Informed Consent

New EAC Vice-Chair Elected

Per a press release from the EAC, Rosemary Rodriguez was announced as the new vice chair of the Election Assistance Commission. The text of the release, describing her background, follows:

Kansas City, MO - Former Denver City Council President Rosemary E. Rodriguez today was elected vice chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) during a public meeting.

As vice chair, she will work with EAC Chair Donetta Davidson as part of the bipartisan leadership team at the commission to set priorities and communicate EAC initiatives.

"My foremost conviction is that all eligible voters should be empowered with simple, unfettered and uncomplicated access to registration and to the voting booth" said Rodriguez. "I look forward to working with my colleagues as we seek practical means to improve elections in this country in ways that most benefit the voters."

Vice Chair Rodriguez joined the EAC in March. She was nominated to EAC by President Bush in 2006 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February. She will serve until December 12, 2007, filling the remaining term of Ray Martinez, who resigned in August 2006.

She served on the Denver, Colorado City Council for three years, and was its president from 2005 to 2006. She was director of Boards and Commissions for the mayor's office from 2002 to 2003 and a clerk and recorder for the City and County of Denver from 1997 to 2002. In 1997 she was acting director of the Denver Election Commission where she supervised city elections. She has been active in numerous grass roots civic and voter advocacy organizations, including the Colorado Voter Initiative where she co-chaired a statewide initiative to allow Election Day voter registration. She was also a co-founder and chair of Latinos Vote, a voter registration project to register Latino voters and provide non-partisan election information to the Latino community.

Gov't Worker Accused of Giving Social Security #s to Thieves

A former employee of the Social Security Administration is being accused of providing a fellow thief with Social Security numbers and other information gleaned from government computers. At $20 a search, she'd look up personal information of victims and supply it to card thieves who then racked up $2.5 million in fraudulent credit card charges in the victims' names. See the story here

French Warned of Airline Plot Before 9/11

French intelligence agents learned in January 2001 that Al-Qaeda was planning to hijack US airlines and told the CIA chief in Paris, according to classified documents obtained by French newspaper Le Monde. Among the 328 documents was a note from January 2001 saying Al Qaeda had been plotting the hijack for months, though agents didn't appear to know that terrorists intended to crash the planes into buildings.

A former head of the French intelligence agency told the paper that the information didn't carry the same weight it would carry today, since hi-jackings at the time still consisted of someone taking over a plane with hostages and forcing it to land somewhere.

To Catch an E-Mail Liar

It's easier to lie if someone isn't looking you in the eye. But researchers at Cornell University are hoping to catch fibbers through their writing (e-mail and text messaging) with lie-detection software that would flag suspicous correspondence. The software is only in the idea stage but the concept appealed to the National Science Foundation so much it awarded the researchers $680,000 to see if it could actually work.

The researchers point to certain "tells" that give liars away.

Passive voice, verb tense changes, and even noun or verb selection can suggest a person is lying, (said Cornell communications professor Jeff Hancock). Hancock said another indicator of written deception is the decreased use of the word "I," which is most likely an attempt to create distance.

"One of the reasons we think that works as an indicator is that pronoun use is subconscious," he said.

In interactive speech, like instant messaging and some dialogues, liars go into a "persuasive mode" and increase the length of their message by 30% to describe and explain situations, he said. Other factors -- such as individual beliefs about behavior, whether someone is accused of something or interacting with an accuser -- can complicate the process.

"In person, normally people say less because they don't want to be caught," Hancock said during an interview Thursday. "In a monologue, you may say less because you don't want to talk yourself into a trap. It's certainly not a simple thing," Hancock said. "It's a very complex problem. From a theoretical point of view, it's really fascinating."

Researchers in Canada studied thousands of e-mails from Enron for cues, like the use of the first person singular ("I") and negative emotion, and they became interested in about 10 e-mails that appeared to be unique.

"Sure enough, they stood out as problematic and of interest to the legal team," Hancock said.

75,000 Voter Registration Cards w/ SS# Found in Trash

Thirty boxes containing 75,000 voter registration cards for residents of Fulton County, Georgia, were found in a dumpster at an Atlanta technical college. A sampling of the cards, filled with voter Social Security numbers and other personal information, indicate that many of them are for still-active voters, writes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The secretary of state's office is investigating.

