Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Voters in Ohio, as well as all other states, will have the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline manned and ready to provide assistance. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that involves the private bar in providing legal services to address racial discrimination, and Proskauer Rose LLP, an international law firm with more than 700 lawyers in the United States and Europe, have joined forces with other law firms and voting rights groups as part of Election Protection - a program to protect the right of every eligible Ohio voter to cast a meaningful ballot and have that vote counted in the upcoming November 7 election. / Now Sequoia and Smartmatic say that they voluntarily submitted themselves to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) investigation. Quite frankly what does it matter whether an unreliable voting system is put out by a company owned, in part, by Chavez or another group of Venezuelans? The system is still just as unreliable. / Sequoia also has a problem with a new law suit in Nevada where a citizen activist is suing for the loss of her vote in 2004. / ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of the manufacturer of electronic voting systems used in Denver and Arapahoe County by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The federal inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corp., and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control over the firm's operations, officials and others familiar with the investigation said", according to the New York Times ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot --- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual." These machines may be used 150 to 250 times on election day. And it seems the county expects them to "slip" out of calibration. Not a big issue because they have a "15 STEP PROCESS" to fix that condition??? / Informal discussions between Sequoia Voting Systems owner, Smartmatic, and the Treasury Dept. have now become a formal investigation, it seems. How much say does Hugo Chavez have in our elections? / In the laugh of the day officials in Lonoke Co Arkansas think they may be done counting votes and have the lights turned off by 9:30PM on election night. / Miller Co, Arkansas Election Administrator is resigning at the end of the year because ES&S representatives "are grossly incompetent, mean-spirited and can't spell"....

Blogged By John Gideon, 28 October 2006

Still over a week from election day and already the problems are piling up. Meanwhile the vendors and their shills are making excuses and attempting to sell the voting public a line of garbage. Among the shills is a federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission, that is supposed to assist the voter and, instead, has sent their chairman out on the road to defend the vendors.

In a blog posted yesterday, Brad said it well:

In a rebuttal to DeGregorios' opinion piece in the Tallahassee Democrat Avi Rubin, Johns-Hopkins Professor, computer scientist and author of "Brave New Ballot" had this to say in his blog:

In The Mean Time Across The Nation...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The West Virginia SoS is recommending to Kanawha Co. that they run all paper ballots twice to ensure the machines are counting accurately. The county is refusing to take that step which will ensure accuracy of the vote count. / Georgia will be using ExpressPoll (e-poll books) at the polls this year. Are they the same as those that failed in Maryland or do they have the modifications that were required in Maryland but never federally certified? / "The equipment has been tested by independent agencies and federal agencies," said Mark Radke, the director of marketing for Diebold, the company that makes the machines. [Independent = we pay them to do the testing and test what we tell them to test.][No federal agency does any testing] / ES&S machines are failing in early voting in Garland and Sebastian Co.s Arkansas ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Lou Dobbs has taped a one-hour "Democracy At Risk" special to be aired at various times on CNN this coming Sunday. Be sure to tune in. / The Washington Post has found that new system boards were installed in Diebold voting machines used in Maryland. These modifications were made in several thousand machines in 2005. The modification was meant to fix a problem with touch-screen freezes. The WaPo investigation seems to reveal that the modification was made without the knowledge of State Board of Elections members. / The cutoff of names by Hart machines in Texas is frustrating for election officials. "I don't like it. We've been asking the vendor to address this issue for a couple of years now," Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said. The names are cut off because of the size of the letters onscreen, which "causes longer names to truncate," Hart InterCivic Vice President Phillip Braithwaite said. / "It's really terrible," said Robert J. Antonetti Sr., elections administrator in Prince George's Co Maryland about the late delivery of paper ballots by Diebold. "Time is running out. It's going to deny people the right to vote." I ask again; is Diebold doing to Maryland what they did to Kevin Shelley and Bruce Funk and attempted to do to Ion Sancho?...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"The use of electronic machines to count ballots cast in last year's municipal elections was a fiasco, Quebec's chief electoral officer said Tuesday. The machines weren't quicker, more economical and more accurate than manual counting" said Quebec, Canada's chief elections official. One of the suppliers of electronic voting machines underestimated its ability to simultaneously service several municipalities. Sound familiar? / "Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho has a starring role in a new HBO documentary that raises serious questions about the security of vote-counting machines used in Florida and many other big states. The program, titled "Hacking Democracy," is scheduled to debut on the cable channel on Nov. 2, running through most of the month." / Diebold, as seems to be their nature, is punishing Maryland for asking voters to vote absentee. They print the state's ballots and they are late in delivering them a majority of the ballots to many counties....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Officials on Chicago, Illinois acknowledged that for the last five or six years it would have only taken a few keystrokes for a knowledgeable computer user to obtain the personal information for more than half of the 1.3 million identities in the system. / "Look, I think that it's time for us to make our elections work in this country, Lou. I mean, that's the bottom line. And obviously we have a great deal of work to do to make that happen. It's time for us to bring together the best and brightest from the high-tech industry, Lou, the business industry, election officials, et cetera, for us to make things work." ex-EAC Commissioner Ray Martinez told Lou Dobbs. "It's time, four years later, Lou, six years removed from Florida in 2000, it's time for us to achieve a consensus on exactly what we have to do to really improve the process of election administration." / Summit Co. Ohio ballot printing problems seem to be coming to a head with calls for federal investigation and anti-trust issues....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Beginning this week, and every Wednesday, I will be doing a regular 5-minute Voting News report on WNJC 1360AM, Philadelphia's Renaissance Radio Station at 8PM Eastern. The program is "Voice of the Voters", with Mary Ann Gould, and it runs from 8PM to 9PM Eastern every Wednesday. It can be heard via live streaming. Last week's guest was Lowell Finley. This week's guest will be Dr. Daniel Lopresti, Lehigh University / Today it was reported that the Chicago, Illinois voter data base has been hacked. / "At least when we had hanging chads we knew what we did not know. Today, with the growth of electronic voting, we don't know what we don't know." Rev. DeForest "Buster" Soaries, Former chair, Election Administration Commission / Some Maryland counties are reporting a shortage of absentee ballots....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"Thirty states now allow no-excuse absentee voting, and most of them also allow voters to cast early ballots in person at county clerks' offices or satellite polling places." / I love this opening to an article: "On a warm Friday afternoon last May, Alex Halderman double-parked his Cadillac STS near a New York hotel, left the motor idling and ducked into an alley for a secret rendezvous. Moments later, the Princeton University grad student emerged with a black attaché case containing what he feared was a grave threat to the United States: A Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine." ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

