of record. ”In the models of ballot scanner examined by Brakey, the Elections Systems and Software (ES&S) DS850 and DS200, there is a switch that must be set to indicate one of three choices of what to retain: none, all, or only the write-in votes.
“Unfortunately, the incentive to destroy or prevent the creation of ballot images would obviously be highest in the very places where they might provide the sole hard evidence of committed fraud,” commented attorney and researcher Jonathan Simon, also of RecountNow.DS850 scanners are used in 16 states in addition to Wisconsin.
In the 2016 election, over 26,500 DS200 scanners were used in 25 states.
A lawsuit in Pima County, Arizona earlier this year spearheaded by John Brakey resulted in an October court ruling that ballot images are public record and must be preserved. Federal law requires retention of election materials for 22 months after a federal election. Public records requests for ballot image files have been filed by investigators, law firms, and others during the Wisconsin recount.
RecountNow calls on all jurisdictions to preserve the ballot images and promptly make them available in response to all public records requests, and for an investigation into possible violation of law by county election employees and officials who have destroyed ballot images from the November election.RecountNow is a citizens’ group of experienced forensic investigators, IT specialists, statisticians, and data analysts, dedicated to fair, secure, and transparent elections.