Anchorage Election Commission report ignored 'evenly cut' security seals on Diebold voting machines; recommended no independent investigation of rampant ballot shortages throughout city

Melissa Green of Bent Alaska reports on the aftermath of Anchorage, Alaska's recent municipal elections, plagued by city-wide ballot shortages and by voter registration disinformation sent out by an antigay Prop 5 opponent.
     The Anchorage Election Commission's report completely omitted any reference to broken seals on Diebold's AccuVote voting machines — then recommended that the election be certified with no outside, independent investigation.

But scant attention was paid to proper procedural control in Anchorage’s April 3 election. Here again is Brad Friedman’s conversation with Jacqueline Duke (substantially similar to the version reported several days later in the Anchorage Daily News):

Duke confirmed to me that she had instructed poll workers not to worry if security seals on memory cards are found broken when setting up machines on Election Day.

     “They come sealed in the Accuvote cases and often times in transit they bust off because they’re the flimsiest pieces of plastic ever,” she told me. Sometimes that leads poll workers to “freak out.”

     She tells them that if they “open the case and can obviously tell the broken seal was from transport, you do not have to be worried. There are more in your supplies.”

...The issue came to light from election worker Wendy Isbell seeing a security seal that had been — as she told the Anchorage Daily News — “evenly cut,” but there’s no telling how many security seals might have been broken or cut, but re-sealed with the extra seals the Municipal Clerk’s office supplied to election workers.

More from an earlier post by Bent Alaska's Green:

Steve Aufrecht of the blog What Do I Know? posted a 20-minute video interview with former deputy municipal clerk Guadalupe Marroquin, who preceded Jacqueline Duke as the person who supervised Anchorage municipal elections; among the topics Marroquin discussed was the importance of the security seals and other measures intended to guarantee the security and integrity of the election. One of these measures, the Data Processing Review Board, was made up of several IT experts who designed their own tests to challenge the programming of the AccuVote memory cards. Once satisfied, they sealed the AccuVote memory cards into place to prevent tampering. But the Data Processing Review Board was eliminated two years ago.