In this space yesterday I mentioned that the Colorado state Election Director, Holly Lowder, had resigned and no reason had been given at that time. It seems that an investigation shows that she shared an address and phone number with a vendor of software services to her office and to 30 counties in the state. Of course everyone is telling the media that she just retired but the fact that this retirement happens just two months before a national election raises many eyebrows.

In previous DVNs we talked about Indian River Co, FL and the idiocy of doing an experiment in the middle of a real election. If you will recall the experiment led to an error which caused some ballots to be double-recorded. The Supervisor of Elections had reported 5,189 votes had been counted twice but yesterday she claims that she "misspoke" and that the total is actually over 10,000 votes.

And finally Palm Beach Co, FL has essentially admitted to a total disaster in election administration. The state has certified the primary election except for the one judicial race in question in Palm Beach Co. Every candidate in every race probably has good reason to question the results in their particular race. The state will probably now step in and oversee the election in November. There is no longer any confidence in that office. ...

Palm Beach Co had first responders joining with election officials and other volunteers out searching polling places looking for 2,500 lost ballots. Meanwhile the state has certified the state-wide primary election except the one judicial race that has been at the center of the incredible problems in the county. One question must be answered; if there are 2500 ballots missing and that one race is still in question then what about every other race on the Palm Beach ballots that is within 2,500 votes? They should all be in question and any candidate in any of those races who does not file a complaint is not giving their supporters their due.

In a surprise report we have learned that Holly Lowder, the Colorado State Elections Director has resigned. No reason has been given for that action and no one is talking but we are hearing the story will be told tomorrow.

Yesterday in this space I pointed out, incorrectly, that in the audit in Broward Co seven precincts disagreed by as much as 95 percent. What I should have said is "The results in seven precincts resembled original results by 95 percent or more"....

Readers will recall that as of yesterday Palm Beach Co Florida officials had lost well over 3,000 ballots sometime between the primary election and an election recount. Earlier today there were announcements that over 2700 ballots had been found. Late this afternoon the officials were supposed to meet to announce whether they had found all of the missing ballots and why those ballots went missing in the first place.

Were the ballots run through the high-speed optical scan machines during the recount and did the machines pick-up two or more ballots at a time thus not counting all of the ballots? Or, were the ballots in bins that were never counted?

The media is not clear on this issue yet so we are going to have to wait to find this out. If the machines were, in fact, grabbing two or more ballots at a time jurisdictions around the country need to be made aware of this possibility.

Meanwhile a report from Broward Co of the result of their state-mandated audit is a bit troubling. The county appears to have hand-counted one race on ballots from 16 precincts. The media is reporting that nine of the precincts hand-count matches the machine results. Seven precincts resembled original results by 95 percent or more. That is a huge number and should raise red flags.

Instead one official said, "When you're dealing with people and paper, that's the best you're going to get." How about agreeing 100% and you keep counting until you are sure that the people and paper are not the problem and then you find out what problem the machines had?...

Just as an example of how screwed-up are Florida election laws yesterday Indian River Co.'s Canvassing Board approved the primary election results. Hopefully the reader will recall that Indian River had over 5000 ballots that were counted twice because someone decided to do a test in the middle of a real election and then failed to properly remove the results in that test. The result was ballots from 40 polling sites that were counted twice. Luckily an observant poll worker realized the totals for her site were double what they should have been. She pointed out the mistake and the county found their error.

Tomorrow the board must do a state mandated audit to ensure their voting machines were correctly counting the votes. If the poll worker hadn't been observant and if this audit were to find the problem, or any other problem that might exist with the vote count, NOTHING can/could be done because the results have already been approved by the Canvassing Board.

One has to wonder what some officials in Florida are thinking when they make stupid rules. This audit is newly mandated. Why didn't they mandate it to happen before canvassing the election? Post election audits are great. We need them everywhere and following every election but they have to be timed in such a way as to mean something if problems are found. If they don't have a purpose (to ensure the votes were properly counted) then they are a waste of tax money....

