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Send by emailInvestigations Working Group
John Brakey
On Election Day 2004, John Brakey was Democratic Cluster Captain for four precincts in Arizona Congressional District 7, which had 80% non-Republican, predominately Hispanic voter registration, yet would be recorded as having voted 42% for Bush. Throughout Election Day, John witnessed suspicious behavior by poll workers at three of his four precincts. An hour after the polls had closed, he caught poll workers at one of these stations in the act of altering the poll books.
Shocked, John immediately launched what would grow into a 1,000+ hour audit of the voting at precinct #324, beginning by salvaging the poll-worker-annotated “Advice to Voter” slips from the trash the next morning and then buying copies of all other pertinent public records.
John entered all of these data on Excel spreadsheets and began e-mailing them to Dave Griscom with highlighted oddities and irregularities.
Eventually, the team of Brakey and Griscom uncovered evidence of an elaborate "hack and stack" poll-worker fraud designed to alter the optical scan ballot count and evade detection in a recount. Griscom was able to calculate the probability of the seven irregularities they found being committed exactly 11 times each. The odds that these seven irregularities were random accidents due to poll-worker incompetence, were less than one chance in 20 million.
Conclusion: The poll workers did these things on purpose, and they religiously followed a formula whereby they could have swung the vote by as much as 12.8%--without being detected in a manual recount of the ballots.
John Brakey is a co-founder of AUDIT-AZ (Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections, Arizona) and the Special Task Force Leader of the Arizona Democratic Party Election Integrity Committee, in which he works with EDA Investigations Co-Coordinator David Griscom.
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David L. Griscom, Ph.D
David L. Griscom is a co-founder of AUDIT-AZ (Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections, Arizona) and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, retired from a 33-year career with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. In 2004, while he was Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Griscom happened to meet John R. Brakey. On Election Day 2004, Brakey was Democratic Cluster Captain for four precincts in Arizona Congressional District 7, which had 80% non-Republican, predominately Hispanic registration, yet would be recorded as having voted 42% for Bush.
Having witnessed suspicious behaviors by poll workers at three of his four precincts, John Brakey launched a 1,000+ hour audit of the voting at precinct #324, and called on David Griscom for assistance in analyzing the voting records.
Eventually, the investigative duo uncovered a pattern of poll-worker fraud, and Griscom was able to use simple gambler’s odds to prove that the probability of seven different irregularities being committed exactly 11 times each, was less than one chance in 20 million if they were seven random accidents due to poll-worker incompetence.
Conclusions: The poll workers did these things on purpose, and they religiously followed a formula whereby they could have swung the vote by as much as 12.8% -- without being detected in a manual recount of the ballots.
In 2005, Dave was invited to speak on John’s and his research at the National Election Reform Conference (Nashville), the Election Assessment Hearing (Houston), and the AZ Democratic Committee Meeting (Flagstaff).
Dave also presented a research paper on these findings at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, February 17, 2007, in San Francisco.
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Investigations
Description:
County-level election integrity organizations will train citizen volunteers to conduct election research drawing on methods such as those modeled by Blackboxvoting.org. Methods will include filing public records requests with county and state elections departments seeking raw voting data; procedures for the conduct of elections; voting systems manuals, procedures, and technical specifications; and transactions and communications between local elections departments, voting systems vendors, and secretaries of state or other chief state elections officials.
Election data down to the precinct level will be sought, including voter registration rolls, voter rosters (poll books), precinct poll tapes, ballot image files, tabulator backup data files, disaggregated, real-time precinct voting data transmissions, absentee ballots and reports, spoiled ballots and reports, provisional ballots and reports, memory card inventories, modem traffic logs, ballot chain of custody documentation, and whatever else is determined to be necessary for a complete accounting of all voting activity.
Technical experts, whether volunteers or hired consultants, will examine voting systems information collected pursuant to public records requests and/or evidence obtained through legal discovery, searching for evidence indicating machine error, clerical error, and other election irregularities, including evidence of vote-altering software and firmware operations.
