‘Daily Voting News’ For August 01, 2007

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Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today has been another busy day in the news. Building on top of the California reports from Friday and Monday and the Florida report on Tuesday we now have an important report from the Brennan Center just released today. This new report discusses audits and why they are needed and points out that states are not doing enough to ensure their vote count is accurate. On top of all of this one county in Utah has decided to buck the trend in that state and they are returning to hand-marked paper ballots and optical scan machines this November. Also in a town election in one small South Carolina town, 149 voters voted on the town’s provided ES&S iVotronic machines. The election was to select a person to sit on the city council. The machine broke down once during the day and 15 voters had to use paper ballots. The 149 votes could not be retrieved from the machine until the next day due to a problem with passwords. It is not good to use a DRE for any election but for an election with only one race and a small expected turnout it is insane. What are these people thinking?…

  • NAtional: Voting Machine Vendors Are Not Responsible Citizens? Really? LINK
  • NAtional: New Report Finds States Not Doing Enough to Ensure Accurate Count on Electronic Voting Machines LINK
  • NAtional: Voting Officials Face New Rules to Bar Conflicts LINK
  • NAtional: Elections Belong To The People: No One Can Conceal Our Right To Know How Our Votes are Counted LINK
  • NAtional: It’s not just the voting machines — it’s how we count them, too LINK
  • NAtional: Another day, another e-voting critique LINK
  • CA: Public Comments to the California Top to Bottom Review LINK
  • CA: Opinion – You can’t trust the voting machines LINK
  • CA: The Hacker Vote – Overlooked No More LINK
  • CA: Opinion – Hacking democracy LINK
  • CA: Editorial: How to deal with voting machine vulnerability
    Secretary of state needs to focus on ways to compensate for security shortcomings LINK
  • CA: Editorial – California, vendors must solve e-voting dilemma LINK
  • CA: E-voting Triad Objects to Voting Machine Criticisms LINK
  • CA: Simple Challenge to Electronic Voting Machines: Prove My Vote Was Counted Accurately LINK
  • CA: Where are the California E-Voting Reports? LINK
  • CT: Plainfield – November ballot may complicate use of new voting machines in Plainfield LINK
  • FL: Vote scans face tests after study flags flaws LINK
  • FL: Florida Adds Their Voice To Voting Systems Studies LINK
  • FL: Fla. voting machines still flawed, study finds LINK
  • FL: Opinion – If you vote will it count? Can’t tell without paper LINK
  • FL: Time to go back to hanging chads? LINK
  • FL: Florida SAIT report highlights more Diebold problems LINK
  • FL: Florida Report Spurs Growing Distrust of E-Voting Machines LINK
  • IN: Randolph County – Randolph election board votes to buy MicroVote equipment LINK
  • NJ: State Likely to Fall Short of Jan. 1 Deadline for New Voting Machines LINK
  • NY: Election money unspent LINK
  • PA: Federal bill proposes paper trail for required electronic voting system LINK
  • SC: Richland County – Machine glitch leaves Eastover voters in suspense
    Who won a seat on town council? Residents hope to learn results today LINK
  • TX: Fort Bend County – Voting precinct reduction OK, says county attorney LINK
  • UT: Summit County – Bubble ballots return
    Elections officer says November will be less expensive with the old method LINK
  • **”Daily Voting News” is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in “Daily Voting News” may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**

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    ‘Daily Voting News’ For August 01, 2007

    11 Comments

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    11 Responses

    1. 1)
      Dredd said on 8/2/2007 @ 5:20am PT: [Permalink]

      John said:

      The election was to select a person to sit on the city council. The machine broke down once during the day and 15 voters had to use paper ballots. The 149 votes could not be retrieved from the machine until the next day due to a problem with passwords.

      It would have been much faster to let a teen hacker do it 🙂 …

      or … wow … what an idea just use 149 paper ballots and hand count them. Take an hour?

      But first they must acquire election officials who can count to 150 and not be bribed by EVM companies. Oh, it was a small carolina city … perhaps sometime next century???

    2. 2)
      Dredd said on 8/2/2007 @ 5:35am PT: [Permalink]

      John,

      Election officials in many places are getting it, but alas some do not (surprise):

      “Just because you are elected to office doesn’t mean you check your constitutional right to free speech at the door,” said Todd Rokita, the Indiana secretary of state and the new president of the secretaries of state association. In April, Mr. Rokita became the co-chairman of the state finance committee for Mitt Romney, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

      (Your Link, emphasis added). What a straw man, canard, and avoidance of the real issue, conflict of interest.

      What a perfect manager for Romney, a republican who can’t remember how to talk about an issue directly.

