Diebold Voting Machines Pivotal in San Diego Mayoral Race

I know, I know, this is all tinfoil hatter stuff, but check it anyway:

On July 25, San Diego held a special election for a new mayor. Currently mayor-less, America's Finest City, now known as "Enron by the Sea," was the scene of a contested election last November after the courts blocked the victory of write-in candidate Donna Frye because hundreds of her supporters wrote in her name, but forgot to black in the corresponding bubble.

This was an exercise in anti-democracy if you ask me.

To get enough people in San Diego, a city with the dirtiest politics west of Chicago (and which won't even vote to increase property taxes by like a buck fifty after the worst wildfires in California history racked the county) to agree to vote for a write-in candidate is a miracle.

To have a judge rule against counting those historic votes was depressing.

To have a second chance threatened by Diebold machines is criminal.

Of the July 25 results, Raw Story reports:

[A] nonpartisan citizens' group that conducted a parallel election has requested a recount of 11 precincts. This time, the issue isn't unmarked bubbles, but the accuracy of Diebold Accu-Vote optical scan voting machines and the Diebold GEMS central tabulator used to count votes.

The Citizens Audit Parallel Election (CAPE) asked voters exiting polls to vote again and sign a log book attesting to the accuracy of their second vote. Sealed parallel election ballots were counted at KGTV's studio with a TV camera crew filming the counting process.

Nearly 50 percent of all voters participated in the parallel election, which included five polling places representing 11 precincts. The sample included more conservative than liberal precincts, with participation as high among Republicans as among Democrats. The tandem election results showed what most feel to be startling results.

"There is a shift of four percent of the vote, consistently," Joe Prizzi, (engineer and physicist,) reported at a press conference held by CAPE in front of City Hall. Frye received 50.2 percent of the votes cast in the parallel election - enough for an outright victory if those results reflect the outcome citywide. CAPE also found that the official count added approximately 2 percent to each of Frye's two Republican opponents, Jerry Sanders and Steve Francis.

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A team of statisticians from California State University- Northridge - have analyzed the data from CAPE, concluding that the probability of luck or chance as the cause of the observed four percent deviation is less than one in 1,300 - or .000678.

All hope is not lost, but Donna will face an uphill battle against a unified Republican opposition during the run-off.

Coincidence? Sure, and so were Florida, and Ohio, and that little tiny mistake about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

San Diego may be on the front lines of voting reform, which is a great place to be for a city that has been a Republican stronghold and rabidly anti-union for its entire existence. As Bob Dylan, said, "times, they are a changin'."

Anyone concerned about black box voting should follow this story!