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Election Integrity News - March 4, 2008
This Week's
Quote: "We want to emphasize accuracy over speed. What's most important
is that their vote get counted accurately and it get recorded in the final returns."
Dean Logan, Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters
| In this issue ... National Stories State Use of Remaining HAVA Funds For New Voting Systems: A Reasonable Option Florida 13th: GAO Report Not a Clean Bill of Health for Voting Machines Pesky Details with Getting a Voting System Correct The Democratic Party's Dangerous Experiment Myth that Touch-Screen Voting Machines Mean Faster Election Results Debunked Chairman Feinstein, Senator Specter Introduce Measure to Regulate Robocalls News From Around the States Colorado: Gov. Ritter, Bi-Partisan Lawmakers Announce New Legislative Plan to Conduct 2008 Elections Georgia: Voters Say Diebold E-Pollbooks Crashed During Primary; Official Says They Didn't Mississippi Voters Threatened by Illegal Purge, if New Bill Passes Legislature New Jersey: Voting Machine Discrepancies Leave Questionable Results Will Some Ohio Polling Places Be Inadvertantly Shut Down on Election Day? Pennsylvania: Lackawanna County Chooses Paper Ballots Paperless Votes: Will They Decide the Texas Primary? Click Here for Previous Issues Two Years Ago: The March 6, 2006 Issue of Election Integrity News One Year Ago: The February 27, 2007 Issue of Election Integrity News Subscribe to Election Integrity News! Put the Election Integrity News on your Website or Computer with our RSS Newsfeed |
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Texas
• Texas has a smorgasboard of voting systems. Though optical scanners are on hand in all but 33 of the state's 254 counties, over 100 counties have both DREs and scanning equipment systems. Many of these counties use DREs exclusively in early voting, and at least some using only DREs at the election-day polling places. The Secretary of State's office maintains a database of the systems that counties have on hand, but the counties vary considerably in how they use the equipment for early voting, election-day voting, and mail-in absentee voting. A county with optical scanners and DREs may use scanners only for paper mail-in ballots, or may use scanners and DREs on election day, with only DREs used for early voting, etc.Vermont• In at least 77 counties, DREs are the primary voting system on election day as well as the system used for early voting. These include 6 of the largest 15 counties: Bexar, Fort Bend, Hidalgo, Montgomery, Williamson, and Nueces. 24 counties use the ES&S iVotronic, 2 use the Premier (Diebold) TSx, and 51 counties use the Hart eSlate as the primary election day and early voting system.
• Among the 15 most populous counties in the state, at least 8 use DREs exclusively in early voting. These include Dallas, Bexar, and Hidalgo counties, which use the iVotronic in early voting, and El Paso County, which uses only the Premier TSx in early voting. Tarrant, Nueces, Galveston, and Montgomery use the Hart eSlate in early voting. The Secretary of State's office maintains a daily total of early voting at this website.
• 98 of the state's 254 counties use only paper ballots, with the AutoMARK for accessibility. 3 of these counties hand-count their paper ballots, and 95 use optically scanned paper ballots. 56 use the ES&S M100 precinct scanner with the AutoMARK, and 39 use central-count scanners from ES&S, including the M650, as well as the older M150 and M550 models.
• Verified Voting has communicated with 8 counties that own only DRE voting equipment but offer paper ballots in early and election-day voting. The paper ballots are hand-counted. The 7 counties are Brewster, Comanche, Cottle, Culberson, Dickens, Hudpseth, Menard, and Runnels.
• A copy of the Secretary of State's inventory may be viewed at this URL (this inventory may not be as current as the Excel spreadsheet Verified Voting obtained from the Secretary of State's office).
• Texas has over 12.6 million voters as of January 2008. 1.8 million of that total are on what is known as a "suspense list." The suspense list is generated when registrars mail out a certificate every two years, which is returned if the address is invalid. Voters on the suspense list may vote at their old polling place if they live in the same county, and will be removed after two federal elections in which they are on the suspense list.
• 687,515 voters voted in the Republican primary in 2004, and 839,231 voters voted in the Democratic primary.
