"Pre-eminent computer scientists have come to a scientific consensus that the (e-voting) technology is a bad idea," elections attorney and member of the commission Paul Hultin said at a Colorado Election Reform Commission meeting on Tuesday. This statement was made while the commission recommended that the state get rid of electronic voting machines and go to an all-paper system by 2014. Another DRE state may soon be falling to paper ballots....

Scantegrity, a registered non-profit organization, has announced a collaborative effort with Takoma Park Maryland to hold a primary and general election on an open-source voting system with both conventional paper and cryptographic audit trails. I’m sure there will be a lot more on this later....

Premier/Diebold has filed a lawsuit against SysTest Labs. The voting machine vendor claims that SysTest’s loss of EAC accreditation in the middle of testing on the newest Premier voting system has wreaked havoc on Premier’s business. This should be an interesting suit.

“Even though reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), and dozens of computer security experts strongly and unanimously warn of insurmountable threats to the privacy and security of ballots cast over the Internet, the Washington State legislature is proposing – and fast-tracking – a bill to allow Internet voting for its military and overseas voters.” “VotersUnite does not believe in using military and overseas voters as guinea pigs in a voting scheme that has already been determined by experts to be an “essentially impossible” task given the current architecture of the Internet.” ...

Not much in the news this weekend. Of course more from Minnesota and the Senate recount/court case. That will be going on for awhile more I’m afraid. ...

“…he didn't see anything wrong with asking to work for Premier Elections Solutions, despite still managing a public office that owed the company $2.2 million.” So claimed Buddy Johnson the former Supervisor of Elections of Hillsborough Co. Florida and often mentioned in this space. Also being reported, “Johnson spent about $2.5 million in federal grants on "voter education," including TV spots, radio ads, mass mailings and print pieces that featured his name and image prominently in the heat of a tight campaign.” As I recall Johnson ended-up spending just a fraction of his campaign funds as compared to the newly elected SOE Phyllis Busansky....

Today’s news finds articles from Minnesota where the recount trial continues on. Now the justices are trying to decide whether they can allow Franken to take the Senate seat on an interim basis. It looks like there will be no final decision this week or maybe even this month.

Also we have articles from Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi and Oklahoma where Voter ID is being pushed by state legislatures under the false idea that voter fraud is rampant or that illegal aliens are streaming over the borders just to vote in our elections. In Georgia they actually want to expand what is already a restrictive law to make it more restrictive. Now they want voters to have to prove their citizenship. Not a problem? It is for voters like Arthur Remillard who was born by a mid-wife and was the placed for adoption. He has no birth certificate. No way to prove his citizenship even though he had never had a problem in his 75 years. ...

The long expected auditor’s report on Hillsborough Co Florida is out and, as we suspected, former supervisor of elections Buddy Johnson has some explaining to do. The auditors found that he overspent his budget by close to a million dollars and he misused some funds. Is their an indictment in Buddy’s future? ...

The recount trial is still ongoing in Minnesota. It’s hard to tell whether there will really be any changes or if this is all just a waste of time and tax money. Time will tell, I guess....

One of the most successful state election integrity groups has been New Yorkers for Verified Voting. Today their executive director and one of the founders of the group, Bo Lipari, announced that he was giving up his position with NYVV. He is still going to be working on elections issues and he will continue to work with the NY League of Women Voters on voting technology issues. We have worked closely with Bo over the past five or more years. He has been a good friend, mentor, and source of technical information in the past. We congratulate Bo on his work and on the successful organization he has helped to build. Bo will be leaving NYVV but he is leaving it in the able hands of Wanda Warren Berry with whom he has worked closely over the years. Thanks Bo. Good job....

Even though the Nov 4 election has been certified by the Riverside Co California RoV since Dec 2, the county is still in the process of doing the state-mandated hand count verifying all ballots cast on touch-screen voting machines. Maybe sometime this week?

The court in Minnesota is still busy gathering testimony and evidence in the Coleman-Franken trial. Maybe sometime this week?

New Mexico has joined a growing number of states that are turning to the insecure and non-verifiable internet as a voting option. It is amazing that state election experts have ignored computer scientists, network security experts, the Dept. of Defense, the National Institute of Sciences and Technology, the Government Accountability Office and others who all say the internet is not secure enough for elections. ...

The new Hillsborough Co Florida elections boss has saved the county $500,000 by going to Premier/Diebold and making them a deal they could not refuse. Of course with the problems the county had last Nov with uncounted ballots and memory card failures, Diebold should have returned all of the money the county has spent on their voting system and taken the machines back....

Most of the news is still coming out of Minnesota and the courts where Norm Coleman is trying to prove that he should still be the state’s senator. Most of the reports seem to point to unsuccessful arguments on the part of Coleman’s legal team. How much longer can this go on?...

The trial against the use of unverifiable voting machines in New Jersey is continuing. Computer scientist Andrew Appel was before the judge tearing apart a Sequoia Advantage DRE voting machine to show how easy it would be to get into the machine and replace memory without anyone ever knowing about it. The trial is expected to take a couple weeks.

Mississippi and Utah have joined Texas in their misguided attempts to push through voter ID laws to combat non-existent voter fraud. In the meantime, one Ohio county has reported that after investigating claims of wide-spread voter fraud in Nov. a special prosecutor has found only one case and in that one the man involved told on himself....

Today the New Jersey voting machine trial started. The trial will decide whether the state’s DRE voting machines can continue to be used or whether they are error-prone and too easily hacked. Today Princeton University computer scientist Andrew Appel demonstrated how the Sequoia Advantage v 9 DRE works. The trial may last as long as four weeks....

As our “Featured” article reports California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has sent a letter to new EAC Chair Gineen Beach. The letter has three proposals that Secretary Bowen is convinced will improve the integrity of voting systems used in the country. As stated in the article we at VotersUnite have also worked on this issue. The three proposals are that vendors should be required to disclose vulnerabilities, flaws, problems, etc. Also, the EAC should create a uniform incident reporting program. And finally, the “Election Day Survey” the states are asked to complete should include data from election officials about how their voting systems performed during a general election. We applaud Secretary Bowen for taking a stand on this issue....