      The issue is not whether or not Ken Blackwell should give up his free speech when he becomes Secretary of State, the issue is whether of not he should sell his Diebold stock and resign from Bush’s campaign.

      Yep, it is conflict of interest stupid, not free speech, that we are concerned about when we pass conflict of interest statutes.

      Now we know who the republican heir apparent is.

    3. 3)
      Joe Fictel said on 8/2/2007 @ 7:28am PT: [Permalink]

      You are all a bunch of morons

      {Ed Note: Removed link to huge cable sales catalog pdf. Joe, if you were trying to make a point, you picked the wrong method. –99}

    4. 4)
      phil said on 8/2/2007 @ 8:10am PT: [Permalink]

      So you’re saying I am a moron because I care about the future of our Constitutional Republic of which I swore an oath to defend?

      So you’re telling us that a voter rights critic (that’s you by the way) that sells wiring products know what happens in a foreign country at the doping level of a silicon chip?

      So you’re telling us that by posting a link to a 15 MB PDF file that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with telco’s/vaults/networking and the FACT that the nsa is hooked into this is somehow not a problem with your products?

      I got to admit, I am not sure to label you as a troll, a commercial spammer, or just someone who decided to attack others with “ANNOYING BEHAVIOR” on brad’s blog.

      But I am sure someone else here will analyze all the NULL’s in your crappy PDF file and comment.

      One wonders if your actually a representative of this company. But since this isn’t my BLOG, I can’t look up your IP number and trace you.

      Being interested in telecommunications myself, I think I will stick to the tried and tested and well known Belkin products. I hope I am not pre-mature in suggesting an all out boycott on you.

      (If it really is you. And if you really represent the company you link to.)

    5. 7)
      the_zapkitty said on 8/2/2007 @ 11:22am PT: [Permalink]

      I’m still catching up to the info overload of the past few days… times like these make me regret my missing optical bandwith channels most of all 😉

      (Stross reference! Stross reference!)

      One admittedly minor thing that struck me was David Jefferson pushing the audit report (which was itself long overdue) as the cure-all for e-voting.

      Not surprising as he’s a member of the pro-evoting group ACCURATE. As is David Wagner… principle investigator for thr CA SoS report.

      So… since ACCURATE was involved in basicly demolishing the lies that were propping up e-voting until now… does ACCURATE now need to throw some support to e-voting to keep the concept afloat (i.e. awash in tax dollars) while they try to pursue their fool’s gold of “secure e-voting”?

      (‘Fool’s Gold’ because by the time you bring an e-voting system to a state of anything resembling “secure” you have perforce rendered voter verification and citizen oversight both irrelevant and impossible.)

      And yes, that’s one reason why Wagner’s report seemed to regard the idea of CA keeping the systems as inevitable. E-voting is what ACCURATE is concerned with. E-voting is what ACCURATE does. Period.

      Snarky but relevant as once upon a time… all of a year ago… ACCURATE’s attitude was one of “E-voting or No Voting!”… so what, if anything, has changed since then?

      And if that attitude is still basicly the same then of course we’ll need to spend all that effort auditing and re-auditing the machines… because the machines can’t be relied upon to count the votes right in the first place.

      For the inevitable “…paper ballots too!” trolls: with a hand count you count once, switch counters, count twice. Discrepancy? Pass to election officials to resolve. Counting and auditing are over… and the additional effort for this does not even compare to the time and money that auditing and re-auditing the machines would take.

      Of course so much more info to process and both SoS Bowen’s decision and Holt’s Fiasco are due by tomorrow…

    6. 8)
      Dredd said on 8/2/2007 @ 3:04pm PT: [Permalink]

      The_zapkitty #7

      Stop spouting the gadfly party plank here. If you want to do character assasination, do it to their face.

      We who have been blogging here at bradblog for years and years look to the issues and the argument related to those issues.

      We even talk to trolls, trools, and lost souls. Even Stalin would be verrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyy, verwwwwyyyy, interesting to play with. 🙂

      And we talk decently to David Jefferson when he posts here. Imagine that … we are also accurate. 🙂
      .

    7. 11)
      the_zapkitty said on 8/2/2007 @ 7:50pm PT: [Permalink]

      Never mind Dredd, 99, the real problem here is that I misspelled “basically” twice

      … the unheralded dangers of stream-of-consciousness posting…

      (As for you, Dredd: outed. You can live with it… or not…)

      But back to election matters: my stream of thought was relevant, if mispelled… how will the various scientists who knew better but signed on to questionable thing like e-voting and Holt’s Fiasco nonetheless… usually citing the public good as the reason… how will they react as the scale of this massive screwup finally publicly unfolds?

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