• Vermont's elections are administered at the township level.Sources: Ohio Secretary of State's office, Rhode Island Board of Elections, Texas Secretary of State's office, Texas County Clerk's offices, Vermont Secretary of State's office. Permalink• 92 municipalities use the Premier (Diebold) AccuVote optical scanner as the primary voting system. These towns comprise the larger population centers. 154 towns use hand-counted paper ballots as the primary voting system.
• For accessibility, all municipalities use the IVS Vote by Phone system.
• Voters in the Presidential primary are asked at the polling place which party ballot they wish to vote. The voter's choice of ballot is public knowledge, but records are not kept at the state level. Vermont does not maintain records of party registration. According to the Secretary of State's office, there are 423, 957 registered voters in the state. In 2004, 27,673 voters cast Republican ballots in the Presidential primary, and 83,116 voted in the Democratic primary.
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State Use of Remaining HAVA Funds For New Voting Systems: A Reasonable Option by Verified Voting Foundation and VoteTrustUSA- March 4, 2008 |
The Election Assistance Commission is considering a Policy Clarification issued last month by Commission Chair Rosemary Rodriguez (pictured at right) that would reverse an earlier staff recommendation regarding the use of remaining Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funds by states to replace voting systems purchased with previous HAVA funds. Verified Voting and VoteTrustUSA strongly supports this Policy Clarification: such expenditures are a reasonable use of HAVA funds to improve the administration of Federal elections.
Background
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) required States to employ voting systems that would meet new requirements. The new requirements were specified in Title III of the bill, which required, among other provisions, that each and every polling place used in federal elections provide at least one voting system allowing voters with disabilities to vote privately and independently.
HAVA established the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and directed the Commission to disburse appropriated funds in the form of payments to States to assist them in meeting the requirements of Title III. HAVA granted broad discretion to the States regarding the use of such that remained after the State had met the requirements of Title III. Such funds were to be used by States as they found necessary to "improve the administration of Federal elections". Read the Entire Article
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Florida 13th: GAO Report Not a Clean Bill of Health for Voting Machines Verified Voting Foundation - February 8, 2008 |
Limited Scope Investigation Not Conclusive
Verified Voting Foundation concluded after reviewing a leaked copy of a draft GAO test report that the findings were not sufficient to exonerate the voting machines in determining what caused a massive undervote in the Florida District 13 contest of 2006.
"After a lot of investigation, we still don't know what happened," said founder David Dill, a computer science professor from Stanford University who co-authored two papers regarding the problem. "We do know this GAO report cannot be interpreted as a clean bill of health for the machines."
The investigation done by the GAO was limited in scope by agreement with the Congressional Task Force for the Contested Election of the Committee on House Administration. VVF found that the testing was insufficiently ambitious to determine what caused an undervote rate many times higher than in any previous election in that contest, and many times higher than that experienced on other voting systems used in that election.
"This is to point out how hard the problem is, not to criticize the GAO," said Dill. "Had this election been conducted on a voter-verified paper ballot system, as in surrounding counties that form part of District 13, it probably would not have failed. More to the point, it would have been a lot easier to find out what happened."
“The lesson here is that the complexity of computer systems, and the poor quality
of evidence trail they produce, can lead to un-resolvable election disputes,"
added Dill. Read
the Entire Article
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Electionline: Back to Paper by electionline.org - February 23, 2008 |
Case study examines five states' efforts to
limit paperless voting.
A new report by electionline.org details how five states that implemented electronic
voting have chosen or are considering statewide paper-based optical scan systems.
"Back
to Paper" explores the process by which California, Colorado, Florida,
New Mexico and Ohio -- having adopted electronic voting systems -- subsequently
decided to de-certify, re-examine or re-think their use.
Although it focuses on five states, the report describes a growing trend. Six
years and millions of dollars into a major overhaul of the U.S. election system,
a number of states are contemplating returning to paper-based voting systems
after failed or troubled experiments with newer voting technology. Even as bills
in Congress have stalled, nearly half of all states have adopted requirements
for voter-verified paper with electronic voting and/or the use of paper-based
voting systems, including optical-scan machines.
In the five states that are the subject of the electionline.org case study,
problems at the polls, pressure from voter integrity groups and rising concern
among lawmakers prompted leaders to scrap -- or in one case, strongly consider
scrapping -- recent purchases of direct-recording electronic systems in favor
of paper-based optical scanners.