Last Cuyahoga Election Board Member Resigns

Despite assertions last week that he was ready for a protracted fight, Robert Bennett, Cuyahoga's election board chair and chair of Ohio's Republican party, announced Wednesday afternoon that he was giving in to the secretary of state's wish for him to resign. Bennett is the last of the four-member bi-partisan board to relent to calls for their resignation.

According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Bennett agreed to resign after Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner agreed to drop her complaint against him "without a finding of fault."

A new board, two Democrats and two Republicans, is expected to be seated after May 1st when Bennett's resignation takes effect.

There's still time for the new board to make effective changes to fix the litany of problems encountered in last year's elections.

EAC Accused of Altering Voter Fraud Report to Appease White House

The federal Election Assistance Commission is being accused of altering a report it commissioned on voter fraud to make the findings agree with the White House stand that such fraud is likely prevalent throughout the country and a risk to the integrity of elections.

But in an earlier draft of the EAC report, which was leaked to the media, the findings stated the opposite, that "there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud, or at least much less than claimed, including voter impersonation, 'dead' voters, noncitizen voting and felon voters."

The final report eliminates the conclusion that voter fraud occurs much less often than claimed and instead says there is no consensus on the pervasiveness of voter fraud.

People for the American Way and other groups contend that the independent researchers behind the report have been muzzled by the EAC, and that the report was altered to please the White House -- which is currently under scrutiny for firing eight U.S. attorney (some of them for failing to prosecute voter fraud as vigorously as the White House wanted them to).

An email exchange published in a New York Times story today would seem to back the idea that there was partisan pressure to tailor the report findings. The email is from one of the report authors, Job Serebrov, a Republican election lawyer, to an EAC staffer:

"Tova and I worked hard to produce a correct, accurate and truthful report," Serebrov wrote. "I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted. . . . Neither one of us was willing to conform results for political expediency."

Why would the EAC, or the White House, want to perpetuate the idea that voter fraud is rampant if it isn't?

Voter fraud has been touted by the White House and others as the reason to pass new laws requiring voters to produce an ID when registering and voting at the polls. Civil liberties groups and others argue that voter ID laws deter certain groups of voters from coming to the polls -- such as minority and low-income voters who are less likely to possess a driver's license or passport and who, more often than not, are registered Democrats.

In fact, a second EAC report about voter ID laws supports the conclusion that ID laws deter minority voters from going to the polls. The EAC was reluctant to release that report, however -- some say the commission suppressed it -- until pressured to do so.

On another note, one interesting section of the draft report on voter fraud appears on page 7:

Several people indicate -- including representatives from DoJ -- that for various reasons, the Department of Justice is bringing fewer voter intimidation and supression cases now and is focusing on matters such as noncitizen voting, double voting and felon voting.

Why is this significant? Democrats often accuse Republicans of voter intimidation and suppression to keep Democratic voters from turning out at the polls to vote. If the DoJ is ignoring voter intimidation and suppression cases does that mean the DoJ is cherry picking types of voter fraud cases -- ignoring certain categories of cases while focusing on others -- to further a partisan agenda?

Sources in a piece published last month by the McClatchy news service say yes:

Other former voting-rights section lawyers (at DoJ) said that during the tenure of Alex Acosta, who served as the division chief from the fall of 2003 until he was named interim U.S. attorney in Miami in the summer of 2005, the department didn't file a single suit alleging that local or state laws or election rules diluted the votes of African-Americans. In a similar time period, the Clinton administration filed six such cases.

Those kinds of cases, Rich said, are "the guts of the Voting Rights Act."

During this week's House judiciary subcommittee hearing, critics recounted lapses in the division's enforcement. A Citizens Commission on Civil Rights study found that "the enforcement record of the voting section during the Bush administration indicates this traditional priority has been downgraded significantly, if not effectively ignored."

By the way, the EAC sent out a press release this morning, presumably in response to the NY Times story about the controversy around its two reports:

Prior to the EAC's adopting a report submitted by a contractor, the EAC has the responsibility to ensure its accuracy and to verify that conclusions are supported by the underlying research.

The Commission takes input and constructive criticism from Congress and the public very seriously. We will take a hard look at the way we do business. Specifically, we will examine both the manner in which we have awarded contracts and our decision-making process regarding the release of research and reports.

Right-wing Blogger Targets Son of Ohio SoS

Did I mention that the battle in Cuyahoga is going to get ugly?

Ohio's new Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has drawn the ire of Republicans for, among other things, trying to oust the head of the Ohio Republican party from his position on Cuyahoga County's election board.

