From the
Phoenix New Times
Ballot Boxing
GOP honchos keep hiding the truth about election foul-ups, as it's learned that local ballots may be stored illegally
Originally published by Phoenix New Times 2006-01-19
By John Dougherty
Who / What:
Maricopa County Elections DepartmentThe crucial District 20 ballots that have become the centerpiece of a mushrooming election scandal are not in the Maricopa County Treasurer's vault as apparently required by state law.
Instead, I have discovered that the 17,000 ballots are stashed away in an unguarded, un-air-conditioned warehouse west of Sky Harbor Airport.
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Schweikert says ballots have not been stored in the county treasurer's vault for years. He says the offsite storage facility is "safer" than the vault because fewer people have access to it compared to the vault.
But the fact that the ballots have not been stored as prescribed by state law shocked state Senator Jack Harper, the Republican maverick from Surprise who has been trying for six months to gain access to the ballots so that an independent expert could examine them.
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The discovery that the ballots are not in the Treasurer's vault increases the possibility that they could have been damaged or tampered with in the 16 months since the now-infamous September 2004 Republican primary election.
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Recently, a nationally recognized voting technology expert concluded that examination of the District 20 ballots is key to determining whether election machines used in Maricopa County elections could have failed in the September 2004 primary election -- or whether someone may have tampered with votes in the one race under the expert's review.
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I can accept that people employed by the Maricopa County Elections Department may not know how to work the county's election machinery. This is a problem that can be fixed.
I also understand that vote tampering occurs from time to time. This, too, can be addressed with a competent criminal investigation.
But what is up with this orchestrated cover-up? The arrogance of public officials who think they can just refuse to allow a state senator to find out what went wrong is staggering.
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The District 20 mess is a unique wake-up call that the state and county must improve the accuracy and reliability of elections. University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones says it is only necessary to inspect a random sample of about 1,000 of the 17,000 ballots cast in the District 20 Republican primary to determine whether the county's voting machines failed in the 2004 primary or whether there was vote tampering.
Jones says the inspection of the ballots can be conducted in less than a day at a cost of less than $1,000. That's a remarkably fast and inexpensive course of action to resolve an issue of huge public importance.
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You would think that everyone would want to determine what happened -- is it machine failure or fraud? But a handful of the state's most powerful political leaders, all Republicans, are fighting like hell to keep the District 20 ballots from getting audited.
Senate President Ken Bennett and Speaker of the House Jim Weiers have repeatedly tried to derail Senator Harper's investigation into District 20. ...
Bennett, meanwhile, forced Harper to find private funding to pay for Jones' trip to Phoenix to examine and test Maricopa County's voting machines. New Times volunteered to cover Jones' expenses up to $3,000 to conduct his research. ...
Secretary of State Jan Brewer has participated in the cover-up by failing to conduct a thorough investigation of the county elections department ...
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas has taken extraordinary steps to hide the underlying causes of the District 20 fiasco. ...
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... Thomas has been particularly hostile to Harper's efforts to obtain the ballots to determine what happened.
His office is now attacking the credibility of Douglas Jones' examination of the voting machines involved, as well as publicly ridiculing Harper.
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At the center of the cover-up sits Maricopa County elections director Karen Osborne. ...
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Osborne told the supervisors that the reason all the votes suddenly appeared during the recount was that ballots were counted on the "more sensitive" Optech 4-C machines during the recount, as opposed to the "less sensitive" Eagle machines during the primary.
The truth is, nearly all of the 489 new votes came from early, mail-in ballots. And all early ballots were counted by the Optech 4-C machines in the primary as well as the recount. The Eagle voting machines are used to tabulate votes cast on election day at individual precincts.
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It gets even worse.
The next day, Osborne misled Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Eddward Ballinger when she changed her story about where all the votes came from. This time, she said the voting machines have an extremely difficult time reading early votes cast by black felt-tip pens and glitter pens.
We now know, thanks to Jones' examination of the county's voting machines, that this isn't true. Jones found that the Optech 4-C machines can detect even a dot made by black felt-tip pens as a vote and that glitter pens performed better than any other writing instrument he tested.
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