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Pesky Details with Getting a Voting System Correct by Dan Wallach, Rice University - March 1, 2008 |
This article was posted at Ed Felten's Blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.
Today was the last day of early voting in Texas's primary election. Historically,
I have never voted in a primary election. I've never felt I identified enough
with a particular political party to want to have a say in selecting their candidates.
Once I started working on voting security, I discovered that this also allowed
me to make a legitimate claim to being “non-partisan." (While some election
officials, political scientists, and others who you might perhaps prefer to
be non-partisan do have explicit partisan views, many more make a point of similarly
obscuring their partisan preferences like I do.)
In Texas, you are not required to register with a party in order to vote in
their primary. Instead, you just show up and ask for their primary ballot. In
the big city of Houston, any registered voter can go to any of 35 early voting
locations over the two weeks of early voting. Alternately, they may vote in
their home, local precinct (there are almost a thousand of these) on the day
of the election. There have been stories of long lines over the past two weeks.
My wife wanted to vote, but procrastinating, we went on the final night to a
gigantic supermarket near campus. Arriving at 5:50 p.m. or so, she didn't reach
the head of the queue until 8 p.m. Meanwhile, I took care of our daughter and
tried to figure out the causes of the queue. Read
the Entire Article
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The Democratic Party's Dangerous Experiment by David L. Dill and Barbara Simons - February 2, 2008 |
As most of us now understand, paperless electronic voting is a really
bad idea. But there is a still worse idea: voting over the Internet.
Voters may worry about whether voting machines were hacked by
programmers or poll-workers who have machines stored in their homes
prior to an election. But with internet voting, we must also worry
about whether the system has been hacked by a teenager in Eastern
Europe, organized crime, or even an unfriendly government. We must
worry about network failure, "denial of service"attacks that shut down
selected machines on the internet, counterfeit Internet websites, and
spyware and/or viruses on the computers used to cast votes. And we must
worry about whether the people running the system are engaging in
electronic ballot-stuffing.
Like whack-a-mole, internet voting proposals have reappeared in
different guises in the U.S. for much of the past decade. When an
extremely ambitious Department of Defense proposal for internet voting
in the 2004 presidential election was reviewed by computer security
experts, it was terminated because of security concerns documented by those experts - the same concerns that should cause all citizens to view any proposal for internet voting with extreme skepticism.
Nonetheless, on Super Tuesday the Democratic Party is going to deploy
internet voting. Democrats living outside the country will be treated
as a 51st state, called Democrats Abroad, and will elect delegates to
the convention. This approach adroitly side-steps almost all regulation
on election technology, which typically are matters of state, not
Federal, law. Internet voting won't even be subjected to the
notoriously inadequate certification process that applies to almost
every other voting system in the U.S. The organizers apparently
maintain their confidence in the security of internet voting by not
consulting anyone who might, as happened in 2004, warn them of risks.
(We know most, if not all, of the independent experts in internet
voting in the U.S., and none of them has been asked to examine this
system). Read the Entire Article
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Internet Voting (or,
how I learned to stop worrying and love having the whole world know exactly
how I voted) by Dan Wallach, Rice University - February 4, 2008 |
This
article was posted at Ed Felten's blog Freedom
to Tinker and is reposted here with permission
of the author.
Tomorrow is "Super Tuesday" in the United States. Roughly half of
the delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions will be decided tomorrow,
and the votes will be cast either in a polling place or through the mail. Except
for the votes cast online. Yes, over the Internet.
The Libertarian Party of Arizona is conducting
its entire primary election online. Arizona's Libertarian voters who wish
to participate in its primary election have no choice but to vote online. Also,
the Democratic Party is experimenting with online
voting for overseas voters.
Abridged history: The U.S. military has been pushing hard on getting something
like this in place, most famously commissioning a system called "SERVE"
To their credit, they hired several smart security people to evaluate their
security. Four of those experts published an independent
report that was strongly critical of the system, notably pointing out the
obvious problem with such a scheme: home computers are notoriously insecure.