So a member of the conservative political site Rightangleblog decided to go after her son for dirt. After getting access to the Facebook page of Brunner's son John (Facebook accounts are semi-restricted), the blogger grabbed some embarrassing photos of Brunner's son (shown above with his mom and Georgia Congressman John Lewis). The photos show the son kissing a woman's clothed breast and smoking something that looks like it could be a joint. A screenshot of what the poster claims is Brunner's profile page lists under Favorite Quote the following: "I got my lighter. Got a blunt. I'm getting higher!"

Not all of Rightangle's readers agree with its tactics, however. As one commenter writes:

I strongly recommend deleting this entry from RAB. This is a political site, after all, not some paparazzi site where we rate Facebook entries of celebs' children. We have plenty of ammo for taking aim at Jennifer Brunner without weakening our message by taking the target off of her and putting it on her son, who, by the way is NOT a political figure. Do the right thing. Scrub this entry from the blog. We have plenty of bones to pick with Jennifer Brunner as it is.

Cuyahoga Battle Getting Ugly: Ohio Election Chief Not Giving Up Without Fight

The battle in Cuyahoga is heating up.

The last remaining member of Cuyahoga County's election board says he's prepared for a dragdown fight with Ohio's secretary of state to keep his job. Robert Bennett, head of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections and chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, told reporters, "I think you're going to be seeing that this is going to be ratcheted up from here on out."

Bennett, you'll recall, is one of four board members that Brunner called on to resign after two election board employees were sentenced recently for rigging a 2004 recount and after numerous other problems with the administration of Cuyahoga's elections were revealed. Three of the board members resigned, but Bennett has been holding out and has promised to fight Brunner to the end.

Bennett called Brunner a "hypocrite" and noted that she hired Jean Burklo as her office's field director for nine Ohio counties after Burklo had been fired in April 2005 by former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell for allegedly ordering records to be altered.

"If Brunner really cares about upholding the integrity of elections, she needs to match her actions with her rhetoric and remove this employee from her position immediately," Bennett said.

Brunner argued that Burklo was never criminally charged with any wrongdoing, unlike the two election board employees under Bennett's watch.

Yesterday, Attorney General Marc Dann got in on the fight, representing Brunner in a court hearing to discuss a restraining order Bennett filed to temporarily halt Brunner's attempt to oust him. The court denied the restraining order, and a hearing to discuss Brunner's complaint against Bennett will proceed on Monday.

While the focus should be on getting the best election administration for Ohio, partisan politics is bound to cloud this effort -- which some might say is a good argument for why states should not allow officials from political parties to serve on election boards in the first place.

CIA Tactics at Wal-Mart? Former Worker Says Company Spied on Employees, Shareholders and Critics

Is Wal-Mart the next Hewlett-Packard?

A Wal-Mart employee who worked in the company's security division was fired for recording phone conversations between a Wal-Mart employee and a New York Times reporter and for intercepting employee pager messages. Bruce Gabbard, a veteran employee who worked as a security technician for Wal-Mart, says the company regularly surveilled its employees, shareholders and critics. He says he was acting within the parameters of his job orders and that his activities were approved by Kenneth H. Senser, a senior vice president and former CIA operative who has headed Wal-Mart's global security operations since 2003. Gabbard says that Wal-Mart, like HP, was intent on finding the source of leaked company documents and information.

Wal-Mart told the Wall Street Journal this week that "it is our corporate responsibility to have systems in place, including software systems, to monitor threats to our network, intellectual property and our people," but said Gabbard went too far and violated company policy in recording conversations. The company also fired Gabbard's supervisor and said the two had not received orders or permission to record phone conversations.

But the Journal has uncovered some contradictions in Wal-Mart statements. The company says the recording of the New York Times reporter and others occurred over 4 to 5 months, but the Journal says it has information that the surveillance lasted more than a year and half and that other sources confirm parts of what Gabbard alleges.

According to this AP story:

Gabbard told the Wall Street Journal he was part of a large, sophisticated surveillance operation by the Threat Research and Analysis Group, a unit of Wal-Mart's Information Systems Division.

. . .

Gabbard told the newspaper that Wal-Mart sent an employee to infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to learn if it was going to protest at the annual shareholders' meeting and investigated McKinsey & Co. employees it believed leaked a memo about Wal-Mart's health care plans. It also uses software programs to read e-mails sent by workers using private e-mail accounts, he said.