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Received via email.

It looks like this Minuteman thing is going to serve as the pretext for getting out of Iraq. Clearly, the Iraq war is lost and Bush will have to, as they say, “declare a victory and leave” before the mid-term elections. He will claim that the situation has stabilized, that Iraq is safe for democracy etc., and, of course, the Iraqis will play along with this, since about the only thing that unites them is their fervent desire to wish the last American soldier “God speed”.

The National Guard is “needed” on the border and as Governor Terminator says, if America can afford the war in Iraq (which, of course, it can’t!), it can afford to patrol its borders. Of course, it cannot do both, and everybody knows that, but nobody will be churlish enough to say so! Moreover, more young Americans may be willing to join the Guard if all it involves is, say, a month’s full-time service per year harassing the ever-polite Canadians or pushing Mexicans around. Indeed, a Swiss-style “draft”, making such service compulsory, could probably be introduced without too much opposition.

I have always believed that the psychological reaction to defeat in Iraq of Americans, still traumatized by the defeat in Vietnam, would be to withdraw into the homeland and circle the wagons. That, in fact, will be a blessing for everybody: for us in the rest of the world, who are thoroughly sick and fed up with American meddling, both public and private, in our affairs, and for Americans, who will then be able to get on with the job of taking back their country from the crazies and re-building it on a sound basis.

I also saw in the BBC website the other day a report that some conservative groups are starting to attack the gas-guzzling SUVs that Americans are so fond of on the basis that America’s profligate ways are making the US dependant on foreign oil and that should be corrected. Clearly, even the crazies are starting to realize that they’re crazy!

A final point. The EU official in me reads about this “Northern Wall” and says “Whatever happened to NAFTA?” You couldn’t build a wall between EU Member States, nor, indeed, have a system of work permits. All of this seems to amount to a tacit admission that NAFTA has failed and will now be quietly buried, although, here again, nobody will say that out loud.

Contracts and Coffee Next Week

By Greg Moses

PinkDome

Prompted by a newly-posted itinerary for a “HAVA listening tour” scheduled by the Texas Secretary of State in various counties, the Texas Civil Rights Review made a few phone calls today (Mar. 24). We reached three SOS staffers who were very responsive and who provided the following information :

(1) The present schedule, beginning March 23, was posted March 23. An offline schedule that runs through the end of April does not yet include Dallas County. I have asked for a complete schedule via email.

(2) The tour is intended to touch base with County Election Officials so they can get the money available to them through HAVA and tell the SOS “what’s working and what’s not working”.

(3) The TEAM statewide database mandated by HAVA to be completed by Jan. 1 and now under development by IBM and Hart InterCivic is nearing completion of the documentation of “business rules” for software specs.

As plans now exist, voters will be able to more easily find out online where to vote, but there will be no difference in the registration experience, ie same old cards with HAVA ID requirements for new voters, same need to fill out a new card when you move, etc.

One source, who spoke on condition of anonymity said Texas would be on the cutting edge of what HAVA requires. Which tells you that HAVA requires nothing FOR the voters.

TCRR scheduled a time next week to view the TEAM contract (500-600 pages). And we were offered coffee to go with it!

I didn’t express with any of these staffers my disappointment that the meeting with Harris County officials was posted the same day as the meeting. One staffer assured me that the press had been notified way in advance. Oh, that’s great. Please let me know if you see the story.

Scott Henson writes: “Texas prisons are full, so the Governor vetoes both legislation that would cause fewer non-violent offenders to have their probation revoked, and also money for leasing space for those offenders who now inevitably will enter the system. The veto of drug treatment money, I suppose, was just for good measure: Texas wouldn’t want any of our addicts to kick their addictions, after all, or else they might not need to be incarcerated.”

See Henson’s earlier roundup of Gov vetoes, including a bill that would have required written consent to search.

Add it up: more useless incarceration. A little Gitmo for everyone everywhere. Are we feeling safer yet?

Our Shero, Karen Richards
You Hang In There, You Hear?

By Greg Moses

OffTheKuff / GritsForBreakfast

With the power of a new voter database coming online next year, will Texas be able to delete tens of thousands of voters with a few keystrokes of political will? Not if Karen Richards gets her way.

As director of voter registration in Texas, Richards has been asked to evaluate thousands of “business functions” that will be part of the new voter registration system, and her comments read like the barks of a guard dog every time the technology gets close to enabling an automated purge.

The frequency of her warnings against automated purges suggests that worries about the technology itself are not unfounded. Why would she have to repeat herself so often if the technology were not ready to swoop through voter lists? Considering the power of these databases nationwide, the Richards principles would make a fine template for federal law.

Time after time, Richards repeats her twin principles: (1) “only a user may explicitly cancel a voter in Texas” and (2) “events should not automatically change a voter’s status.”

Richards is meticulous in her logic. The eRegistry system made by election purveyor Hart InterCivic will match voter records against records of felons and deceased. But even if a felon record matches a voter, Richards argues that there can be no “certainty” of a match, because the possibility remains that identity theft may be involved. Says Richards, the computer may make all the matches it wants to “as long as flagging does not mean actually canceling the voter record.”