It's easy to imagine viruses and whatnot being engineered to specifically watch
for attempts to use the computer to vote and to specifically tamper with those
votes, transparently shifting votes in the election. The military killed the
program, later replacing it with a vote-by-fax scheme. It's unclear whether
this represents a security improvement, but it probably makes it easier to deal
with the diversity of ballot styles.
Internet voting has also been used in a variety of other places, including Estonia.
An Estonian colleague of mine demonstrated the system for me. He inserted his
national ID card (a smartcard) into a PCMCIA card reader in his laptop. This
allowed him to authenticate to an official government web site where he could
then cast his vote. He was perfectly comfortable letting me watch the whole
process because he said that he could go back and cast his vote again later,
in private, overriding the vote that I saw him cast. This scheme partly addresses
the risk of voter coercion and bribery (see sidebar), but it doesn't do anything
for the insecurity of the client platform.
Okay, then, how does the Arizona Libertarian party do it? You can visit their
web site and click
here to vote. I went as far as a web page, hosted by fairvotelections.com,
which asked me for my name, birth year, house address number (i.e., for "600
Main Street", I would enter "600"), and zip code. Both this web
page and the page to which it “posts” its response are "http" pages.
No cryptography is used, but then the information you're sending isn't terribly
secret, either. Do they support Estonian-style vote overriding? Unclear. None
of the links or information say a single word about security. The lack of SSL
is strongly indicative of a lack of sophistication (although they did set a
tracking cookie to an opaque value of some sort). Read
the Entire Article
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Myth that Touch-Screen Voting Machines Mean Faster Election Results Debunked by Kim Zetter - February 5, 2008 |
This article was posted at the Wired Threat Level Blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.
California election officials who have been forced by the state to replace their touch-screen voting machines with optical-scan machines due to security issues have been complaining to reporters that going back to paper ballots will mean long delays for election results -- possibly "hours or even days." In fact nearly every story I read that mentions the California primary quotes an official saying this.
But Kim Alexander, President of the California Voter Foundation, debunks the oft-repeated claim that electronic voting machines automatically mean faster results.
Alexander reviewed past status reports that were posted to the CA secretary of state's web site on election nights to see how prompt counties were in delivering results after polls closed. The only pattern she found among counties that produced late results was the size of the jurisdiction. Larger counties tended to be slower in producing results. She says election officials who try to claim that results were delivered faster in the past when electronic voting machines were used are engaging in revisionism. Read the Entire Article
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Chairman Feinstein, Senator Specter Introduce Measure to Regulate Robocalls Senator Dianne Feinstein Media Release - February 12, 2008 |
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, and Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) today introduced legislation to regulate robocalls.
The measure introduced by Feinstein and Specter would not ban robocalls, but instead places sensible restrictions on how and when the calls can be made including limiting the hours within which calls can be made, limiting the number of calls that can be made to each household, and requiring callers to identify themselves at the beginning of the call.
“During this primary season, we have heard stories about people being called over and over again, at all hours of the day and night. I believe we need sensible guidelines in place,” Chairman Feinstein said. “Something must be done about the worst of these calls.
The bill that we have introduced today does not ban robocalls. It merely provides a reasonable framework. It’s a sensible solution that will protect American families from being inundated by calls through the day and night.”
“This legislation creates a much-needed structure for addressing the harassing
computer-automated calls that are increasingly used in the days leading up to
an election,” Specter said. “The Supreme Court has stated that the privacy
of citizens in their homes is an interest of the ‘highest order,’ and this bill
provides a reasonable and measured approach to protecting that interest.” Read
the Entire Article
From Around the States
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Colorado: Gov. Ritter, Bi-Partisan Lawmakers Announce New Legislative Plan to Conduct 2008 Elections by Colorado Governor Bill Ritter Media Release - January 23, 2008 |
Click here to view Gov. Ritter's letter to the county clerks.
Colorado
Governor Bill Ritter (pictured at right) and a group of bipartisan lawmakers
today announced new legislation for conducting the 2008 elections by using paper
ballots at polling places while maintaining voter choice through options such
as early or absentee mail voting.
"One of the most basic roles of government is to provide for elections that are fair, reliable, transparent and convenient for voters," Gov. Ritter said. "Our democracy depends not only on the people's ability to vote, but also on their confidence that every vote counts.
