Trouble in River City

The map from Black Box Voting shows the ratio of the number of purges to the
current voter list.

Bev Harris, the founder of Black Box Voting, reports that Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, while bragging about the increased registrations, has failed to mention a document which shows that 1,134,427 voter registrations have been cancelled prior to May 6th's Democratic primary--that's 26 percent of the current statewide list. And oddly, just two northwestern Indiana counties purged almost a quarter of these voters. Lake County, home of Gary Indiana deleted 137,164 voters and neighboring Porter County, another 124,958 voters. Harris comments that

Lake County has been referred to as "the second most liberal county in America." Lake County also has one of the heaviest concentrations of African-American voters that you'll find anywhere in the USA.

Nearby Porter County, the home of Valparaiso, is 95% white and went
solidly for Bush in the 2004 election. It's also got a lot of college
students.

She explains the shortcomings in the information available:

It would be nice to have the original quantities, it would make for a
cleaner number, but this is not available on the Secretary of State's
Web site, so I haven't got a tidier statistic for you, wish I did. I also
wish the time period for these purges was clearly indicated, but it is
not indicated -- nor can it be derived -- from available information
at Indiana's official election Web site...The dang Indiana information doesn't break voter registrations out by party which makes crunching the primary numbers a little harder.

In addition, the Microvote Infinity voting machine has been decertified, but anyone who already bought them can used them, although there have been lawsuits in Pennsylvania for machines that didn't work, and in two Tennessee locales where candidates have asked to redo
elections due to anomalies such as vote totals which changed overnight.

She says that Microvote's insurance company has declined to cover the firm, because the insurance company alleged that Microvote was selling defective products. A judge ruled against the insurance company, saying the product wasn't defective, it just didn't work.

Indiana is also using ES&S paperless iVotronic touch-screens, the ones that
lost 18,000 votes in Sarasota County Florida. Dan Rather showed footage of the touch-screens being manufactured in a sweat shop in the Philippines. Their quality control test was to shake the machine and if it didn't rattle, it passed the test.

She also maintains that the National Election Pool is

paying elections officials (through their associations or otherwise) to call and fax them the results off the voting machine poll tape.In fact, the National Election Pool (used to be Voter News Service) is getting this stuff BEFORE the election officials and way before the secretary of state. The first number they quote is the adjusted exit poll number, and it comes from asking people about who they voted for. The point here is, when what you thought was "exit polls" suddenly changes, that is the impact of those called-in poll tape results. Yep. That's the voting machines talking, and when they say something different than the people answering the exit pollers' questions, we should be looking at the programming on the machine, not the exit pollers, for answers.

Her organization is providing a tool kit on how to do records requests. There will also be a forum to file information from Indiana and North Carolina.