The news from Palm Beach Co Florida is not getting any better. The official recount is complete as required by the state. By state law they have exactly one week to count ballots, rectify any problems, do any required recounts, and certify that everything is correct. Of course that is all without any court orders and it looks more and more like this election will be going to the courts.

The original election evening count seems to have been 102,523 and the final recount total was 99,045. The only race that was recounted was a race for a judicial seat and the winner flipped from one candidate to another from the original to the final recount. The original difference was 17 votes and the final was 60 votes.

The big question is what happened to over 3,400 ballots. The losing candidate will be going to court to ask that question among others. And now any candidate in any other race who lost by less than 3,400 votes is also being encouraged to go to court and demand a recount or re-election.

There is a lot wrong with this situation. The state is wrong in forcing a quick handling of the ballots. No wonder mistakes are made and more seem to be made in Florida than most other states. A complete investigation must be held inside the county to figure out what happened and why it happened. Was it administration issues or the voting system? And why did members of the county canvassing board sign an official document that had no final numbers on it? The voters need to know that and they need to know before November....

• Featured - FL: Palm Beach County - Election officials stumped by about 3,400 missing ballots
  http://www.palmbeachpost...8/09/02/recount0903.html
--- Click here for REST OF STORY!... ---

A friend and fellow Election Integrity activist and Florida voter reminded me that in this space yesterday I neglected to mention that the two counties I discussed, Indian River and Palm Beach, were the only two customers in the state for Sequoia Voting Systems. Now, I'm not saying that Sequoia is to blame for the problems of the past week. Unlike Sequoia I don't set blame until I have evidence to back it up. Besides the Indian River plan of testing a modem down-load system in the middle of a real election was bone-headed and seems to be the fault of the administrators.

On the other hand the situation in Palm Beach County is still up in the air. The media can't seem to get all of the facts correct and that is probably the fault of the county and probably the media representatives who just don't know enough to ask the right questions like; what happened to over 3,000 ballots? Were they physically lost? Is anyone trying to find them? Or, is the whole problem a difference in how the poll site optical scans work as compared to the central optical scan machines?

Hopefully we will get a true accounting for this problem. After all, only 12% of the registered voters turned-out for the primary last week; what is going to happen when there is a 60 to 70% turnout? I shudder to imagine....

True to form Florida is in the midst of another election nightmare. Is it a few less than honorable election officials in a couple counties; or, is it the simplistic process the state uses for certifying and accepting voting systems for use; or, is it vendors who have no problem at all selling counties voting systems that should never be used in elections work and that they don't even warrant as being manufactured to be used in elections? Or, is it all of the above? I suspect it is all of the above. Indian River Co. decided to test a new system that would modem results from the poll sites to the main tabulating room. They decided to do this test in the middle of an election and they ended up doubling results from 40 polling sites. The results from Palm Beach Co are still a mess big enough to boggle the mind but there seems to have been thousands of votes that went uncounted originally while the final total vote count went down by over three thousand votes in one race after a machine and manual recount. And there is still a recount underway in Broward Co. Who knows what reports of problems will come from that recount. Is this a portent of things to come in November? It very clearly is that. ...

Last week Premier/Diebold admitted that their GEMS software used in as many as 34 states may have failed any number of times over the last 10 years. The admission comes from their actions in Ohio but no jurisdiction in any of the 33 other states can truly say they have not had the same problem but just never caught it.

Then this week the same company had to admit that their software used in Florida has more problems, on top of the earlier admission. We also learned that their high-speed optical scan machines failed in Sarasota Co. to a point where Premier/Diebold is loaning the county older machines in hopes of not having problems in November.

All of these problems are still on the voting system that is presently awaiting EAC certification. All of these problems are forcing a change to that voting system. Now the vendors are working hard to lobby congress to force the EAC to go back to the old NASED type system. The vendors don't want the test labs to be forced to actually test their systems and report problems. The vendors want a rubber stamp.

In no other industry do the vendors have so much power over the process of testing and approval. They should never have that power when it comes to our elections. If they can't put out a product that they can stand-behind and be proud of then they need to get out of the business. Have a safe and sane Labor Day weekend...

