Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"The use of electronic machines to count ballots cast in last year's municipal elections was a fiasco, Quebec's chief electoral officer said Tuesday. The machines weren't quicker, more economical and more accurate than manual counting" said Quebec, Canada's chief elections official. One of the suppliers of electronic voting machines underestimated its ability to simultaneously service several municipalities. Sound familiar? / "Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho has a starring role in a new HBO documentary that raises serious questions about the security of vote-counting machines used in Florida and many other big states. The program, titled "Hacking Democracy," is scheduled to debut on the cable channel on Nov. 2, running through most of the month." / Diebold, as seems to be their nature, is punishing Maryland for asking voters to vote absentee. They print the state's ballots and they are late in delivering them a majority of the ballots to many counties....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the city of Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners has decided that they may hold back payment on their new voting machines because they are afraid of 'potential glitches.'

Cook County's election board, a separate entity, will not be paying their portion of the $26M still owed to Sequoia until after the election in two weeks. Now the city has openly voted, at least for now, to see what happens in the election before they make a decision to make their final payment.

The guinea pig voters may end up giving up their democracy in the bargain, but at least they may save a few dollars!

Sequoia's president, Jack Blaine, told the paper that he felt the company had done all they could and that they deserved to be paid. As the Trib reports...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

In this segment of 'Democracy At Risk' Lou and Kitty cover the latest cautionary report on voting and elections, in this report from Electionline.Org, a national non-partisan, non-profit group. Lou also reports on yesterday's breaking story from The BRAD BLOG regarding the elections security breach discovered in the Chicago, Illinois voter registration data base.

The text-transcript of Tuesday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Officials on Chicago, Illinois acknowledged that for the last five or six years it would have only taken a few keystrokes for a knowledgeable computer user to obtain the personal information for more than half of the 1.3 million identities in the system. / "Look, I think that it's time for us to make our elections work in this country, Lou. I mean, that's the bottom line. And obviously we have a great deal of work to do to make that happen. It's time for us to bring together the best and brightest from the high-tech industry, Lou, the business industry, election officials, et cetera, for us to make things work." ex-EAC Commissioner Ray Martinez told Lou Dobbs. "It's time, four years later, Lou, six years removed from Florida in 2000, it's time for us to achieve a consensus on exactly what we have to do to really improve the process of election administration." / Summit Co. Ohio ballot printing problems seem to be coming to a head with calls for federal investigation and anti-trust issues....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

In this segment Lou interviewed two ex-Commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission. Ex-Chairman Deforest Soaries and Ex-Assistant Chairman Ray Martinez. As revealed in an earlier interview reported by BradBlog, Chairman Soaries is speaking out and speaking out loudly.

Of note in tonight's interview is this exchange:

The text-transcript of Monday's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Beginning this week, and every Wednesday, I will be doing a regular 5-minute Voting News report on WNJC 1360AM, Philadelphia's Renaissance Radio Station at 8PM Eastern. The program is "Voice of the Voters", with Mary Ann Gould, and it runs from 8PM to 9PM Eastern every Wednesday. It can be heard via live streaming. Last week's guest was Lowell Finley. This week's guest will be Dr. Daniel Lopresti, Lehigh University / Today it was reported that the Chicago, Illinois voter data base has been hacked. / "At least when we had hanging chads we knew what we did not know. Today, with the growth of electronic voting, we don't know what we don't know." Rev. DeForest "Buster" Soaries, Former chair, Election Administration Commission / Some Maryland counties are reporting a shortage of absentee ballots....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"Thirty states now allow no-excuse absentee voting, and most of them also allow voters to cast early ballots in person at county clerks’ offices or satellite polling places." / I love this opening to an article: "On a warm Friday afternoon last May, Alex Halderman double-parked his Cadillac STS near a New York hotel, left the motor idling and ducked into an alley for a secret rendezvous. Moments later, the Princeton University grad student emerged with a black attaché case containing what he feared was a grave threat to the United States: A Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine." ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

'Although most of the attention has focused on paper trails and how vulnerable the machines are to hackers, a professor at Ohio State University and one of his former students are questioning the haphazard way these machines are bought and distributed.' 'Election officials interviewed all said they bought machines based on the number of registered voters in their county. But each county had a different idea of what the proper ratio of machines to voters should be.' ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Alachua Co Florida elections people have admitted that not all votes in an April 11 city election were considered. They have also admitted that one voting machine had an error and that absentee ballots were not put into "secrecy folders". / Some county election officials across the country seem to be discussing the need for emergency paper ballots at the poll site "just in case" / 'Provisional ballots could again be a leading concern at the polls this year, with new figures showing one in three--more than 650,000 of 2 million cast--were left uncounted or discarded in 2004, according to a new briefing paper by Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy and research center.' / Sadly activist judges have legislated from the Supreme Court and found that Arizona can require Voter ID / Benton Co Arkansas has not received their absentee ballots from ES&S and won't until next week. No change for ES&S. / VoteTech (VTI) machines in Randolph Co Indiana are not working properly during testing....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon (with additional snark provided by Brad Friedman)

The Washington Post is reporting in Friday editions that the FBI is investigating the "possible theft" of Diebold electronic touch-screen voting system source code in Maryland.