"This bi-partisan legislative proposal will fix the problems we face because of decertified electronic voting machines for the 2008 elections. Paper ballots are a tried-and-true election method that has worked for decades. They ensure a verifiable paper trail and minimize the possibility of technology failures that have caused Election Day problems in the past."
The legislation will be co-sponsored by Reps. Alice Madden, D-Boulder, and David Balmer, R-Centennial, and Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver.
"Given the constraints of the decertifications, this is the best solution we can craft," Rep. Balmer said. "We must preserve absentee voting and Election Day, precinct-based voting so that we avoid disenfranchising voters who only vote in presidential election years."
"The people of Colorado can be assured that the 2008 elections will be accessible, accurate, secure and transparent," Sen. Gordon said. "With paper ballots as the primary method of casting votes, people can feel secure knowing that there is a paper record of their vote." Read the Entire Release
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Georgia: Voters Say Diebold E-Pollbooks Crashed During Primary; Official Says They Didn't by Kim Zetter - February 12, 2008 |
This article was posted at the Wired.com
Threat Level Blog and is reposted here
with permission of the author.
I've
been getting a number of reports from voters in Georgia that the electronic
pollbooks the state used during last week's Super Tuesday primary crashed in
a number of counties, resulting in the long
lines that I reported about last week and in voters leaving without casting
ballots.
Numerous voters in at least five Georgia counties have complained that there
weren't enough e-pollbooks and that the machines crashed or were otherwise inoperable.
But an election official in Fulton County, Georgia, where many of the crashes
were reported, denied that any machine crashed, and said voters were mistaken.
(I've posted some .mp3 files below that come from a voter hotline in which voters
discuss crashes and inoperable machines.)
The ExpressPoll e-pollbooks, made by Diebold Election Systems, are used to verify
that a voter is registered. (Georgia uses an older model of the ExpressPoll
pictured above.)
Ralph Presley, who voted at a church in Fulton County, said there were about
200 people waiting in line at his precinct and although the church had fourteen
voting machines, only two of them were being used at any one time due to a backup
caused by problems with the e-pollbooks.
“They were crashing, and then they’d call the technician and wait for the technician
to come out,” he told me by phone.
There were only two items on Presley's ballot -- the presidential primary and
a bond referendum -- and while it took only 30 seconds to cast a ballot, it
took 90 minutes to reach the poll booth. Presley said voters had to wait until
a technician arrived to re-boot one of the e-pollbooks that was down. It took
the machine about five minutes to re-boot, he said. Read the Entire Article
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Mississippi Voters Threatened by Illegal Purge, if New Bill Passes Legislature by Project Vote - February 26, 2008 |
Senate Bill 2910 Would Force Nonvoters to Reregister in Violation of Federal Voting Rights Law
A new bill working its way through the Mississippi State
Legislature threatens the hard-won voting rights of elderly, minority, and disabled
voters throughout the state. Senate Bill 2910 was proposed as an election
reform cure-all, but one of its provisions would likely result in thousands of
voters being purged from the voting rolls in violation of federal law.
Filed by State Senator Terry C. Burton and supported by
Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, SB 2910 would cancel the registration of
any voter if he or she did not “appear to vote” in a single
election between Nov. 3, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009. Purged voters would then have
to reregister before they could vote in subsequent elections. If signed into
law, the bill would take effect in January 2009.
In a
letter to Senator Burton and copied to Secretary of State Hosemann, the
national voting rights organization Project Vote notified Burton that the bill
violates the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). The NVRA
explicitly prohibits states from removing any voter from the rolls as a
consequence of failing to vote.
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New Jersey: Voting Machine Discrepancies Leave Questionable Results by Verified Voting Foundation - February 21, 2008 |
Discrepancies in the results reported by electronic voting machines in New
Jersey's Presidential primary highlight the urgent need for that state—and any
other state still using paperless voting machines—to adopt a paper ballot voting
system, the Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) said today.