It is never easy asking for funding but it is something that non-profit groups have to do occasionally. VotersUnite.Org is not a project of Pew or one of the big-money organizations and we don't want to be. We like being able to make our own decisions and not having to make those decisions based on a position of a sponsoring organization. However, this freedom means we have to do our own fundraising and we have to ask, hat in hand, for your help. "Daily Voting News" is a near daily service provided by VotersUnite free of charge to subscribers. I have never taken a penny, beyond some expenses, for doing this; not for over four years of gathering the news; and I never will. We do, however, have overhead and we need help with that. So, here I am doing what I dislike doing very much, asking for help from you so we can keep doing this work and keep VotersUnite.Org as one of the premier informational election integrity organizations. Please help us out with a tax-deductible donation. ...

Today Premier/Diebold has again had to accept the blame for voting machine failures. This time the optical scan machines that had tallied absentee ballots in Sarasota County would not upload the totals to the main server and refused to post elections in Hillsborough County. Election officials in Sarasota ended up having to count 10,000 ballots by hand. It is a good thing they had the paper ballots to count by hand or those votes would have been lost....

Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

In an article this morning from the St Petersburgh (FL) Times the reporters report that Diebold/Premier voting systems failed to work properly in Hillsborough County.

They report:

However, Florida Today reports that Brevard County had problems with their Diebold voting machines and this problem is recurring...

College students in Dutchess Co. New York are taking advantage of a grant from the Election Assistance Commission to be trained to operate the counties voting equipment. These students will work as "fellows" earning a stipend as the recruit up to 200 more students to help out as election workers. Students from local colleges; Vassar, Marist and Dutchess Community College are taking part in the training process. This is a great idea that needs to be repeated all over the country. Kudos to the EAC for helping to fund this worthy project....

Today's featured article is a warning from Greg Gordon of McClatchy News in which he points to the fact that the recent disclosure of flawed software in Premier/Diebold machines points directly to a system of testing and certifying voting systems that was broken. Gordon points out, "NASED watched over the issuance of "qualified" reports from Independent Testing Laboratories, but with little control over the testing. The vendors secretly negotiated payments with the labs, helped design the tests, got to see the results first and only shared the codes driving their software with three NASED technical experts who signed non-disclosure agreements."

All it took was a disclosure by Premier/Diebold that all of their voting systems of the past ten years have potentially lost votes and the media has woken up to the issue. Of course, some election officials are just too wedded to their vendors. Officials in South Carolina and West Virginia proudly proclaim that while states around them are doing the right thing by changing from DRE voting to paper based systems they are going to stand firm behind their paperless voting systems, ignoring the facts in doing so. ...

Today many of the articles could have been "Featured" but I chose one because it contains one of what seems to have become Premier/Diebold's requisite half-truth. In our featured article Premier spokesman, Chris Riggall is quoted as saying, "There are no votes that are lost here; the votes remain on the memory cards, and the original ballots still exist." This is all true. The votes remain on the cards and, when voting is done on a paper ballot the original ballots still exist. As factual as this statement is, it does not tell the true story.

The problem with the Premier machines (all of them sold for the last 10 years that use the GEMS software) is that in some circumstances the system will tell the operator that it has downloaded the votes from memory cards but the votes are never downloaded and tabulated. This problem is not readily apparent which is clear because it has existed for 10 years and was only found by accident. One thousand votes would have been lost in Ohio if the problem had not been discovered. How many votes have been lost nationwide over the past 10 years?...

So far this year your kind donations to VotersUnite.Org have allowed us to keep providing 'Daily Voting News' at least 6 days a week except for a couple weeks of vacation or conferences. We have also been able to spend over four weeks of long hours to research, write and edit a report that has been discussed by media around the nation and was featured on Lou Dobbs earlier this week. In the upcoming months, as election day grows nearer, our work load will grow and then as voters begin going to the polls and problems are announced we will be passing on the information to all of you via DVN and our website. We know money is tight right now but your help is needed to allow us to keep doing our work. Please help us out with a tax-deductible donation. ...