There is not a lot of election’s related news today. The discovery that Premier/Diebold allowed counties to use software that they, the vendor, knew was not accurate is still in the news. There are two blog items leading tonight’s short list that discuss this recent discovery in Humboldt Co California....

More news is coming out on the lost votes in Humboldt Co California as well as the expected obfuscation and misinformation from Diebold. They aren’t denying the fact that their voting system doesn’t correctly count the votes but they are making excuses as to why they didn’t recall the software that is to blame. Those excuses don’t hold much water. This story is not going away any time soon....

Today we have three articles about an amazing story of transparency in elections and what can happen when that transparency exists.

With the assistance of Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich, the Humboldt Co elections office partnered with local advocates to duplicate all paper ballots after they were originally counted. The images of those ballots were then put on line for research by the public. In conjunction with the “Humboldt Election Transparency Project” software was written that allowed researchers to recount the ballot images. This recount was just completed after the election was certified. The results of that recount were the discovery that a batch of 197 ballots that had been fed into the county’s Diebold optical scan machines were deleted after the totals were input on the GEMS software.

The county went back and checked and verified this problem. It then took the county several phone calls to Diebold/Premier to discover that the vendor knew about this problem and had known about it since 2004. It is reported that they neglected to notify the county and, according to one article, the state was never notified of this problem.

Carolyn Crnich and the advocates of Humboldt Co are to be congratulated for excellent work. Diebold/Premier, on the other hand, needs to be investigated for violations of the Help America Vote Act Section 301(a)(5) by the Dept. of Justice....

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was signed into law in Oct. 2002. Amongst other things HAVA required the formation of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and provided some mandates, in Title III of the law, for federal elections including some standards for voting systems. Those standards include, but are not limited to, accessibility for voters with disabilities and accuracy in the vote count. Testing by experts in accessibility has shown that none of the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems presently in use meet the requirements for accessibility for disabled voters. Failures in testing and vote counting in real elections have also proven that, at times, the voting systems presently being used across the country do not meet the federally mandated requirements for accuracy.

So what guidance has been provided by the EAC to the states with regards to Title III? Well, actually none. In fact even though voting systems presently in use do not meet federal law the EAC is just now getting around to issuing guidance to state and local election officials and, according to the draft of the plan ‘featured’ below, it is going to take another two years before the EAC can complete the guidance.

Why can’t they just tell the vendors and the states that the law is clear and, if they fail to follow that law, violations will be referred to the DoJ? The fact that the vendors misrepresent their products as being accessible is a clear violation of the law. It is time they are held responsible and it doesn’t take two years of studying Title III of HAVA to make that clear....

Here is the news for the day. ...

Other than a report of problems in one Georgia county with their electronic voter database the news has been quiet. Results of this election should be known this evening and reports of counting problems, if there are any, will dribble out over the next couple days.

The recount in Minnesota is still ongoing. One county found 171 previously uncounted ballots. Reports are that the vote count is getting closer.

It appears that the battle over House District 105 and the Dallas Co. Texas recount has been joined as the county has hired a law firm to represent their interest against the Democratic party in court....

The Minnesota recount is still on-going. Tomorrow the polls open for election day in Georgia for the re-vote for their Senate race. There was also a TRO sought by the Democratic Party in the recount of the Texas House District 105 race as part of a federal voting rights lawsuit. That lawsuit was filed today. Also, Washington DC city council member, Mary Cheh, announced today that she will be asking her council colleagues to pass a resolution to enforce subpoenas on Sequoia Voting Systems. She wants the source code and other Sequoia records and wants a judge to force compliance....

The good folks in Minnesota are still recounting votes in the Senate race. There will be a lot of heated discussion over how voter intent is decided by officials and my guess is that the courts are going to have to decide the winner and loser.

Tuesday is the runoff election for Senator from Georgia. They will be using the same Diebold voting system that is in question from the 2002 election. ...

I have been asked often about my position on Instant Runoff Voting [also known as Ranked Coice Voting]. My answer is always that I just haven’t formed an opinion on the basics of IRV. I do, however, have a problem with the fact that those who are avid supporters of IRV quite often favor IRV over voting system issues. They tend to be willing to turn a blind-eye to the use of voting systems that I would never support because there are no voting systems that actually support IRV that are federally certified.

