Election Oversight - Florida 2016 November

Citizens Oversight (2016-11-06) Ray Lutz

This Page: https://copswiki.org/Common/ElectionOversightFlorida2016November
More Info: Election Integrity, Election Team, Snapshot Protocol, Snapshot Protocol

Welcome!

Citizens' Oversight Projects is developing a network of citizens who can help us provide oversight of our rigged and hacked elections!

We need your help in the November 2016 General Election in key states and in the top 175 counties in the nation, comprising 50% of the voters.

This topic is dedicated to the situation in Florida, since it is a "battleground state" and tends to frequently be problematic. For other states and the general strategy, see Election Team.

Here are specific suggestions for volunteers who are providing oversight to Florida in the 2016-11-08 General Election

Since we have limited resources, we are targeting the most important districts according to the "Pareto Principle" (AKA 80/20 rule). Actually, we will target first the top 20% and then the top 40% of counties.

The top counties (shown in red) are (in order of importance):

1. Miami-Dade
2. Broward
3. Palm Beach -- 27% of voters in these top three counties alone.
4. Hillsborough
5. Orange
6. Pinellas
7. Duval
8. Lee
9. Brevard
10. Polk
11. Volusia
12. Pasco
13. Sarasota -- These top 13 (20% of the counties) comprise about 66% of the voters in the state.
14. Seminole -- (blue)
15. Marion -- (blue) -- We added two more as a compromise. These top 15 counties are our primary target in Florida, comprising 71% of the voters in the state.

• Next 12 Counties (blue) -- together with the first 15 cover over 88% of the voters. (Manatee, Lake, Escambia, Collier, Leon, St. Lucie, Osceola, St. Johns, Alachua, Clay, Okaloosa, and Hernando)
• Remaining 40 Counties -- These counties comprise together only 12% of the voters in the state.

Bottomline: we need boots-on-the-ground help in Florida. Feel free, of course, to cover your own county even if it is not in our target list, it can't hurt. But incremental value is very low compared to the top 15 counties we list here.

Audits in Florida

Election audits in Florida are minimal in power but are not worthless, especially to discourage hackers and fraudsters from even trying, if they know they might be caught. In Florida, they choose one random race and one percent of the applicable precincts. You can't do any less than that, so it isn't any sort of high-powered audit they are using. In addition, in Florida, if any race is so close that a "recount" is ordered, then no audit occurs at all. And the "recount" amounts to machine rescanning the ballots and only looking at over-votes and under-votes for voter intent. So if there is any recount, then there is really no audit at all, and the recount is so gutless, it will never catch anything. *"MACHINE RECOUNTS" DO NOT QUALIFY AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE MANUAL AUDIT in the opinion of Citizens Oversight
See the following for details and an example of a random draw and recount.

• (M1688) 2016-09-01 Recount ordered in Rouson-Narain race -- Jeremy Wallace, Tampa Bay Times, FL
• (M1689) 2016-09-01 Marion County, Florida choosing random race and precincts for tally of 2016-08-30 primary -- Margaret Carlock, Citizens Oversight, FL_Marion

There are two parts of these audits which are of interest to us.

1. The random selection meeting, where they select the random race and 1% of the precincts that comprise that race.
2. The actual manual tallying process

The most important part of this process to make sure it is clean, is the selection of the RANDOM RACE. We really need to VIDEO RECORD these meetings and make sure they cannot use any sleight of hand to manipulate the result.

Audit Schedule for November 8, 2016 General Election

Here is the schedule as known today. If you do not see the schedule for the audit selection and manual audit, perhaps you can help us find this information when it becomes available. We will be updating this page as new information becomes available, so check back occasionally. Most counties have standardized on Nov. 18 for the random selection meeting.

SAVE DEMOCRACY IN 5 MINUTES!
PLEASE ATTEND AND VIDEO RECORD THE ELECTION AUDIT
SELECTION MEETINGS HIGHLIGHTED BELOW!

More info: https://copswiki.org/Common/ElectionOversightFlorida2016November
These meetings are very short but it is critical that we record them because otherwise
Election officials can rig the elections. PLEASE HELP!
NOTE: Please check with election office before to find out if selection meeting will be held.

