TheWalk.com

This was posted by Bev Harris on Jan 16th, 2008 at 11:42am, after investigating the New Hampshire recount efforts.

We are finding in New Hampshire: the best of the best in MOST situations, but considerable naivete and in some areas, and an alarming and wilfull negligence.

Among the “best of the best” of New Hampshire situations:

(1) Beautiful, community oriented hand counted paper ballots in more than one hundred jurisdictions.

(2) Very democratic and participatory township structure of government, combined with very high level of representation of local areas in the state legislature

(3) Amazing level of responsiveness of public officials. Secretary of State Bill Gardner, for example, answers questions personally and tirelessly from just about everyone. Many, many high level officials perfectly willing to talk with and answer all questions from the public.

(4) Beautiful, participatory 100% hand counted recounts.

(5) Very good public records laws. If they have it in their possession, they let you see it THAT DAY. Along those lines, Paddy Shaffer did a hand written records request today which elicited some very good information. The dream team here is in the process of editing another request as I write this.

On the almost schizophrenically BAD side:

(1) A fully idiotic reliance on a sole source private contractor. Not particularly bothered that the company has private chain of custody during critical points, no policy or even apparent concern with having convicted felons involved in the voting system.

(2) Use of a system with known defects without even taking any mitigation steps that other states took.

(3) NO REQUIREMENT to even save the memory cards. The explanation is that they get a disk with the “program” on it. VotersUnite attorney Jon Bonifaz questioned the assistant attorney general on this closely today, because federal law requires records retention of 22 months on electronic media.

New Hampshire has a truly idiotic policy of allowing the memory cards to be kept, or not, with a chain of custody, or not, shipping back to LHS, or not, and it’s perfectly okay with New Hampshire if the memory cards are erased altogether the day after the election. They profess to believe that if they just have LHS ship them a disk containing some purported program — BEFORE the election, when there aren’t even any votes registered — everything is okay. No one could tell us if this is the memory card program, or the GEMS database file, or the optical scan chip. They seem to have no idea what they are doing with this and I would call this wilfull ignorance, not naivete.

(4) Lack of documentation and lack of diligence on keeping documentation or written procedures in key areas

(5) Ballot chain of custody procedures with major holes and a few very creepy areas that will be the subject of a future article.

The upshot will be that New Hampshire could be the role model for the nation, but not until they purge themselves of a limited number of very significant problems.

The problem with chain of custody: You can have a strong, beautiful, stainless steel chain but if one link is broken, the rest doesn’t matter.

Source: Black Box Voting : 1-15-08: Can recount chain of custody be rescued?