Guest Blogged by John Gideon, with Brad Friedman

Elections Systems and Software (ES&S) has finally shown us why they should not be in the elections business. The disgraceful primary election in Arkansas yesterday is a prime example. It was, and continues to be, an utter disaster today. The day after.

Brad and I both have been overwhelmed all day with the number of reports coming in on the complete failures by ES&S in the state yesterday. So much so, that it's difficult to even know where to begin. Thus, tonight's late report --- with general details and enough links to set you on your way to inform yourself about what the hell is going on here.

In our best (if fruitless) attempt at brevity, however...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Yesterday I pointed out a problem in Luzerne County. Unfortunately I moved that county from it's home state, Pennsylvania, to Ohio. My apologies to both states and the people of Luzerne County. Over 200 Danaher 1242 DREs are now reported to have failed on primary day in Philadelphia, PA. These are the same machines that Bucks County PA has now announced they want to buy, except they want used ones. As far as Arkansas goes, yesterday's primary election was a complete disaster for elections officials, poll workers and most of all for the voters in the state. iVotronic machines did not work properly, would not start, and would not shut down on time. Some precincts just ignored the machines and used paper ballots because the machines were not working. Paper ballots could not be read by some optical-scan machines due to lack of proper software. Some voters were turned away from the polls because they ran out of paper ballots. Yes, they were denied their right to vote because of a lack of paper ballots....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

"We need more audits. We need recounts. Trust no one. If it can't be verified, it can't be used": Ion Sancho. Why is it that newspapers in Virginia talk about their new voting machines and mention they are AccuVote Touch Screens but the papers never utter the name "Diebold"? Official results for Luzerne County Ohio's primary race are down by 10 percent from unofficial count done on election night. This mistake by an ES&S employee's failure to reset a counter to zero has resulted in a change in at least one race. It will also surely result in recounts and/or lawsuits. Poll workers in Arkansas seem to be having some problems getting voters to try the new iVotronics. Up to 75% of the voters have opted to use paper ballots. And, Arkansas SoS Daniels has no stated that he will be talking with ES&S about their failure to support elections in his state. Of course, the DoJ is in Arkansas and one of the things they are surely looking at is that four counties are still using their old lever machines because of ES&S's failures....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Tomorrow we have primary elections in Arkansas and Idaho. Arkansas is iVotronics while Idaho is a mixture of ES&S op-scan with AutoMark or Sequoia Edge. Did you think the machines used in Allegheny County Pennsylvania were new? If you did you were wrong. In fact, they are used machines with some coming from New Orleans. Those machines have not stopped traveling either. They are now on their way to their permanent (maybe) home in Tennessee. Yes, two days before the deadline set for Tennessee counties to sign their contracts with ES&S, the vendor told the state HAVA coordinator that any county wanting to contract with ES&S would have to accept used machines. The coordinator just shrugged his shoulders and did nothing. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Crittenden County Arkansas trained all of their poll workers Saturday morning. Four hours of training and throw them to the wolves on Tuesday. A newspaper in Ohio correctly points out a fact we have been talking about for quite sometime now: the cost of elections is going to markedly rise for school, water, fire and other districts who hold small elections for bonds, initiatives and levies. The same will be true for small town elections when they are not held on the same day as county and state elections. In other words those small elections will be driven to be held with the larger elections which will increase the size of our ballots and the complexity of those elections. Benton County Arkansas Election Coordinator Jim McCarthy said. "To make the voting process go as smoothly as possible, we would urge everyone who can to use a paper ballot. We have not had a sufficient amount of time to do adequate training for our pollworkers with the electronic ballots, and it's going to stop everything, or slow it way down, if they try and do that." County Election Commission Chairman John Brown said the company has "bitten off more than it can chew," leaving nearly every county in the state dealing with the same problems as Benton County. "ES&S has oversold itself all over the country," McCarthy said....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Crittenden County Arkansas hoped to have gotten their ballot programming for their iVotronic machines yesterday afternoon. They are being forced by the state to use the machines in the primary on Tuesday. Because of late arriving software and then having the software come in with mistakes the first time, the county had planned on not using the machines at all. Now they must gather all 150 poll workers today, which is "Graduation Day" for Arkansas schools, and give them a crash-course in how to operate the DREs. This is a recipe for disaster. Someone at ES&S has admitted that they knew there was a problem with their iVotronics that affects the votes of tall voters. However, their spokesperson is now denying there is a problem and that it is up to the voters to check their votes and everyone just loves using the iVotronics so there can be no problem. "ES&S workers" were responsible for some ballots being counted twice on PA primary night so vote counts in Luzerne County were not correct. The 'undervote' rate in Allegheny County Pennsylvania seems to be very high according to reports....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Trouble seems to be brewing in West Virginia where SoS Betty Ireland has requested every county to determine their losses due to poor support from ES&S. Those losses will be used in an investigation into the vendor's missed contractual deadlines and lack of support. At the same time many county clerks are speaking out about the late support from the SoS against ES&S. Last Wednesday I posted an article regarding ES&S charging $8.50 for a roll of thermal paper for the iVotronic machines in White County Arkansas. Today I called White County and verified that the paper is, in fact, thermal paper and it is used for their vvpat....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

