Publisher’s Note: All of you are aware I think voting is nonsensical and does nothing more than lend legitimacy to the statist quo. Nonetheless, Jim March has produced an expose that I think is instructive to bolster my case. Voter and voting fraud is epidemic in America and the world. Yet, the state cannot even keep its grubby paws off THAT system without trying to game the power brokers and give advantage to the rulers every time. If voting could change the system in a significant way, it would be illegal.
For a witty compendium on why non-voting is the only virtuous course of action: https://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/non-vote-arch.html -BB
Introduction
OK. This is a weird situation. I’m going to make some extraordinary claims here, and by law I’m unable to prove them. That alone should tell you something has gone funky here.
In short, when I finally had a chance to compare a county’s list of registered voters (Apache County) against the Arizona Secretary of State’s database of who’s registered, I found no matches at all in the year of initial voter registration that we would expect the most support for: 2009.
In other words, the county thinks these people are registered, the state doesn’t. Which should be impossible – because due to recent federal laws and statewide procedures changes, they claim to be operating out of the same database.
What’s going on here? I have no idea. But I can tell you this – it ain’t working the way they say it’s supposed to work. It can’t be. Something is broken or operating in full-on retard mode, or worse there’s fraud afoot. I dunno, but I do know this needs looking into.
Welcome to the sausage factory. Grab some nose plugs or a barf bag and do try and keep up.
The Process They Claim Is Going On
In most counties (Pima notably excepted), when you register to vote you fill out a paper form which gets it’s contents typed into a computer database. That database doesn’t reside in your county (again: Pima excepted). Instead, the election clerk in, say, Apache County uses a terminal application on a PC that talks to a database in Phoenix, at the AZ SecState’s office. The application is provided by ES&S (Election Systems and Services), one of the major vendors of electronic voting systems – but unlike electronic voting machines, no outside auditing of the statewide voter registration database is mandated.
It damned well should be!
Once your voter reg data goes to the AZ SecState, they run it past motor vehicles and other vital records. If you’ve moved from elsewhere, they check and make sure you were deleted as a voter wherever you came from – in-state or across states. See, these centralized voter reg databases were mandated by a 2002 federal law, the Help America Vote Act that also pushed electronic voting.
OK. So once the AZ SecState’s computers are convinced you are for real, they pass that back to Apache County or wherever, and you end up on their voter reg rolls.
If you fail to vote too often, you get “purged” – which is why, every election, the records of who voted (not what you voted for thank the deity of your choice) gets passed back to the SecState.
But the key thing is, the “master record” is in Phoenix, at the SecState (or maybe whoever they’re buying major web service space from…Amazon or who knows?). The record in Apache County is a copy. Remember that.
Other than tracking the election process, the voter reg databases are provided by the counties to political parties for two purposes:
1) Figure out who to target for campaign mailings.
2) Research the election process itself – because by AZ law the parties have certain oversight rights on election reliability issues.
On that second basis, I obtained copies of various county registration databases from the Libertarian Party’s state chair, attorney Michael Kielsky – who made me sign a gnarly non-disclosure on this stuff, because it would be his butt on the line if I let spammers get ahold of this stuff. (He keeps the CDs in a fairly hefty safe…I keep the electronic copies I made on a couple of hard disks protected with whole-disk-encryption with nasty long passwords under the Linux DM-Crypt utility. And if somebody thinks they want to try rubber-hose decryption, they’ll be met with Mr. Ruger 357 <grin>. Welcome to Arizona, even the geeks are heavily armed…)
OK. So I have these voter reg databases from various counties. Problem: most of them don’t include the voter’s date of birth. There’s an obscure state law I won’t go into that may give them cover on that, I dunno.
But of the ones I scored, Apache had full details including DOB.
I imported the data into a spreadsheet and sorted them by date of registration. I focused on registrations that happened in 2009, because they’re established enough that their paperwork should have stabilized, but they can’t have fallen out yet due to non-voting. I compared them to the official “check your voter reg status!” page at:
https://voter.azsos.gov – run by the AZ SecState of course.
And what do I get? Zero matches. Wait, what? Seriously. None.
OK…that ain’t supposed to be possible. There’s a single master copy everybody is supposed to be working off of.
Now, I’m registered in Pima County. I’m in there, no problem. Note that I have to have all that info, not just parts – you can’t do a “query for near-miss matches” or anything. I had a friend check his status, and he came up empty – which was impossible considering he was running for office at the time and had been scoped out six ways from Sunday.
Folks, even if this is accidental, it could lead to trouble if it’s messed up in some areas as opposed to others. If it’s not accidental and there’s a built-in false reporting bias on the lines of geography, racial demographics or party affiliation, just telling voters (falsely) that they’re not registered a few days before the election could be enough to swing close races – esp. if the bias is across the state in a partisan fashion.
I’m not saying it is. I am saying we damn well better find out!
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP: open your wallet, find your voter registration card or driver’s license, go to the “check your status” page and look yourself up:
Report back in the comments here, all of the following: your county, whether or not your info is accurate or not (please, report either way!), your political party and the date of the last election you voted in. Use a fake name if you want…that’s not important right now. We need to get a handle on how widespread the problem is, and whether or not it’s happening along a “fault line” of any sort.
I’ll do a follow-up article summarizing the results and what they might mean.
Next step, once we have a bit more statistical data, is to file suit on behalf of the Libertarian Party and whichever others want to join in, to force an outside audit of the whole process – which has never been done before. See, that’s the other nightmare: when this was de-centralized at each county, the county parties could keep a reasonable level of tracking on the voter reg process. Now that it’s all moved to the SecState’s office, that tracking has been lost – since at least 2004 or 2005, when they set up the statewide database. Oops.
Errors could be introduced from several possible points of attack: the database vendor could be monkeying with it, the SecState’s staff could, or for that matter the vital records at motor vehicles and the like that the SecState’s database talk to could be rigged to allow fraudulent paper applications. Or just the web-reporting system is rigged or in error. Or there could be multiple attacks going on. Who knows. What we know now is that something is wrong. We need to scope out the extent in rough terms, scrape together some cash, figure this bad boy out. Telling people they can’t vote when they can…um…yeah, that’s actually a classic problem, isn’t it? This may be just a high-tech version of an old-school scam.
That old Ben Franklin gent was right: we have a Republic, if we can keep it. Sigh. Grab your voter reg cards, dig in, because this is (in part) what “keeping it” looks like.
Sigh.
Jim March is a member of the Board of Directors at https://blackboxvoting.org and is nationally known in election reform issues. He is also the 2nd Vice Chair at the Pima County Libertarian Party, and sits on the Pima County Election Integrity Commission as the LP’s representative as they advise the Pima County Board of Supervisors…and per that commission’s draft bylaws, he’s NOT speaking on behalf of the commission here. He was also the tech support behind the Pima Democratic Party’s lawsuit over election public records, from 2006 to…gawd, parts of it are still going on. If you can stand almost two hours of tragicomic documentary video on that mess, see also: https://www.fatallyflawedthemovie.com and scroll to “Free showing of revised cut”. If you see a big guy in Tucson or nearby rockin’ a single action wheelgun in a custom leather holster with a yin-yang symbol on it so he doesn’t get mixed up with the common AZ “heavily armed Christian Conservative” meme, you probably found him…
Info is correct
PINAL
PARTY NOT DESIGNATED
2010-11-02 2010 GENERAL
I suppose Scotty from Star Trek was right when he said, “The more they over think the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain”