Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Prior to the 2000 general election thousands of otherwise eligible voters were scrubbed from the rolls in Florida. In 2002 the Help America Vote Act was signed into law. One of the issues that law was to help with was to clear up the voter registration issues such as what happened in 2000. That law required centralization of voter registrations at the state level and not, as previously, at the county. Now, in Florida again, voters have had to go to court in order to get put back on the voter rolls. Little things like missing hyphens, common in Hispanic surnames or Haitian first names, are enough to have a person’s registration denied. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

It looks like counties in Southern California like to hire election officials who have failed in their jobs elsewhere. Michael Vu, the Cuyahoga Co Ohio election director who was run out of the state ended up as the number two in the San Diego Co election office. Now Los Angeles Co has named Dean Logan, who failed miserably while the elections director in King Co Washington (Seattle) as their interim elections director to replace Connie McCormack who was run out of Texas years ago.

California counties who have the AutoMark A200 machines have been told by the state that they can now use those machines. The lawsuit against ES&S will continue.

More bad news for ES&S as San Francisco is changing vendors to Sequoia Voting Systems. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

According to reports from Vigo Co Indiana, where there is a recount being held for Terre Haute mayor, a court-appointed recount commission is seated to oversee the process. State law, according to the news report, requires that one of the three members of that commission be a representative of the voting system vendor. So ES&S is overseeing the recount of ballots. It is time the people take back our elections. No vendor should be allowed to be contracted to take over counting votes or sitting on commissions that make decisions in our elections.

Is Cuyahoga Co Ohio being set-up to fail yet again? That is the question being asked and answered in a blog from a county voter. Just why is Brunner suggesting to the county that they totally overhaul their voting system before the March primary?...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Good news today from New Jersey where S-507, a post-election audit bill, passed through the budget committee on a party-line vote even with opposition from the state Attorney General.

This week we are scheduled to hear the results of the Ohio Secretary of State’s EVEREST project. This project and resulting reports from academics and others was supposed to be Jennifer Brunner’s “Top-To-Bottom Review” with the resulting recognition comparable to that given to California’s Debra Bowen. We are still waiting to hear whether we will actually see the reports or just an executive summary that only gives us the information the Secretary wants us to hear. In the meantime, Brunner seems to be nudging Cuyahoga Co to change from DRE voting to optical-scan. While those nudges would have been great 6 months or more ago, it is questionable as to whether the county should change now. The Ohio primary is March 4 with absentee voting beginning in January. The county should now be working on ballot lay-out, ballot programming and ballot printing. This is NOT the time to make any changes. One has to wonder whether Brunner is trying to emulate Bowen or Blackwell. The jury is still out.

Links to those, and today's other notable voting news stories, all posted below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

San Francisco has finally certified their Nov. 6 election. They hand-counted 80,000 ballots which delayed the final certification by a month. Officials in Cuyahoga Co Ohio seem to be reluctant to get rid of their Diebold DRE voting machines even though they have caused many problems which have affected many voters....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The court case in Pima Co Arizona goes into its fourth, and what is supposed to be last, day today.

While the Secretary of State of Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, is asking Cuyahoga Co to look into changing over to optical-scan and paper ballots for future elections. It’s probably time for the county to tell Diebold/Premier to bring in a large garbage truck and pick-up the trash. Then file a lawsuit for misrepresenting their product as something that would work.

Those stories, and all the other notable voting news today, linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

For election watchers there will be a special congressional election next week in northwest Ohio. There will also be another congressional election in Virginia at the same time. In the Virginia election voters are being given their choice between DRE or paper ballots.

Goshen New York held an election on a $70M school bond issue and brought out two lever machines to count the votes. As the counters on both machines hit 999, they each rolled back to 000 like an overused car odometer. The question that will never be answered is, for which side were those 1,998 votes cast?

Those stories, and the rest of today's notable voting news, all linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

HAVA mandated that all punch-card voting systems be replaced? Not at all. In fact a close reading of the law will prove that there are protections for punch-card and hand counted paper ballots. 12 counties in Idaho are still using their punch-card voting system. Seldom do you see Idaho as a source for any articles on this page and never have you seen an article on this page about a problem with voting in Idaho.

Many of you know our friend Bernie Ellis of “Gathering To Save Our Democracy” His is a story much too long for this space but I wanted to pass on some good news about Bernie to all of his friends. Yesterday Bernie learned that his probation had been cut in half and that he is now a totally free man. One of his first actions today was to re-register to vote....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Sequoia Voting Systems should be very happy today. Palm Beach Co Florida signed a non-bid contract with the company for 1001 precinct based optical scan machines. The contract is worth $5.5M. One has to wonder what the vendor may be holding over the heads of the county commissioners to get them to not take bids and not bargain for the best price.