For the most part the news from Pennsylvania has been pretty good. The ES&S iVotronics and Danaher 1242s seem to have had a problem providing the poll opening zero tape but that seems to be the biggest problem reported. In Indiana an investigation by the Secretary of State's office found that ES&S may have committed around 30 violations of the Indiana Election Code. More on this will be coming out soon. And in Florida the LWV has stopped doing voter registrations and has filed a suit against the SoS and Division of Elections for draconian fines that can now be levied against any organization doing voter registration work for filing the forms late even when it is not the organizations fault....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

From Arkansas today we learn that ES&S is selling vvpat thermal paper rolls for $8.50 per roll and each roll will handle around 100 voters. A quick search of paper suppliers shows that the same paper can be purchased retail for $50 to $60 for a case of 50 rolls. ES&S wants to milk and bilk every single penny they can from their customers. A large majority of the news from Pennsylvania was in praise of the myriad of new voting machines being used throughout the state. I'm not sure if this is because everything worked well or because the media has not been given all of the facts. Let's hope it is the former and not the later. There were few voting machine problems reported from Kentucky today. However, some local election officials seem to have found a new way to scam the machines as they tell voters not to finalize their votes. Voters walked away from the machines and poll workers then may have gone in and changed the votes....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

While voting machines in the Kentucky primary seem to have worked fine in early reports, some voters got to the polls to find that they had been purged. The SoS apparently is concerned about the hoards of illegal voters from neighboring states who will cross into Kentucky just to vote in their election. While they worry about that dozens of voters in Clay County are complaining about the possibility of their votes being changed on the voting machines. They were told not to confirm their vote on the machine which left the machine to poll workers to change the votes and do the final confirmation. Meanwhile, over 100 Danaher machines in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had problems at start-up. They sat their and spit out their "write-in paper tape" in a steady stream of paper. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Pennsylvania counties used the media to their benefit as they extolled the virtues of their voting systems and tried to convince voters to be confident. They should be concerned about the mix of systems, brand new systems, lack of training and knowledge, and what have proven to be unreliable machines. I hope we get through this one without any "Train Wrecks" but I am not confident that will happen. And there is more in the news and blogs about the Diebold security vulnerability....

By John Gideon, www.VotersUnite.Org and www.VoteTrustUSA.Org May 15, 2006

Yes, the wheels are wobbling on the locomotives. The vendors --- ES&S, Diebold, and the rest --- attempt to keep a stiff upper lip as they both fail to perform, yet continue collecting tax-payer dollars from the county election coffers. Meanwhile some elections officials have just turned a blind-eye to what is happening while they continue to make excuses for their vendors: The private corporate American Electronic Voting Machine behemoths that are being paid to take over America's Public Electoral system.

And the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) which was put in place by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), theoretically, to keep all of this from occurring? Well, all they do is raise their hands and shrug and tell anyone who asks, that they don't do voting systems certification so they just don't know anything. The Sergeant Schultz Defense, perhaps?

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Yesterday voters in Iowa Park, Texas had their choice of voting on paper ballots or iVotronic voting machines. 100% of the voters chose to vote on paper. Not one single vote was cast on the machines. Today we have a great article about Ion Sancho and another article from Ohio about corruption in the Franklin County elections office. Don't forget that Tuesday is primary election day for Oregon, Kentucky and Pennsylvania....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Included in today's news is an excellent investigative article from Texas in regard to small communities and the cost of elections. Remember that in most, if not all, states the small communities, school districts, park districts, etc. have to pay for elections that they need to elect local officials or float bonds or levies. The cost of doing that is skyrocketing because of the steep rise in the cost of voting machines. In order to handle their inability to provide voting machines to meet their contracts, ES&S has changed, without permission, the contract for Tennessee and included words to allow them to send used machines to a dozen Tennessee counties for the primary. Big surprise to those counties and the state. And, due to problems with the counties ES&S op-scan machine, Harrison County Indiana must now manually recount the ballots from 15 precincts....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Please note that I have segregated out all of the articles that discuss the Diebold security issue from the rest of the articles. Today the corporate national media finally woke-up and began to do their job. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, United Press International, and Associated Press all reported on the Diebold security 'chasm' and, as it turns out, other voting news items. In the face of this reporting and quotes from renowned computer scientists and experts in security, election officials in Georgia, Maryland and Utah have spoken out that there isn't any problem as far as they are concerned or that it is just a minimal issue. They are aping the line from Diebold who must be looking at the beginning of the collapse of their house of cards. And from Florida we learn that Diebold has shipped TSx machines that are not state certified to 5 counties. The state is covering for them. Three primaries next Tuesday; Oregon, Kentucky and Pennsylvania....