Guest Blogged by Stephen Heller

In an article from the April 24th edition of the Seattle Times, we learn that King County, Washington election officials have recommended Diebold tabulators for use in counting mail-in ballots.

According to Sherril Huff, who has been nominated by County Executive Ron Sims to become elections director, Diebold products represent "the solution with the least amount of risk."

Say what?!

I am astounded (although I guess as a regular reader of The BRAD BLOG I shouldn't be) that any election official can, at this point in time, say that ANY Diebold product is "the solution with the least amount of risk."

And Ms. Huff is recommending the purchase of Diebold tabulators BEFORE they have received federal certification.

Has Ms. Huff been living in a cave?

I'm glad to say some council members are awake enough to know this is a bad idea. They are worried about the lack of federal certification, and they seem to be aware of the various computer experts' tests showing Diebold machines to be hack-friendly and about as risk-free as Dick Cheney's hunting partners....

By John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Normally this space is taken with my ideas of what are the "Top 5" voting news stories for the week. Today I am going to use this space to talk about what I see as the beginning of a disaster in the making with our elections. This isn't the election fraud that some point to when they talk about the vendors and some elections officials. It's not about recounts or audits. This is a real, get your hands around it, happening problem that will disrupt our election process if we do not do something about it now. While we have been involved in all of our issues about Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or "touch-screen") voting machines or paper ballots the electronic voting machine vendors have been wreaking complete havoc across the country.

So far this year two states have conducted primary elections. In Texas there is at least one candidate who has stepped forward and has challenged the election because of anomalies in vote counts and known voting machine failures. One county's machines counted some votes up to 6 times which resulted in approximately 100,000 more votes being counted than were cast. Though the vendor, Hart Intercivic, initially blamed the problem on human error, they finally had to admit that it was a programming error and not poll workers or voters who had erred. In Illinois some county officials are threatening to withhold final payment of funds on contracts with Sequoia Voting Systems because of failures with their machines that ended with results in the primary not being known for over a week after the voters went to the polls. In both states the involved vendors were very successful in the media with deflecting the blame from their machines to "human errors" or "glitches". However, when you listen to people who were there and who saw and worked through the problems you get a very different picture...

We congratulate the Republicans in Washington State for fighting so hard to ensure the accuracy of the election for Governor there. We're glad to see a political party willing to fight for the validity of every vote.

If they had an actual case, however, as the Democrats do in numerous other states where they've failed to fight the way Republicans do for every vote, John Kerry would likely be the President by now.

Nonetheless, here's the key information on the GOP's resounding defeat as reported by today's Seattle Times...

So. No fraud found in Washington State. For the Governor's race anyway. We suppose the only thing that Wingnut Tinfoil Hat Wearers will now be able to use in order to counter the calls for a similar investigation of the Presidential Election in states where the votes were never actually counted (like J. Kenneth Blackwell's Ohio for example) will be those slashed tires in Wisconsin.

Beyond that, we're certain those GOP'ers who were outraged by what they thought they saw in WA will be calling for the same strict standards to be applied to the rest of the country any moment now. Right?