NJ State Senator Nia Gill will be on Voice of the Voter Radio again tomorrow night to discuss the NJ statistical audit bill, S.507, which was reported out of committee yesterday, as written and amended by Senator Gill....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Last month 108 voters went into the voting booth to vote on a school bond referendum and walked away without voting at all; or that’s what the county is questioning. The votes were cast on ES&S iVotronic DREs. The total undervotes was less than 2% of the 6,252 total ballots cast but about 8% in some precincts.

The Pima Co Arizona lawsuit goes to court tomorrow. That suit, if the results go our way, should provide a lot of information about elections and the voting machines being used across the country.

There is also a great review of “Margin of Error, Ballots of Straw”. We have a couple copies left which we would be happy to send out as a premium in exchange for a $50 donation. [Note: VotersUnite! is in affiliation with International Humanities Center, a nonprofit public charity exempt from federal income tax under Section 501[c](3) of the Internal Revenue Code.] ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Need a good book as a Christmas gift for someone? We still have a few copies of “Runoff” by noted novelist and mystery writer, Mark Coggins. We had the following to say in our review of the book; “What could be better than a fun fiction about the real dangers of electronic voting? Coggins shows us that elections can be hacked and the cover-up can be murder.” The book is gripping and laugh-out-loud funny in places. Read more about the book at VotersUnite.Org and help us out with a $50 or more donation and get a copy of the book as a premium. You help VotersUnite continue our valuable work and you get a great book. [Note: VotersUnite! is in affiliation with International Humanities Center, a nonprofit public charity exempt from federal income tax under Section 501[c](3) of the Internal Revenue Code.]

Links to today's voting news stories follow below as usual...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Over 100 computer science and social sciences faculty from more than 20 colleges and universities across the state of New York have signed a letter to the governor, legislature and local election officials to urge them to replace the state’s lever machines with optical-scan machines.

Our friends in New Jersey have an urgent request for people from throughout the US to call the Governors office and ask Gov. Corzine to call off his Attorney General who wants to gut S-507 which many consider to be model legislation for post-election audits. Read about the bill and action Here

The GOP in Wharton Co Texas has taken the step to tell the county election office that their primary will be done using paper ballots and not the county's vote switching Ivotronics.

Those stories, and the rest of today's notable voting news items, all linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Knox Co Ohio reports that they have successfully certified the votes from Nov. 6. However, in doing that certification they found that votes from three precincts (418 votes) were counted twice. The problem, as reported by the media, was that an ES&S contract employee forgot to clear one report before running another. ES&S contract employee? Why was the county not counting those ballots and doing the reports? It’s bad enough that we have given over our elections to vendor’s proprietary software but to actually invite the vendors in to do our work; i.e. counting the votes and doing the reporting; is inexcusable. And what does the county want to do about this problem? They are turning to the County Prosecutor for a decision on what action they should take with regards to ES&S in the future. My advice, for what it’s worth, do the job you were hired for and count the people’s votes. If you can’t do that job then quit and put someone into the position who can do the job....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Yesterday, in this space, I stated that a problem in Wharton Co Texas had votes switching from a GOP candidate to a Democrat. In fact that information was incorrect. The election was a non-partisan election on constitutional amendments. There clearly was, however, vote swapping taking place. The information regarding the vote switching in Pennsylvania was correct. My apologies for the erroneous information.

The EAC terminated all certification of the Advanced Voting Solutions voting system that was being tested by iBeta. This renders the AVS system used in three Pennsylvania counties useless. Northampton and Lackawanna Counties are now discussing suing the vendor.

Twenty percent of the vvpat tapes from Diebold/Premier DREs used recently in Cuyahoga Co Ohio are damaged beyond use. The SoS has given the county permission to run ballot images from the DREs for recounts. Thus no voter verified paper ballots will be used to recount 20% of the votes. Diebold is looking for a way to blame election officials or the voters, of course.

Those stories, and the rest of today's notable voting news items, are all linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Recently we were asked to answer some questions sent to us by someone in Wharton Co Texas concerning vote-switching. In the Wharton Co situation votes for a GOP candidate were switched on the touchscreen to the Democratic candidate. In doing a little research I looked at machine malfunctions over the past year with regard to ES&S Ivotronic DREs and chose Pennsylvania I was reminded that in Nov. 2006 there were reports from 12 counties that used Ivotronic machines of vote-switching and in every case the votes were from GOP to Democratic candidates. The inaccurate, unreliable voting systems sold to state and county election officials were sold simply due to the greed of the vendors. The machines need to be recalled sooner and not later and replaced by paper ballot supported voting systems....