Director Vu's Next Gig?

Is Michael Vu taking a position at Diebold? After Director Vu's recent dismal performance in the May 2006 primary election, and subsequent unsuccessful attempts of Dems to fire him, it has been widely rumored that Vu had cut a deal to leave the Cuyahoga BOE soon after the general election. But who would be willing to take such damaged goods? Perhaps Diebold, as Vu just directed approximately $10M of Cuyahoga's tax dollars to Diebold in the last 3-months. Sounds like a win-win for both Vu and Diebold, with both getting nice payoffs - all at the expense of Cuyahoga County.

Please stay tuned. But remember, you heard it here first.

Video: Board attacks Election Science Institute

Here is what happens when you conduct an audit of a Cuyahoga-Diebold Election and the results are not favorable. In short, you get attacked. In this August 2006 video, Steven Hertzberg presents ESI's findings to Chairman Bennett, who obviously is more interested in attacking the messenger than in fixing the problem with Diebold machines.





Viewers should note that the questions (see below) asked by ESI have yet to be answered by the Cuyahoga BOE:

1. After 8-weeks of repeated requests to the Board of Elections to provide ESI with data that did not include 17 year old and curb side voters, why did ESI still receive data contaminated with this information? How will the BOE provide accurate data to partisan election lawyers in a timely way during a future hotly contested election result.

2. Why does the Diebold TSX machine not provide an error message when data from a machine does not copy on to a memory card? ESI observed approximately 4% of the machines that did not copy election results from the machine to a memory card without repeated attempts by operators.

3. Did booth officials switch memory cards on Election Day, and what impact does that have on transparency and auditability?

4. Can we confirm why 24 TSX units in the warehouse, used on Election Day, do not have any election data on them at all?

5. Why do over 50% of the VVPAT summaries not match the election archive results, even when all missing VVPATs are eliminated from our analysis?

BOE's Election Data Archival Process

In late July/August, 2006, in the midst of election data retention concerns, with the federal 22 month deadline approaching while the Richard Hayes Phillips investigation of 2004 punch card ballots was still proceeding and showing many "anomalies", I asked and became aware of SoS Blackwell's Advisory 2005-04. It supposedly allows BOE's to "transfer" (undefined) electronic election data to CD-ROM (in an undefined process) for non-federal races, after only 60 days after an election - wiping off memory cards, presumably for (vendors' ridiculously high) cost reasons.

Further alarmed, I began to question if the Cuyahoga BOE was going to "transfer", and if so, what and how they would do that - the latter of which, my answerers did not know. I also asked for notice to be posted on their website so the public could witness the process.

Very late Friday 9/22/06/early Saturday a notice popped up on their site for transferring on Sunday 9/24 at 8:30am, a time when many are in church and also a Jewish High Holy Day. Unable to attend because of the latter, I called a videographer to ask if he would go and film for me.

Though he then originally would not share the film, he did tell me about it. After I shared the news with some others, the videographer has been persuaded to release some of it the internet.

The clip here is a portion of the 10/2/06 Cuyahoga board meeting, where I asked them about that "transferring" process. The other video clip shows what really happened on 9/24. This press release issued by ESI and Ed Felton discusses the implications of the BOE's actions.

Compare for yourself - and be shocked by both the process and response.