'Although most of the attention has focused on paper trails and how vulnerable the machines are to hackers, a professor at Ohio State University and one of his former students are questioning the haphazard way these machines are bought and distributed.' 'Election officials interviewed all said they bought machines based on the number of registered voters in their county. But each county had a different idea of what the proper ratio of machines to voters should be.' ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Alachua Co Florida elections people have admitted that not all votes in an April 11 city election were considered. They have also admitted that one voting machine had an error and that absentee ballots were not put into "secrecy folders". / Some county election officials across the country seem to be discussing the need for emergency paper ballots at the poll site "just in case" / 'Provisional ballots could again be a leading concern at the polls this year, with new figures showing one in three--more than 650,000 of 2 million cast--were left uncounted or discarded in 2004, according to a new briefing paper by Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy and research center.' / Sadly activist judges have legislated from the Supreme Court and found that Arizona can require Voter ID / Benton Co Arkansas has not received their absentee ballots from ES&S and won't until next week. No change for ES&S. / VoteTech (VTI) machines in Randolph Co Indiana are not working properly during testing....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Utah has announced a change in election rules that will require a minimum audit of 1% machines in each county. A 3% audit will be done for congressional races and 5% for smaller elections. These are minimum requirements. This is a good first, baby-step now the state needs to make an adult step to a meaningful audit. / Officials in Chicago and Cook Co Illinois are already predicting a meltdown. While the Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group blamed any mistakes on poll workers (no surprise there) even experienced elections officials had problems with the Sequoia HAAT. / Denver Colorado will be doing a 5% audit of their machines. / Here we go again. Early voting in Arkansas begins next Monday. At least one county has still to receive their PEBs and paper ballots. Maybe Saturday. I wonder if they do any L&A testing at all? ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

A federal appeals court will hear a complaint against the Indiana Voter ID law today. / 'As the new [federal] testing and certification program is developed in response to input from public interest organizations, computer security experts, and concerned citizens, the EAC should be guided by a desire for the greatest possible transparency. A transparent election process is fundamental to democratic governance' says Warren Stewart of VoteTrustUSA. / Grant Parrish Louisiana needs 47 new voting machines to replace those that were damaged due to flooding in their warehouse. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The worst county for elections in the US, Cuyahoga Co. Ohio has taken another step into the realm of the absurd. The county wants to get their votes tabulated as quickly as possible and they apparently aren't worried as much about accuracy so they are using a new add-on device from Diebold that has never been used in an election and is not even complete with the federal inspection process yet. This device reads the data from the voting machine memory cards, six cards at a time in one minute. The county just has to get the totals out quickly; never mind the accuracy of those totals. / Massachusetts has still not settled on accessible voting machines. Three weeks from election day is too late to bring in new machines and train workers. The state, apparently, is also going to ignore HAVA and not require a new machine at each polling place....