These are the counties that have announced recounts:(None have announced recounts so far)

County	Rank	Audit Selection	Manual Audit	Location	Website	Lead Contact Audit Selection Video
Brevard	9	CANCELLED (due to recount)	11/22/16 (9 am)	2725 Judge Fran Jamieson Way, Bldg C, Melbourne, FL 32941	votebrevard.com
Broward	2	CANCELLED (due to recount)		1501 N.W. 40th Avenue, Lauderhill, Florida 33313.	browardsoe.org	Michaelangelo, David Gibson
Citrus		11/18/16 (1 pm)		120 North Apopka Ave., Inverness, FL 34450	votecitrus.com	Margaret Carlock
Duval	7			105 East Monroe Street, Jacksonville, FL 32202	duvalelections.com	Lisa Peth
Hillsborough	4	11/18/16 (10 am)	11/22/16 (10 am)	2514 N. Falkenburg Rd., Tampa, FL 33619	votehillsborough.org
Lee	8	CANCELLED (due to recount)		2480 Thompson Street, Fort Myers, FL 33901	lee.vote	Sara Peterson
Marion	15	11/18/16 (1 pm).		981 NE 16th Street, Ocala, FL 34470	votemarion.com	Margaret Carlock
Miami-Dade	1	CANCELLED (due to recount)		2700 NW 87th Ave, Miami, FL 33152	miamidade.gov/elections
Orange	5	11/18/16 (12 pm)	11/22/16 (8 am)	119 West Kaley Street, Orlando FL 32806	ocfelections.com
Palm Beach	3	11/18/16 (4pm)	11/21/16 (9 am)	240 South Military Trail, West Palm Beach, FL 33416 Canvassing Board meetings are held at the Supervisor of Elections Service Center, located at 7835 Central Industrial Drive, Riviera Beach, FL 33404	pbcelections.org
Pasco	12	11/18/16 (10 am)		14236 6th Street, Suite 200, Dade City, FL 33526	pascovotes.com
Pinellas	6	CANCELLED (due to recount)		13001 Starkey Rd., Largo, FL 33773	votepinellas.com	Ray Lutz
Polk	10	CANCELLED (due to recount)		250 South Broadway Avenue, Bartow, FL 33831	polkelections.com
Sarasota	13	11/18/16 (4 pm)	11/22/16 (9 am)	101 S. Washington Blvd., Sarasota, FL 34236	sarasotavotes.com
Seminole	14	11/18/16 (4:30 pm)	11/22/16 (10 am)	1500 E. Airport Blvd. Sanford, FL 32773	voteseminole.org
Volusia	11	11/18/16 (9 am)	11/22/16 (9am)	125 W. New York Ave., De Land, FL 32720	volusiaelections.org	Rita Lunardi

What we want you to do

There may be other things you can see at your elections office, so try to be ultra aware of what is going on. Use your photo or video camera as much as you can. But we have some very specific tasks.