“It's a reminder that it is not possible to depend on software alone in elections,”
said VVF president Pamela Smith. The discrepancies involved the political-party
turnout reporting. Sequoia Advantage machines in several counties showed different
figures between the result tape from the machine and the records of a secondary
memory cartridge, for the number of Democratic and Republican voters. Counties
were under deadline this week to certify the election results, despite being
unable to reconcile or explain the non-matching results. Penny Venetis, a law
professor at Rutgers University who represents citizens suing to have the touch
screens scrapped, was quoted in yesterday's Star-Ledger, "I realize
the clerks are caught in the middle here," she said. "If you can't
certify an election, I feel you shouldn't certify it. Period. Why is it that
the citizens of this state can't be protected?"
The machines involved do not allow voters to see their choices on paper before
casting their votes, and the tallies cannot be audited effectively. New Jersey
was supposed to have voter-verified paper records by January of 2008, to meet
a new standard passed into law in 2005. But the deadline was pushed back to
June and further delays loom, while debate continues about how New Jersey should
accomplish the move to verifiable voting. NJ was listed at “high risk” in Verified
Voting/Common Cause’s recent report due to its unverifiable systems.
New Jersey could adopt an increasingly popular system of precinct-based optical
scanners, in which voters mark paper ballots with a pen or an assistive device
for voters with disabilities. The ballots are tallied by an optical scanner,
and can be recounted by hand. The state’s plan, however, is to add paper-trail
printers to the existing touch screen machines. The printer would show voters
a paper record of their votes before the ballot is cast, but proposed printers
failed the first round of state testing. “Vendors have to go back to the drawing
board, and voters have to wait—yet a better option has been available for years,”
said Smith. “It’s sad that a state with both a paper ballot law and an audit
law is still conducting high risk elections—and apparently will keep
doing so.” Read the Entire Article
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New York: DREs Lose Round Two by Bo Lipari, New Yorkers for Verified Voting - February 18, 2008 |
Counties Choose Paper Ballots Despite Court Ruling
“It ain’t over till it’s over.”
- Yogi Berra
Just 3 weeks ago, when we thought the ruling by the State Board of Elections
had finally eliminated DREs from New York State after a long hard five year
campaign, I
used a Gandhi quote about grassroots movements. But the DRE vendors weren’t
done fighting, and voters were dealt a setback when the State Supreme Court
ruled that DREs
must be allowed to be purchased by counties. Now, we’ve taken another important
step to our goal. But this time, while searching for a quote to capture the
true spirit of New York’s contorted, inside out journey to new voting machines,
Yogi Berra seems more appropriate.
Earlier this month, Judge O’Connor overruled the decision of the State Board
and allowed DREs to be selected by New York counties. But when the county choices
were released on February 8 and reaffirmed on February 14, it showed the depth
of support for paper ballots created by citizens in our long struggle. As it
turned out, of New
York’s 58 Boards of Elections, all chose Ballot
Marking Devices compatible with paper ballots and scanners but for one -
Hamilton, the smallest, which ordered only 11 LibertyVote
DREs.
This is very, very good news. For even though counties had the option, ordered
by the Court, to choose DREs, they did not! This is a demonstration of the success
of the work voting integrity advocates did educating the public, election commissioners
and the media. In the end, the commissioners chose paper not because they had
to, but because they wanted to. That’s pretty huge and says a lot about how
deep our success has been.
But, just like Yogi said, it ain’t over till it’s over, and friends, it ain’t
over yet. Read
the Entire Article
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Will Some Ohio Polling Places Be Inadvertantly Shut Down on Election Day? by Joseph Lorenzo Hall - February 22, 2008 |
This article was posted at Joe
Hall's Blog and is reposted here with
permission of the author.
Many of us are seriously worried about Ohio's March 4 primary. I highly recommend
Ned Foley's article, "Administering the March 4 Primary in Ohio",
which lists five things we should all keep our eyes on. In the 8th paragraph
of Prof. Foley's article, he mentions a bill that the Ohio House was poised
to pass on Tuesday. That bill was SB 286, and it did pass on Tuesday with little
opposition.
Prof. Foley talks about concerns he has with a particular feature of the bill:
a new practice allowing mid-day pickups of ballot materials at the polls. Foley
is primarily, and appropriately, concerned with chain of custody issues; that
is, the procedures that ensure ballot materials make it from the controlled
environment of the polling place to the controlled environment of election headquarters
without any additions, subtractions, modifications or damage.
