It appears that there may be some good news coming from Florida. The State House Majority Leader has said that the regressive voter suppression bill will be totally rewritten to remove almost all of the provisions that had any controversy.

This change in tone is the result a lot of hard work on the part of advocacy groups. Clearly they made it so uncomfortable for the majority party that the party had no choice but to back-off of their really bad bill. Congratulations on a great job go to all of the advocacy groups and advocates who worked long hours to kill this bill. Of course we now have to see what the changed bill will look like. Fingers crossed here....

Sequoia may have a bit of a legal problem in Washington DC to go with their legal problems in New Jersey. Sequoia was served with a subpoena, last September, to provide certain information, including their source code, to a special investigative committee. It appears that Sequoia has chosen to ignore the subpoena and committee chairwoman Mary Cheh is turning to the Superior Court to force compliance via a motion to compel which will be filed tomorrow. Typically Sequoia’s spokeswoman will post a blog on their website that attacks the character of those who stand against the company. She did this in the case of one New Jersey court witness. This should be interesting as it plays out....

The state of Pennsylvania has announced that they have purged over 200,000 voters from their voter rolls since last November’s election. While we understand that up-to-date voter rolls are important, we also know from past purges that there are mistakes made in the process. It is now important that every voter in Pennsylvania check to ensure they were not purged incorrectly. Don’t wait until it is too late.

The pressure against suppressive voting legislation in Florida is not letting up. Election Integrity groups, Civil Rights organizations, the media, county election officials and maybe even the Governor have all come out against the legislation we have spoken about in this space over the past couple of days. Let’s all hope that the raised voices are heard....

In today’s news we have one of the many articles reporting that Norm Coleman has filed an appeal of his court loss with the Minnesota state Supreme Court. Will this be the final step before the state finally has a second Senator?

We’ve also got a lot more on the voter suppression bill before the Florida legislature. The governor has now said he is not happy with the bill. He wouldn’t use the “V” word but he came awful close....

In my opinion voter suppression is an ugly act. When one party is in power and then pushes legislation that only serves to help to ensure they will stay in power then there is something wrong with our democracy. This is now the case in Florida where the party in power waited until week seven of a nine week legislative session to attempt to ram-rod through bills in both the House and Senate that will help to ensure they stay in power. Our two ‘Featured’ editorials (here and here) explain what is happening in Florida much better than I can. ...

“Announce plans to improve the quality of your equipment. ... Announce plans to guarantee adequate staff to support first deployment of the new equipment. ... Negotiate supportive policies for software licensing fees, especially for small counties. ... Announce a provision for 'open-source' software.” These are all requests of two potential vendors of voting systems to New York State in an open letter to them from New Yorkers for Verified Voting. See our ‘Featured’ article [PDF]....

My apologies for the lateness of DVN this evening but when you lose the Internet you lose all contact with the world it seems. For those of you concerned with the voters right to actually vote I suggest reading the articles concerning Florida’s Senate Bill 956 that will do a lot to suppress the vote. Also the articles from Texas including the fact that the DoJ may have to weigh-in on any VoterID laws passed by that state’s legislature to keep the state in compliance with the National Voting Rights Act Section 5....

The following is one of the stunning revelations in our ‘Featured’ article today.

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From the Minnesota Senatorial court decision [PDF]:

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Voters in Salina, Saline County, Kansas went to the polls this past Tuesday and some of them had their votes flipped by the county’s ES&S iVotronic machines. Our ‘Featured’ article talks about the vote flipping and gives some new information. Kansas was warned about ‘vote flipping’ in an October letter from the Brennan Center and Verified Voting. Naturally they ignored that warning.

ES&S has now admitted that their touch screens lose calibration during the day, from normal use, and that they have to be recalibrated on occasion. The county seems to be sure that no flipping was done without the voter noticing it; a baseless assumption. They think that the voters review their ballot before hitting the “Vote” button. That is a false assumption according to studies. The county also thinks they can go to the internal audit log to find out what happened. That is not possible because the voters touch on the screen happens before the audit log records anything. ...

Another country has now had problems with Internet voting schemes. In this case Finland used Internet voting in three municipalities in 2008. Nearly 2% of the votes were lost due to a “usability glitch”. The Finnish Supreme Administrative Court found that the election must be redone. The law allowing the use of any Internet voting scheme has expired so the people of the three municipalities will now be able to vote on a more secure and accurate system, using paper ballots. One of the companies involved in this scheme was Scytl, a Spanish corporation that was also involved in the Okaloosa Co Florida Internet voting scheme last Nov. At least with that scheme paper ballots were also generated....

Some ES&S iVotronic DREs used yesterday in Saline Co. Kansas were found to be flipping votes. When asked about the incident the county clerk blamed it on a calibration problem caused during the shipping process from storage to the precincts. Naturally the clerk also minimized the problem by claiming that the chances were slim that any voters vote was incorrectly recorded. He disingenuously tried to claim that the review screen and vvpat printer kept that from happening. Of course, there is no evidence that most voters even look at the review screen before touching the “Vote” button.

Also 407 votes cast on a Premier op-scan in one St. Clair Co Illinois precinct were nearly not counted after the machine failed to have its vote totals tabulated....

Recounts! We have recounts. Minnesota’s Senatorial recount appears to be done, as of today, with Franken gaining more votes than Coleman. The count of the NY-20 absentee ballots will begin tomorrow. This isn’t a recount yet but will probably go that way after these ballots are counted. The criminal investigation recount in Arizona will go throughout this week, at least....