1. Provisional screening -- Spend some time watching the screening of provisional ballots. Normally, only the signature should be compared, not the address. This happens prior to the certified results.
2. Snapshot File -- Prior to the Audit Selection meeting, find and download the results of the election. We call this the Snap Shot file. In Florida, this file is the certified results. We need the results separated out by PRECINCT, RACE, and BALLOT TYPE. Best to get all formats available. Sometimes only PDF but CSV file is sometimes easier to load into a spreadsheet or open with a program.
   • Please email these to info@citizensoversight.org or at least let us know you have it and we can give you instructions to get it to us. We want to archive these on our website.
3. Audit Selection Meeting -- Attend the Audit Selection meeting and VIDEO RECORD the entire meeting. (see M 801for some tips -- Nowadays, you can just use your cell phone, but it may be a long meeting, so a tripod and a little cell-phone clamp may be needed. )
   • We want to make sure they are picking both the race and precinctAT RANDOM so it is a complete surprise to them.
     • If they choose these by numbers, those must be assigned and available in lists BEFORE the selection.
     • Please inspect any sheet of paper they may put into a hat and ask to draw them and do not let them hold the side of the hat (and hold one of the slips of paper).
     • Best is to use ten-sided dice to select a number that then indexes into a table.
   • Please send us the video or upload to You Tube or another service and give us the link.
   • If they say you can't record the meeting, stand your ground! Of course you can!
     • This is a public meeting, not one processing the ballots. You have the right to record these meetings as long as you are not disruptive. We have had to have some confrontation in the past over this point. Be sure to bring the text of the actual law in your state. If they persist, ask them to explain what they are afraid of, and tell them your recording is for educational purposes. * We sent an email to all the counties we mentioned (top 15 in FL, top 2 in AZ), shown below.
     • Florida Recording Law: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/florida-recording-law
       • QUOTE: If you attend a public meeting (i.e., a meeting of a governmental body required to be open to the public by law) in Florida, generally you are permitted to use sound or video recording devices, so long as your recording does not disrupt the meeting.
   • Take a snapshot with your camera of the selected numbers.
   • If they do not allow you to record the meeting, despite your most assertive objection, then please document the situation, (video record it if possible, or secondly, audio record it).
   • Arrange to have another person who will simply attend if you plan to stand your ground and take the recording at the risk of arrest.
     • Being arrested for trying to record an election audit meeting will be a huge feather in your hat and will allow the issue to be settled in a court of law. We are supposed to have first amendment rights!
4. Watch the Manual Tally procedure.You must be able to get close enough to see the ballots and confirm they talliers are marking it correctly.
   • Most important is the end of the process to see what they do if there is a difference.
   • Talliers should NOT know the official results before they start, but if they checked the file we downloaded, they would know, so this is a bit of a defect in the process.
   • Some counties let us record the general situation in the room as long as we make it clear the camera will not focus on individual ballots (although with no identifying marks on the ballots, it makes no sense to worry about that but they are over the top on establishing control.) The only time it is a genuine concern is if you can both identify the voter and see the ballot such as when provisionals and VBM ballots are processed. That is a crime, so you don't want to try to do that and generally be willing to cooperate. Bottom line is that you can try to record it but if you can't get it, it is not as important as the SNAPSHOT file and the SELECTION PROCESS.

An example

Here is a sample video we made of the selection process in San Diego. San Diego only selects PRECINCTS and not RACES because CA law requires that all races be audited. In this video, we also notice that they chose too few VBM "batches" and this led to our lawsuit.

• (M1662) 2016-06-08 San Diego County Manual Tally selection meeting, June 8, 2016 -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, Save time and skip through most of the drawing part!

Please join our team.

• Sign up here: http://citizensoversight.org/signup

Email to Elections Officials

Citizens Oversight sent the following email to elections officials in the targeted counties on 8/30,

To:        (list of emails of elections officials)
From:   raylutz@citizensoversight.org
Subject: Citizen Oversight of Audit-related Public Meetings for Nov 8, 2016 Presidential Election

[Elections Officials: Please confirm your reception of this email. Also, please confirm the date, time and location of your random selection meeting. Thank you!]

Dear Elections Official:

Our organization's primary mission is increased civic engagement and increased oversight by the public
of the processing of our elections. In this election, we are encouraging citizens to provide oversight of your
public meetings regarding selection of races and precincts involved in manual tally audits in your county.

Because these are public meetings and contain no sensitive material, (such as ballots, signatures, etc.)
we believe the public has the right to video record these meetings, as with all other public meetings these
days. As a matter of courtesy, we wanted you to be forewarned that citizens may wish to attend these
meetings AND will want to discretely video record the selection process.

We have told the volunteers that they will likely not be allowed to video record the actual tallying process,
but since the ballots have been separated from information regarding the identity of the voter, this
restriction is hardly makes sense. Nevertheless, it has become customary not to video record this process
and the volunteers are aware of these likely restrictions of that process.

Please let us know in advance if you intend to block access or disallow video recording of the audit selection
public meetings. According to state "sunshine" laws, such recording is allowed unless it disrupts
the meeting. We have provided instructions to these volunteers not to disrupt the meeting.

The other thing we have asked them to do is to download the election results, broken down by precinct, race,
and ballot type, prior to the selection procedure. We believe you normally provide this on your website. If not,
those members of the public may request that file. It is essential that these results are "frozen" prior to the
random selection so that there is no possibility that the computer results could be changed. From what we
have been able to learn, it appears that you normally publish this file. Nevertheless, we suggest that you
mention the location of the published file in your meeting.