However, there are other aspects of this bill that are troubling. For example,
on the issue of mid-day pickups of ballot materials, neither the legislature
nor the Ohio Secretary of State seem to fully understand what this process would
entail. In order to hand-off ballot materials at mid-day, pollworkers will essentially
have to do all the things they normally do at the close of polls. Most importantly,
they'll have to reconcile the number of ballots cast up to that point with the
number of signatures in their pollbook. This means that the pollbook will be
entirely unavailable to voters who arrive at the polling place during this process.
Since the various steps of ballot accounting take on the order of an hour (maybe
two), this means that the polling places in Ohio that do midday pickups will
be closed to voters for this amount of time. SB 286 makes no provisions for
the exact procedures involved with this; it appears that polling places in Ohio
using central-count optical scan will be shut down for a period of time on 4
March.
Read
the Entire Article
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Pennsylvania: Lackawanna County Chooses Paper Ballots by Warren Stewart, VerifiedVoting.org - March 4, 2008 |
Reversing an earlier decision to purchase touchscreen voting equipment to replace their decertified AVS WINVote machines, Lackawanna County commissioners have announced that they will purchase a paper ballot optical scan voting system from Election Systems & Software (ES&S).
The county will also purchase AutoMARK Voter Assist Terminals to provide disabled voters with the ability to vote privately and independently. The $1.3 million cost tof the contract will be reimbursed by the state.
Election officials were confident that the equipment would be up and running for Pennsyvania's primary in seven weeks. "So we do have some logistics to work out but we're confident we can do it. Otherwise we wouldn't have given the commissioners assurance that we can make the switch to this new system," said Director of Elections Maryann Spellman Young, told WNEP.
As recently as two weeks ago, the county commissioners seemed determined to resist public demand for a paper ballot system, having entered into negotiations with Premier Election Solutions (Diebold) for the purchase of touchscreen machines.
Lackawanna County was one of three counties that had used the AVS WINVote. The Election Assistance Commission terminated testing of the WINVote last year after AVS withheld payment to the testing laboratory SysTest. Testing had already uncovered 1946 anomalies in the system's software and dozens of firmware flaws. Pennsylvania decertified the equipment in the Fall. The AVS WINVote is still used in Hinds County, Mississippi and many counties and cities in Virginia.
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Paperless Votes: Will They Decide the Texas Primary? by Sean Flaherty, VerifiedVoting.org - March 3, 2008 |
The Texas primary on March 4 could be the closest and the most consequential
election so far this year in which ballots cast on paperless
electronic voting machines are a large portion of the overall vote. The Texas
primary may determine the Democratic Party's nominee for President (the
Republican nomination campaign is considered essentially over) , but its outcome
will not be verifiable due to the extensive use of insecure and unrecountable
voting systems. As noted in Verified Voting's snapshot
of voting sytems in the four March 4 states, Texas's 254 counties use a
large diversity of systems. Around 100 counties use only paper ballots, with
most paper ballots being optically scanned and a small number hand-counted.
Random manual audits are not done in Texas. Most of the state's larger counties
make some use of touch screen direct-recording electronic voting machines, or
DREs, and in these counties, touch screen DREs have often been the system used
for early voting.
Early voting turnout in Texas has been very high, as the campaign press has
reported. In the 15 most populous counties in Texas, as many as 20% of registered
voters in both parties combined had already cast their votes by February 29.
The early voting turnout in the 15 most largest counties is available at the
Secretary of State's website. Of these counties, at least 8 are using only
paperless machines for early voting: Dallas, Bexar, Hidalgo, El Paso, Tarrant,
Nueces, Galveston, and Montgomery. By the end of early voting, 10.76%
of the registered voters in Dallas County, and 17.85% of the voters in Hidalgo
County, voted on the paperless ES&S iVotronic in the Democratic primary
alone. 11.65% of the voters in Nueces County, and almost 10.4% in Galveston
County voted on paperless Hart eSlate machines in the Democratic primary. Read
the Entire Article
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Election Integrity News Editor: Warren
Stewart
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