7 days until Election Day.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist has declared an emergency in the state and has decreed that polling places are to stay open overtime. Polls will now be open for up to 12 hours a day across the state. Now we will wait to see if any county election officials decide to file a lawsuit against the Governor so the poll hours are not extended.

The Brennan Center and VerifiedVoting have sent a letter to 16 Secretaries of State warning them about vote flipping on their ES&S iVotronic DREs. We certainly hope the Secretaries pay attention and accept the suggestions in the letter....

7 days until Election Day.

The NAACP and Advancement Project have sued the VA Governor and the state’s top election officials for failing to provide enough resources to accommodate expected record turnout next week. The suit claims the state is in violation of the US and state constitutions and that a failure to fairly distribute voting machines, poll workers and polling places will result in long-lines in some neighborhoods. The suit asks the state to move voting machines to precincts most like to have long lines; keep polls open longer and to use paper ballots in some cases.

Also this morning is the revelation that some Georgia polling places have had lines with as long as 8 hours waiting time due to their voter registration data base being slow. The state claims that the problem is the turnout but that explanation does not make sense in the real world. The number of poll site computers feeding into the central data base computer dictates how fast that system is; not the number of voters. On election day there will be many, many more poll site computers all feeding into the central computer at the same time. Things will probably get much, much slower and lines will grow longer....

8 days until Election Day.

Kim Zetter writes in her “Threat Level” blog on Wired.com [Featured] that while ES&S touch screens in West Virginia were flipping voters votes the Secretary of State was busy giving an ex-official of that company, and a WV resident, Gary Greenhalgh, a “Medallion Award” from the National Association of Secretaries of State. Greenhalgh sold the machines used in the state to the state. While he no longer works for ES&S, his wife is now the companies representative in WV. Secretary of State Betty Ireland, just two years ago, filed a formal complaint against ES&S with the federal Election Assistance Commission, the body that oversees federal testing and certification of voting machines. She called for an audit of the company's contractual performance. She has now turned to a supporter of the company. Not covered by Zetter is that at one time Greenhalgh worked for MicroVote as their national sales director. This NASS “Medallion Award” winner was sued by his employer for what MicroVote says is “trade secret violations”. According to James Ries Jr., the president of MicroVote, Greenhalgh’s actions were “Probably the most damaging, he was actually selling the equipment being released from Montgomery County to our customers on the side. And it violated his working contract with us that he was selling outside of MicroVote's jurisdiction”....

9 days until Election Day.

In a stunning admission Sequoia Voting Systems has admitted to not printing and mailing over 11,000 absentee ballots to Denver, Colorado, voters. Their spokeswoman claimed they “made an unfortunate mistake.” In fact, the company had failed to notify the city of this “mistake” and when originally asked they lied and told the city they had delivered all 21,450 ballots they were supposed to print and deliver to the post office on Oct. 16. Sequoia claims they will have ballots printed and delivered to the post office by tomorrow, Monday. Voters have until election day to get those ballots marked and either back in the mail or delivered to any early polling site. Not mentioned by anyone is if any overseas voters or military are affected by this failure.

In Jefferson Co, Arkansas, voters will vote on ballots that don’t have some alderman races on them. The county discovered their error too late and they have now fixed it but all early voting has been done without those races being voted on by the voters. The county will just forget all of those voters and hope that none of the races are close, which would open them up for potential lawsuits....

10 days until Election Day.

The story seems to be the same from most of the ‘early voting’ states; long lines of voters and from a few states vote flipping has been reported and it seems that the flip is always in one direction.

We highly recommend that if you, or a friend or acquaintance, have a problem at the polls you/they call the hot-lines – 1-866-OUR-VOTE and 1-866-MY-VOTE1. We also recommend that you notify the local media and don’t give up on telling them what happened. Of course, there are other steps that need to be taken. See our featured article for more suggestions on what actions need to be taken....

11 days until Election Day.

Two voters in Palo Pinto Co Texas have now reported that their straight party vote was flipped to another party. These are ES&S iVotronic machines. The same machines used to flip votes in West Virginia and South Carolina. Every voter needs to skip straight-party voting if they have that option and every voter needs to review their ballot on the touch-screen before touching that final “Vote” button.

Every day there seems to be one or two articles, mostly in the tech magazines and blogs, about the New Jersey/Princeton/Sequoia report. While Sequoia is probably not happy seeing these articles out there, I’m sure they are breathing a sigh of relief that the report only spent a very small time talking about the real reason the report was done in the first place; their voting machines failed to accurately count the votes in 9 counties on 38 different voting machines. This should NOT be a security issue. This IS an accuracy/reliability issue....

11 days until Election Day.

Because of concerns about voting machine failures in Arapahoe Co Colorado and the possibility of long lines and disenfranchised voters a US Congressman has asked the county to provide a common sense fall-back. Congressman Perlmutter has requested that the county have emergency paper ballots at each poll site. The county and Secretary of State have refused to do this.

At least 10,000 absentee paper ballots will have to hand counted in Gwinnett Co Georgia. The ballots were printed and sent out and then the county did pre-election testing only to find that the ovals on the ballots were printed too dark. Another vendor caused problem that will affect the voters. ...

12 days until Election Day.

