07.28.08
Action Alert: Tell your Senators to vote NO on S. 3212
Here is the latest from my friends at Verified Voting:
We need your help today to make sure that Congress does not reverse the nation’s progress toward voter-verified paper ballots. It is not an exaggeration to say this could be one of the most important actions you ever take on the issue of verified voting. After you take action, please forward this message to your friends.
Here is what’s happening. This Wednesday, the U.S. Senate will hold hearings on S.3212, a bill aimed at providing independent verification of ballots cast on electronic voting machines. That’s a laudable goal, but S.3212 gets it wrong - very wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
06.25.08
Sen. Nelson (FL) introduces One Person, One Vote Initiative
Senator Bill Nelson’s attempt at comprehensive reform, S.J.Res. 39, was just introduced in the U.S. Senate. Because it is so late in the cycle the bill has little chance of passing before the new Congress is sworn in next January. The “One Person, One Vote Initiative” contains some intriguing elements, including a proposed Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College.
Any constitutional amendment faces an uphill battle because of the need for passage by a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress followed by adoption by three-fourths of the 50 states (Article V). Not likely to happen very quickly.
For those in need of a refresher about why the Electoral College was created by the Framers, it should be said that those who designed our Constitutional system never envisioned that the President would be elected by popular vote. They planned to have state legislatures select the members of the Electoral College who would in turn gather to vote for President and Vice-President. Read the rest of this entry »
05.24.08
Bev Harris gets it wrong, part 2
Once again, an e-mail from Bev Harris of Black Box Voting landed in my mailbox filled with smears, insinuendos and half-truths (the most dangerous kind). Guess her coffers are empty and she needs to do a little fundraising.This time Bev takes aim at the recent primary in Oregon, singling out three counties for attack.
IMPOSSIBLE AND IMPROPER NUMBERS FROM OREGON’S MULTNOMAH, POLK, AND YAMHILL COUNTIES Read the rest of this entry »
02.23.08
What to believe …
The numbers from the cartridges that print out vote tallies and the paper-tape backup didn’t match. http://tinyurl.com/2odsco
This is the dilemma faced by election officials in several New Jersey counties including Union, Bergen, Gloucester, Middlesex and Ocean counties during the recent Presidential primary. The voting machines in question are paperless DRE’s from Sequoia. Not machines that have paper for voters to check to see that their vote was recorded correctly but machines where votes are recorded invisibly somewhere in the depths of the machine’s memory.
Now they (and we) find out that even the computer speaks with forked tongue when asked what the election results are.
The discrepancies involved the political-party turnout reporting. Sequoia Advantage machines in several counties showed different figures between the result tape from the machine and the records of a secondary memory cartridge, for the number of Democratic and Republican voters. http://tinyurl.com/269edr Read the rest of this entry »
01.14.08
Only Diebold knows for sure …
…And the rest of us will find out via a recount in New Hampshire. Because Diebold won’t tell.
The paper ballots hold the key.
I have said before and I will say it again here — paper ballots are not enough to ensure election integrity and transparency. You’ve got to do something with the paper to check the election results — like a mandatory routine audit. If New Hampshire had a law on the books requiring a post-election audit we would not be in the ignominious position of
- first, begging for a candidate, any candidate, to step forward and ask for a recount and,
- second, scrambling around to help raise funds to pay the thousands of dollars it costs to recount all the ballots even in a small state like New Hampshire.
We are grateful that Democrat Kucinich and Republican Howard have stepped forward to help find answers the burning questions: Who really won the primary – and, could the vote have been hacked? Read the rest of this entry »
01.07.08
Glaring omissions in otherwise excellent NYT article on voting machines
“Can You Count on Voting Machines?” is the question posed by Clive Thompson in his cover article in this week’s New York Times Magazine. The answer, of course, is a resounding “No” due to flawed design, buggy software and poor quality control in the manufacture of these machines, as Thompson ably demonstrates. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
Thompson’s solid article is a timely reminder on the eve of the New Hampshire Primary that the nation’s election system is still broken. The curtain was pulled back in Florida 2000 to reveal the sorry state of U.S. elections and, despite the efforts of activists and politicians, there is not as much progress as one would hope. Some states like Florida are making great strides toward transparent paper-based systems, while others like Maryland, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Virginia are still struggling to ditch paperless voting machines.
However, there are a few areas of omission that need to be filled in and a few bits of mis-information that need to be corrected. Read the rest of this entry »
12.29.07
Dear presidential candidates: say no to paperless primaries
Sean Flaherty of Iowans for Voting Integrity has penned an eloquent letter to the current crop of presidential hopefuls urging them to insist on paper ballots in the upcoming primaries. He calls particular attention to the well-documented problems with the paperless DRE called the iVotronic that will be used in the early-voting state of South Carolina (but this machine is also used in many other states including populous Pennsylvania, Texas, and Indiana).
Reproduced below is Sean’s well-footnoted plea to the presidential candidates to request paper for the presidential primaries.
I write to call your attention to the insecurity of South Carolina’s upcoming Presidential primary, and to respectfully urge that you request the election officials of South Carolina to use paper ballots, and conduct manual audits of electronic vote tallies in the January 19 Republican primary.
South Carolina uses a paperless touch screen system statewide, the iVotronic [1] Paperless electronic voting is reckless in any right, but the iVotronic has managed to become notorious on its own terms. Key facts: Read the rest of this entry »