Two west-coast counties, Pierce in WA and San Francisco in CA, used Sequoia systems that were a mix and match of certified parts and tested parts that were never tested and certified to be used together. Officials in Minnesota are now talking about IRV for the future. When asked about a second or third count election, officials said they would hand-count those ballots, but officials who have done IRV say that would be a “huge nightmare”.

One of the two west coast counties is even now thinking of going back to the voters to ask that IRV voting no longer be used. We agree with this position but only until there is a system that can actually count the ballots and not be a “huge nightmare”....

The “Daily Voting News” staff [all one of us] is going to take tomorrow off to enjoy family and friends. We will be back on Friday. We hope you all have a great Thanksgiving and have an opportunity to enjoy family and friends.

A three judge panel of the 6th US Court of Appeals in Ohio has ruled unanimously that a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters in the aftermath of the 2004 general election can continue in US District Court. One judge said this about disenfranchising acts by some election officials, “"If true, these allegations could establish that Ohio's voting system deprives its citizens of the right to vote or severely burdens the exercise of that right, depending on where they live”....

Prior to election day we, VotersUnite.Org, counseled voters to not use straight-party voting. We put it on our website and I wrote about it in these spaces. Straight-party voting as it is used in Texas is rife for misunderstanding and mistakes by the voters. When someone votes a straight-party ticket but then also selects the name of a candidate within that party in a particular race, electronic machines "deselect" that candidate. If no other candidate is chosen, no vote is counted in that race. The best solution, in our minds, was to NOT use straight-party voting but we got a lot of push back from some party officials in the state. Now Dallas Co. Democrats have been in court in an attempt to get the county to count all deselected or emphasis votes. The Secretary of State and the county both say no. The court, after two days of hearings and the promise of a decision, has, at the last minute, decided that they may have no jurisdiction. There would be no problem at all if straight-party voting had not been pushed by party officials....

Thousands of Georgia absentee ballot requests have been denied because the voters did not sign the requests. Many of the requests are via a post-card provided by the RNC and the signature block is supposedly hard to find on the card. Over 7,000 requests have been rejected in Cobb Co and 2,800 in DeKalb Co.

Connecticut has submitted their reports done by UConn for the SoS office with regards to their voting systems to the EAC for inclusion in the “clearinghouse”. The state and the university have become good partners and are to be commended for the audits of memory cards that they accomplish before and after elections. Every state and local election official should be aware of these reports and the results of the audits. As well as being a font of good information and warnings they should also serve as a valuable example of what a state can do when they actually want to ensure that voting system problems are found. While the reports the EAC allows to be on their site are only a small portion of the reports that should be in the EACs clearinghouse, what is there is a beginning....

The Minnesota Senatorial race is still the source of most of the news. The Minneapolis-St Paul Star-Tribune seems to have some of the best coverage of the recount. The link in the article below has not changed over the past few days but the story is constantly updated and changes as the news changes.

One of the counties that had problems on election day, readers will recall, was Kenton Co. Kentucky. You may remember that many of the county’s Hart Intercivic eSlate machines were not properly recording straight-party votes and they were taken out of service. The machines are sold, maintained and programmed by Harp Enterprises.

During an investigation of the Kenton Co problem the president of Harp told investigators that election officials in nearly 100 Kentucky counties failed to do any pre-election testing. If officials in Kenton Co had done the testing they should have found the problem that affected their machines. Of course, Harp has thrown the counties under the bus to some extent. It should have been their duty to warn the state that the testing was not happening. It is also important to note that Harp programs the machines in many of those counties so they are deflecting the blame to some extent...

The recount in Minnesota continues to dominate the news. Franken is inching closer to Coleman’s vote total but there are still a lot of votes to count and then a steadily growing number of challenged ballots that will have to be cussed and discussed. Also today we have news from Ohio where another close race, 15th Congressional District, may be decided by provisional ballots. Over 27,000 provisional ballots in Franklin Co were not going to be counted but a federal judge has stepped-in and ruled that at least 1,000 of those ballots must be counted and that will probably lead to a count of all of the ballots. Of course there is an appeal of this ruling so it will be another week at least before there is any final decision....

For those of you who are closely watching the Minnesota senatorial recount there is a live blog that is dedicated to reports from the ground in the state. You can go here and keep up-to-date....