This morning there were two press releases from Pennsylvania. The links were broken so I have re-posted those articles to the top and added ‘tinyurls’.

Hispanic voters in Nevada are getting calls to tell them they can vote over the phone. The callers, Spanish speakers, claim they are from one party yet the information they are passing on is clearly false and meant to disenfranchise the unwary voter.

Sequoia Voting Systems appears to be in the middle of another huge problem in Washington DC. They printed and mailed the Districts absentee ballots. It seems that either ballots were misprinted and races were left off or the wrong ballots were sent to voters in the right wards. ...

12 days until Election Day.

There is just too much news to fit into one DVN today so there will be one edition this morning (Pac time) and one at the normal time. We will be doing that through the election as the amount of news grows.

So far today a federal lawsuit has been filed in Pennsylvania seeking an earlier use of emergency paper ballots than is presently the dictate of the Secretary of State. The SoS has dictated that emergency ballots can only be used when all of the machines at a poll site are shut-down for some reason. The lawsuit hopes to loosen up that dictate to when 50% of the machines are shut-down for some reason.

While the West Virginia SoS has dictated that all of the states ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines must be recalibrated we are still getting reports of vote switching.

13 days until Election Day.

Today we have more vote switching reports from Tennessee. There are also reports that the “Ballot-On-Demand” printer may be the root of the problems in some Florida counties. It seems that if the blank paper is not put into the printer just exactly right the printer prints the ballot skewed and the OSX tabulator will not read that ballot.

Voters on Hilton Head Island South Carolina were surprised when they reviewed their ES&S iVotronic ballots to find that some races were not shown on the review screen at all. They voted those races but nothing was shown on the review screen. South Carolina seems to have a real problem with doing any pre-election testing to ensure the ballot programming works the way it is supposed to work and when you have ES&S as a vendor that testing is even more important.

69 voters in Sarasota Co Florida received their absentee ballots only to find that the State Senate District 23 race was left off. Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent, whose name appears 8 times on sample ballots, knew about this problem 11 days ago and claims she told members of the elections board about it but they deny knowing any specifics....

14 days until Election Day.

New York state officials have either purged or made inactive over 1.6 million voters. That is a huge number and with that large a number there will certainly be problems.

Georgia’s Secretary of State is doing all she can to suppress the vote. She is requiring a waiting period between voters registering and voting. She has also instituted checks on citizenship and ID at registration even though the Justice Department has warned her that she can’t do that without pre-clearance. The state is also woefully behind in processing new voter registrations.

We’ve also got more reports of vote swapping in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas, and long lines across the nation.

Straight-party voting in Texas continues to cause problems for voters. Voters need to be told not to vote straight-party. Vote for each race but vote the whole ballot....

15 days until Election Day.

Election officials in Jacksonville Florida must not have done the required Logic and Accuracy testing on all of their optical scan machines to be used in early voting. Nearly half of the optical scan machines in use in the city failed because they indicated the ballot was too long. This is clearly an error that should have been discovered in pre-election Logic and Accuracy testing. The problem is also being reported in other counties in the state and is being attributed to the machines purchased by the state.

Voters in Houston Texas were faced with long lines for the first day of early voting. Long-lines in some voting sites caused by failures of the computers used to check-in the voters. There were also some reports of voters who voted straight-party Democrat only to find that their Presidential selection was given to the Republican....

16 days until Election Day.

Yesterday we reported vote flipping on ES&S iVotronic DREs in Jackson Co West Virginia. Today we have a report from Putnam Co that votes are flipping on their iVotronic machines. In every case, in both articles, the voters are voting for a Democratic candidate and their votes were being moved to the Republican candidate by the machines.

Already turn-out is proving to be heavier than many jurisdictions have prepared for. Long lines have been reported in Nevada and New Mexico, and elsewhere, with voters having to wait for as much as two hours to vote. Luckily anyone who gave up has the time in the next two weeks to go vote early. I’m just afraid that Nov. 4 is going to find long lines at the polls and precincts ill prepared to handle the number of voters who want to exercise their right to vote....

17 days until Election Day.

Along with early voting we are getting reports of early vote switching. The ES&S iVotronic machines in Jackson Co. West Virginia are reportedly swapping voters selections from one candidate to another.

VotersUnite has done some research of state laws and talked with election officials in a few states on the subject of straight-party voting. The laws and rules from one state to another are a confusing mess and even state election officials did not understand the rules without checking. How can the machine vendors and ballot programmers be expected to get it right? The best answer for everyone is to vote the whole ballot but avoid straight-party voting. We have done our best to explain the rules in each state for the voters HERE. ...

18 days until Election Day.

Today was a day for court decisions. Finally a judge in New Jersey has released the Princeton University report on the state’s Sequoia Voting Machines. Earlier Sequoia had released their response to the report. After the recent failures of their voting systems in Palm Beach Co. Florida and Washington DC Sequoia must be very concerned about this report and what it contains. One item of note is that the inspection and resulting report was the result of an election problem that called into question the accuracy of the Sequoia Advantage voting system. The cause of that failure is discussed in the Princeton report but that section of the report is one of the only sections that Sequoia ignores.

Also this morning the Supreme Court sided with the voters of Ohio and freed the Secretary of State and county election officials from a ruling by a lower court that would have caused as many as 200,000 voters to lose their right to vote in this election....