Although we have suggested that members of the public attend these meetings and document what is done,
they are not officially representing Citizens Oversight, Inc. but act instead as individual members of the public.

Sincerely,

Ray Lutz
Citizens Oversight, Inc.
A 501(c)3 nonprofit Organization.
(phone number)

Responses to the email

Palm Beach County

Mr.Lutz:

Thank you for your correspondence.

All of our election activities are always recorded and open to the public.

The time and date of our audit selection process will be when we meet to add Military Ballots into our vote totals, 4pm on 11/18/16 at our warehouse, 7835 Central Industrial Drive, Riviera Beach.

Our Post Election Audit will be posted on our website and at this time we believe it will be on Monday, 11/21/16 beginning at 9am, but we must confirm with the other Canvassing Board Members.

Because our warehouse has motion cameras, we always have a video record of our activities.

Pinellas County

Good afternoon,

The Pinellas County canvassing Board will meet at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, November 15 at the Election Service Center, 13001 Starkey Rd. in Largo.

The Board’s meeting agenda includes the following:

    Conduct a machine recount for the City of Seminole Council Member contest
    Certify second set of unofficial election results for the November 8, 2016 General Election
    Conduct a manual recount, if required, for the City of Seminole Council Member contest

State law mandates an automatic machine recount if the margin between candidates or issues in unofficial results is 0.5% or less. An automatic manual recount is required if the machine recount results in a margin of 0.25% or less.

Per F.S. 101.591(6), no post-election audit is required if a manual recount is conducted.

All Canvassing Board meetings are open to the public.

Sincerely,

Jason Latimer
Communications Director
Representing Deborah Clark, Supervisor of Elections
13001 Starkey Road
Largo, Florida  33773
Phone: (727) 464-4988
Fax: (727) 464-6239 
jlatimer@votepinellas.com
Facebook: PinellasCountySOE
Twitter: @VotePinellas
Instagram: @VotePinellas

Jacksonville County

Dear Mr. Lutz:

You are correct these activities are conducted in the public and are advertised/noticed on our website. The public is always welcome. Since It is not a public meeting the public is there strictly to observe. We do not field questions or allow time for public comments. We will be following the rules set by the State of Florida. Check our website for dates and times.

Mike Hogan

Brevard

Hello Mr. Lutz,

Thank you for taking the time to write to the Supervisor of Elections office.

At 9:00 am on Wednesday, November 16, 2016 the Canvassing Board will meet to conduct two recounts: Cocoa Beach City Commission, Seat 3 and Palm Bay City Council, Seat 3. The Brevard Canvassing Board will meet at 9:00 am on Tuesday, November 22, 2016 to conduct the Post-Election Audit, if a manual recount is not conducted on November 16th.

Please reach out if you have any further questions.

Thank you,  
Michelle Bujold
Communications Director
Brevard County Supervisor of Elections
Office: 321-637-5316 

Orange County (Florida)

Mr. Lutz,

The Orange County, Florida County Canvassing Board is scheduled to meet at noon on Friday, November 18, 2016 at the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office (119 West Kaley Street, Orlando). At this meeting the County Canvassing Board will be canvassing any oversea ballots, obtaining our final results, and then select the contest and precincts for the Manual Audit. The Manual Audit is scheduled for Tuesday, November 22, 2016 at 8 AM at the Elections Office. The meeting schedule for the Canvassing Board is posted on our website (ocfelections.com).

Bill Cowles
Orange County
Supervisor of Elections

Pasco

The below link has the dates/times you requested.
http://www.pascovotes.com/Newsworthy/Newsroom/ArtMID/8461/ArticleID/296/CategoryID/14/CategoryName/Legal-Notice/NOTICE-OF-CANVASSING-BOARD-MEETINGS-GENERAL-ELECTION


Regards,

Brian Corley, MPA
Supervisor of Elections
Pasco County
(O) 352-521-4323
(C) 813-579-0707
www.pascovotes.com 
Twitter @brianecorley

Topics that reference this topic or similar topics

• (M1684) 2016-08-30 Citizens' Oversight: Election Scrutiny Extended to Florida and Arizona Primary Elections -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
• (ElectionOversightProcedures) 2016-08-10 Election Oversight Procedures -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,

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