While the Maryland State Board of Elections admits that the disks contained "the software...used in Maryland in the 2004 elections," Diebold denies everything. Of course. They gave their catch-all apologia --- the software is for "versions...that are no longer in use in Maryland" --- although they were forced to acknowledge "the version of one program apparently stored on the disks is still in use in 'a limited number of jurisdictions.'"

The disks feature logos from Ciber Inc. and Wyle Labratories, Inc., two labs that test voting machines and software (sort of) for Diebold. Both firms deny the disks are theirs.

According to the article...

WaPo goes on to report...

So will Diebold just continue to deny that anything has happened or can happen? Will MD State Election Director Linda Lamone just pass on Diebold disinformation as she always does (despite knowing better...since she's seen the unredacted scientific reports on these systems from security organizations like SAIC and RABA?) Or will someone finally understand that this is a massive problem that needs immediate attention?

Maryland, along with Georgia, was one of Diebold's original "showcase states," implementing Diebold's hackable paperless touch-screen voting across virtually the entire state since 2002. With failure after failure, we might add.

If it's all not bad enough, in what is reported by WaPo as "an unrelated development" in the same article, a new report from Maryland state auditors revealed that the state's new voter registration database does not have proper security controls in place for access to the data...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Utah has announced a change in election rules that will require a minimum audit of 1% machines in each county. A 3% audit will be done for congressional races and 5% for smaller elections. These are minimum requirements. This is a good first, baby-step now the state needs to make an adult step to a meaningful audit. / Officials in Chicago and Cook Co Illinois are already predicting a meltdown. While the Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group blamed any mistakes on poll workers (no surprise there) even experienced elections officials had problems with the Sequoia HAAT. / Denver Colorado will be doing a 5% audit of their machines. / Here we go again. Early voting in Arkansas begins next Monday. At least one county has still to receive their PEBs and paper ballots. Maybe Saturday. I wonder if they do any L&A testing at all? ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

A federal appeals court will hear a complaint against the Indiana Voter ID law today. / 'As the new [federal] testing and certification program is developed in response to input from public interest organizations, computer security experts, and concerned citizens, the EAC should be guided by a desire for the greatest possible transparency. A transparent election process is fundamental to democratic governance' says Warren Stewart of VoteTrustUSA. / Grant Parrish Louisiana needs 47 new voting machines to replace those that were damaged due to flooding in their warehouse. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

In August Vote-PAD learned that the California Secretary of State had decided to deny them certification that would allow Vote-PAD's voting assistive devices to be used in the state of California. They did this even though some counties had already contracted for Vote-PAD or were in the purchase process and even though Vote-PAD showed clear and convincing evidence that the testing process was biased. This denial by Bruce McPherson and his underlings led to the now famous "Off With Their Heads" blog here at The BRAD BLOG.

On Monday Vote-PAD issued a press release to inform the public that they had filed a formal complaint with the California Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board. According to the press release, Vote-PAD "asserts that the Secretary of State violated a number of State and Federal protections during the Vote-PAD certification process: 'a violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitutions of both the United States and the State of California, a breach of contract, a violation of the California Administrative Procedures Act, a violation of the Election Code provisions governing voting system certification and an abuse of discretion in the Secretary's authority to certify voting systems.'"

The full press release follows...

The Coalition For Voting Integrity (CVI) in Pennsylvania has announced that beginning tonight and weekly they will be doing a one-hour radio program that centers on voting issues and democracy.

The program can be heard locally in the SE Pennsylvania and S New Jersey area via WNJC Radio 1360AM or it can be heard live via the internet by going here. They are encouraging audience participation so if you have questions/comments for tonights guest, Lowell Finley of VoterAction you can call 856 227 1360.

We are happy to see another group sharing their voices with Brad and the others who are on the radio spreading the good, bad and ugly news about our elections. The whole CVI Press Release has upcoming guests and more information....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The worst county for elections in the US, Cuyahoga Co. Ohio has taken another step into the realm of the absurd. The county wants to get their votes tabulated as quickly as possible and they apparently aren't worried as much about accuracy so they are using a new add-on device from Diebold that has never been used in an election and is not even complete with the federal inspection process yet. This device reads the data from the voting machine memory cards, six cards at a time in one minute. The county just has to get the totals out quickly; never mind the accuracy of those totals. / Massachusetts has still not settled on accessible voting machines. Three weeks from election day is too late to bring in new machines and train workers. The state, apparently, is also going to ignore HAVA and not require a new machine at each polling place....