These hardware and software technical specialists will devise election auditing methodologies; recruit other expert consultants; train other volunteers in information-gathering; conduct forensic examinations of electronic voting equipment, computer hard drives, machine logs, modem traffic logs, software code, etc.; publish findings for peer review; and prepare evidence for litigation efforts.
Other volunteer researchers will pursue leads on all other types of information pertaining to electronic and non-electronic voting machines, supplies, vendors and their subcontractors, including business and political relationships linking elections officials, voting system vendors, representatives of polling firms and news media. Investigations will cover corporate ownership, loans and payments, business or data-sharing agreements, lobbying of local elections officials or state or federal legislators, and any other relationships or dealings influencing the conduct and reporting of elections.
Election data, technical evidence, and analysis methods developed by this coalition will be shared and coordinated with the National Election Data Archive and other projects working to systematize election data reporting and analyze patterns in past elections for evidence of error or fraud in the tabulation of election results.
Members:
John Brakey AZ
Chandra Friese CA
David Griscom AZ
Tom Manaugh TX
Ellen Stone WA
Peg Luther TX
Wallace Knight MD
Fritzi Ross NC
Page Day WA
Jim Soper CA
Phyllis Huster WA
Bev Harris WA
Ken Karan CA
Jim March AZ
Ramon Sevilla CA
GO TO THE FORUM (Forum access requires Working Group registration)
County-level election integrity organizations will train citizen volunteers to conduct election research drawing on methods such as those modeled by Blackboxvoting.org. Methods will include filing public records requests with county and state elections departments seeking raw voting data; procedures for the conduct of elections; voting systems manuals, procedures, and technical specifications; and transactions and communications between local elections departments, voting systems vendors, and secretaries of state or other chief state elections officials.
Election data down to the precinct level will be sought, including voter registration rolls, voter rosters (poll books), precinct poll tapes, ballot image files, tabulator backup data files, disaggregated, real-time precinct voting data transmissions, absentee ballots and reports, spoiled ballots and reports, provisional ballots and reports, memory card inventories, modem traffic logs, ballot chain of custody documentation, and whatever else is determined to be necessary for a complete accounting of all voting activity.
Technical experts, whether volunteers or hired consultants, will examine voting systems information collected pursuant to public records requests and/or evidence obtained through legal discovery, searching for evidence indicating machine error, clerical error, and other election irregularities, including evidence of vote-altering software and firmware operations.
These hardware and software technical specialists will devise election auditing methodologies; recruit other expert consultants; train other volunteers in information-gathering; conduct forensic examinations of electronic voting equipment, computer hard drives, machine logs, modem traffic logs, software code, etc.; publish findings for peer review; and prepare evidence for litigation efforts.
Other volunteer researchers will pursue leads on all other types of information pertaining to electronic and non-electronic voting machines, supplies, vendors and their subcontractors, including business and political relationships linking elections officials, voting system vendors, representatives of polling firms and news media. Investigations will cover corporate ownership, loans and payments, business or data-sharing agreements, lobbying of local elections officials or state or federal legislators, and any other relationships or dealings influencing the conduct and reporting of elections.
Election data, technical evidence, and analysis methods developed by this coalition will be shared and coordinated with the National Election Data Archive and other projects working to systematize election data reporting and analyze patterns in past elections for evidence of error or fraud in the tabulation of election results.
Members:
John Brakey AZ
Chandra Friese CA
David Griscom AZ
Tom Manaugh TX
Ellen Stone WA
Peg Luther TX
Wallace Knight MD
Fritzi Ross NC
Page Day WA
Jim Soper CA
Phyllis Huster WA
Bev Harris WA
Ken Karan CA
Jim March AZ
Ramon Sevilla CA
GO TO THE FORUM (Forum access requires Working Group registration)
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