Or take the case of a registered voter who is contacted for jury duty and marks as an excuse for not showing up that she or he is not a citizen. eReigstry will see to it that the information gets tracked back to the voter database where the voter will be marked non-citizen and ineligible to vote. Say Richards once again: there should be no automatic deleting of voters for any reason.

If the database flags a record on the basis of some internal information flow, someone should look things over. But the Richards principles are clear and consistent. Do not have the computer delete any voter for any reason by automatic means. Or in language that we might call Richards rule number three: when it comes to correlating any information that would affect a voter’s status, the computer “should not attach anything more than an event to investigate.”

And Richards has commitments beyond the purge question. When a new voter is added says Richards, “a new voter card should automatically be created.” Sometimes comments from software vendor Hart InterCivic seem strangely nonresponsive. For example, when Richards insists that voter registrations should be created “automatically,” the Hart rep assures her that the user will have an “opportunity” to create such a card. But an “opportunity” is not “automatic.”

Or when Hart suggests that a “business function” will allow a voter to be registered and assigned a precinct without a complete or verifiable address, Richards says the function should be disabled. “Leaves room for error for voters not to receive certificates or appear on voter list,” writes Richards. Richards to Hart: disable that event.

With all these “business functions” to read and think about, we are beginning to understand the significance of March complaints from state staff that they felt overwhelmed by the flow of paperwork coming at them from Hart. These are not the kinds of evaluations that should go rushed.

Some of the technical questions about which ID numbers will be used are resolved in the comments between Hart and state election officials. Texas has a distinct preference for drivers license numbers as an indexing scheme, and computer tests showed that the TDL numbers were more efficient than SSN for searching voter records

Also, our hypothesis about the real value of the voter lists as campaign and party contact tools gets a shot from eRegistry “business functions” that will accept home phone numbers and email addresses. As Richards points out, the phone number collection should be disabled since Texas law prevents counties from taking the information. But the Hart response is telling: We can disable it until such time as Texas wants it back, as other states have found these contact data helpful. No doubt.

On the possibility of name prefixes we had to laugh out loud. Name prefixes can be enabled by the Hart system, but Richards sees no good reason for them. Perhaps, maybe a Mr. or Ms. could be used for printing letters, to which the Hart rep replies in writing, okay we’ll consider enabling Mr. and Mrs. The first time this happens, Hart gets off the hook, but the second time it happens, Richards writes, “why is the Hart answer talking about Mr/Mrs references?” LOL! Ms. Richards, you hang in there, you hear!

The many detailed world
of the Texas voter database project

Richards’ evaluation of eRegistry business functions have been carefully documented and preserved as part of User Acceptance Criteria or UAC that were completed during late March. In the meticulous tables of functions and comments found in a four-inch stack of UAC documents, the reader gets a sense of the detail demanded by Bob Futrell, the state’s project manager for the Texas Election Administration Management system or TEAM project.

For instance we know that the database to be delivered from IBM to Texas early next year will scan the 88,000 records of Hays County in .5 seconds to check for a duplicate drivers license number before committing a new voter to the database; that voter registration certificates for mass mailing will be created at a rate ot 83.8 per second; and that it will take ten minutes to create an official voting list for a county of 1.6 million voters.

These are just a few of the details that Futrell required IBM to find out about the existing Texas database so that when the lead contractor delivers the new system next year it will be perform at least as well as the existing Texas Voter Registration System (TVRS).

And these details in turn are only the top few sheets of paper that begin to outline all the “business functions” that the state will expect before it says yes to the computerized system now being developed by IBM and Hart InterCivic. In official project terms the UAC doc is marked as Deliverable 32 (D.32) and was turned in at the end of March.

The paperwork on these computer events still has to go through four more transformations as “business functions” listed in D.32 get refined into “how to requirements” or Detailed Requirement Specs (D.10) each of which will be assigned a unique ID or URID in the Requirements Traceability Matrix (D.11) before being committed to a User Acceptance Test Plan (D.19) that will finally be checked off as “passed” in what might be called the mother of all report cards, the Acceptance Test Results (D.21).

So if you have any question at all about what this new system will or won’t do, all you have to do is get yourself crosseyed over this stack of docs known as the UAC. In the UAC we find a collection of spreadsheets, the left columns of which have rows of business functions followed by columns of comments on each business function made by a few of the players in the database project, most notably the head of voter registration for Texas, Karen Richards.

* * *

Note: this is part of a series of articles by the Texas Civil Rights Review about a statewide voter database and election management system being developed by Texas to meet federal mandates under the Help American Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA).

As readers of this series already know, we cannot pass over the
opportunity to point out that the state has a pretty good voter registration system in place (TVRS or Texas Voter Registration System). The website for the Secretary of State says over 120 counties are online with the system, but a source at the office told us all but 90 (of 254 total) counties will be hooked up live to the new database when it comes online next year. Why the old system could not be upgraded to meet federal standards is a question we like to keep open.