We The People Say Yes!
The fight for fair elections goes on. It’s been overshadowed in the news by various ongoing disasters related to finances, our schools and the banksters fleecing our great-grandchildren dry. But if we don’t get elections right, we’re in for far worse long-term consequences.
We recognized that the foundation of all our rights is based upon the democratic process of voting. In Arizona, the object of the election laws is to prevent fraud and to guarantee to the voter the count of his ballot. The Arizona Constitution contains strong requirements as to the conduct of elections. This is just one of 7 citations state and federal in the appeal:
Ariz. Const. Art. 7 § 7. In all elections held by the people
in this state, the person, or persons, receiving the highest number
of legal votes shall be declared elected.
in this state, the person, or persons, receiving the highest number
of legal votes shall be declared elected.
The wording of that section merits a special notation. The phrase “elections held by the people” refers to the fact that it is the people who hold elections and not the government. The government surely has its role, and the legislature sets out rules, but all of those are for the purpose of facilitating the people in holding elections.
Superior Court Judge Harrington erred in striking Plaintiff Democratic Party’s supplemental constitutional citations, tendered before argument, on the basis that the citations could have been discovered earlier and now can’t be used. How is that possible: they’re constitutional citations.
Run Time 12:52 – From August 28, 2009 court hearing
Attorneys Bill Risner and Ralph E. Ellinwood, asked the judge to "stay" his order until we appeal his earlier decision where he claimed that Arizona courts did not have subject matter jurisdiction to consider allegations of fraud in any election. Basically, the only issue that will be of interest is the decision on the stay question. The legal issue is extremely important but would be moot if the ballots were destroyed.
The case is as fundamental as it gets.
The case is as fundamental as it gets.
What we’re seeking “prospective relief” so they cannot cheat in the future. However, history tells us there are many ways to cheat and if more ways are found we need to have the courthouse doors open to right the wrong.
Add to this all the other problems previously exposed, documented and yet not answered leaves the public questioning whether our votes are being secured and accurately counted in Pima County. The previous case in Judge Miller’s court room proved that Pima Count’s voting system is “Fatally Flawed”. When counting and processing of the ballots is concealed from the public, the only solution is transparency, transparency and more transparency at all times, not Election Theater.
In that case “database lawsuit” between the Democratic Party of Pima County and the Board of Supervisors the county’s defense was based upon the lack of security in the databases produced by GEMS (the election computer software). That lawsuit took around one and one-half years for the Democratic Party to obtain Pima County’s election databases. Christopher Straub, Pima County’s attorney, admitted that “the databases themselves are not secured. We know that and we agree that they can be altered using Microsoft Access.”
- “A Source Code Review of the Diebold Voting System” prepared by the University of California, Berkeley, under contract to the California Secretary of State as part of a “Top-to-Bottom” review of electronic voting systems for use in the State of California was provided to the trial court. That review extensively reported on the vulnerabilities and unreliability of the Diebold system used in Pima County.
- Arizona’s election director, Joseph Kanefield, testified in the database case that the fundamental security flaws that make the GEMS data impossible to validate were “known by not only our office but election officers all over the country.”
- An affidavit of Zbigniew Osmolski that he had been personally told by the Pima County computer operator that he had “fixed” the Special Election “on the instruction of his bosses, and he did what he was told to do."
- And how we can not forget election-night of the RTA and the “MS Access Manual” “cropscanner” then later discovering the that Pima County owned a machine, an "infamous hack tool" that can be used to fraudulently program precinct optical scan memory cards is a fact. Pima County purchased the machine 10 months before the RTA Election. Bryan Crane practiced with the machine immediately upon learning that it could be used to rig elections. Those are facts that are not in dispute.
From the first case “we won” the databases which point us to the need to inspect poll tapes. From that examination of the databases for the 2006 special election, we learned that 85 separate precinct memory cards were at least loaded once to as many as 6 times starting at 10:15 pm election night. No backup of the database was made election night Tuesday May 16th as always had been done. In fact no backup was made until Friday May 19th at 5:01 pm. Why you may ask? Well, that is simple: they didn’t want to leave any evidence of wrongdoing. To have a flip, then you have to have a flop, no backup made, no evidence of misdeeds, except the database shows the time when the reloads were done and how many times it was done.
Importantly, the poll tapes will have date and time on them, how many votes were cast and are signed by the Poll workers at the precinct.
- Will they match what in the final database?
- Will they have evidence of the “cropscanner” being used?
- Will they still be there?
- Have they already been destroyed?
- Why has the county worked and spent so much money keeping the poll tapes out of the public view?
Well if you’re reading this and saying: “well, what about the hand count done by the Arizona Attorney General?” Please read Significant Discrepancies in Comparison of RTA hand count Results by AZ AG, a report by Ellen Theisen of Voters Unite.org.
The truth is Pima County has used every available legal tactic to mount a determined and expensive campaign to stomp on our rights, to stall, deny and escalate costs on what started out as a straight forward agreement to set a time and a fair procedure for following the law by allowing copying of public records.
Run Time 1:38
This time, Pima County has spent over $150,000 and counting to hire two private law firms to handle this case. This is on top of the estimated million dollars Pima County spent to deny release of electronic election databases. Enough already!
This stall tactic in both court cases is just more attempts to deny the public the right to obtain copies of the records of a public election, a right enshrined in Arizona law. As citizens, we must fight to exercise this right because it is the only way we can find out if our votes really count. As you know, transparency and open government is the foundation of democracy.
This is the fight for Freedom, the vigilance the founders taught.
This is just a few of the items we’ve learned and there’s much more wrong.
Read below or Download the actual court filing.
