07.28.08
Posted in Diane Feinstein, Election reform, Elections, S. 3212, paper ballots, voter verified paper ballots, voting, voting machines tagged Elections, paper ballots, S. 3212, Senator Bennett, Senator Feinstein, verified voting, voter verified paper ballots, voting machines at 11:10 pm by bluebanshee
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 »
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06.18.08
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections, Voter ID, Voting Rights, paper ballots, politics, voter fraud, voter suppression, voting, voting machines tagged Elections, politics, Obama, voter suppression, Voter ID, 2008 election at 10:13 pm by bluebanshee
Every election cycle in the U.S. there are votes that never get counted –but not because of computer glitches on paperless voting machines, as if often assumed. The computer glitches happen and no paper trail is there to give silent evidence of the missing votes. Much energy has been devoted to replacing paperless voting machines with systems that have a voter verified paper record without also considering the other source of missing votes.
What am I talking about? What other type of missing vote is there besides the ones lost inside the electronic world of computerized voting machines? The answer, of course is that the other type of votes that never get counted are the ones that never get cast. Tragically millions of votes are never cast in jurisdictions across America each election cycle for a wide variety of reasons –partisan dirty tricks, voter suppression, voter intimidation, purged voting rolls, misinformation campaigns targeted at certain groups of voters, or simply voting machine shortages in inner city precincts. It is these uncounted votes that never show up in the winning (or losing) margin but in close races can mean the difference between victory or defeat. Read the rest of this entry »
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05.24.08
Posted in Elections, paper ballots, voting, voting machines tagged Add new tag, Bev Harris, Elections, Oregon elections, paper ballots at 9:47 pm by bluebanshee
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 »
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02.23.08
Posted in Elections, New Jersey primary, paper ballots, politics, voting, voting machines tagged Elections, New Jersey primary, Sequoia, voter verified paper ballots, voting, voting machines at 11:23 am by bluebanshee
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 »
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02.18.08
Posted in Barack Obama, Elections, Hillary Clinton, voting, voting machines tagged Clinton, Elections, New York primary, Obama, politics, voting, voting machines at 5:23 pm by bluebanshee
Looks like the election results in New York will be revised with Barack Obama possible gaining in his delegate count.
Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.
That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district. http://tinyurl.com/38a6r5
The above report in the NYT caused much alarm across the country — with many folks suggesting that there was some chicanery on the part of Clinton supporters in her home state. In fact, the explanation offered by Doug Kellner of the New York State Board of Elections is much more plausible: Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in ES&S, Election fraud, Elections, election audits, voting machine certification, voting machine testing, voting machines tagged CA SOS Debra Bowen, election audits, ES&S, Top to Bottom Review at 4:35 pm by bluebanshee
ES&S is the target of the latest T2B report
California SOS Debra Bowen has issued the latest in her studies of voting systems used in California. This time round it is ES&S in the dock and found guilty of general incompetence in designing the software and security for its voting equipment.
More disturbing is the fact that the machines in this latest part of the Top to Bottom Review (T2B) are widely used optical scan machines that count paper ballots. So even jurisdictions which have paper ballots and use these scanners should consider putting additional safeguards in place and instituting post-election audits. Especially since these are the same machines that were recently decertified by the SOS in Colorado. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Barack Obama, Double bubble, ES&S, Elections, Hillary Clinton, Voting Rights, Washington Republican caucus, paper ballots, politics, voting, voting machines tagged California primary, Double bubble, Elections, ES&S, politics, vote counting, Washington caucuses at 3:28 pm by bluebanshee
Making ‘one person one vote’ a reality in this country
In the rush-rush hurry-hurry to announce election results there have already been some miscounts and uncounted ballots this primary season. This should not happen. If we are going to truly be a democracy of “one person one vote” we need to be sure that all ballots cast by eligible voters are counted.
For example, there’s the recent example in the Washington state Republican caucuses where the winner was declared in a close race before all the votes were counted. Entire counties did not have their results included in the tally: Read the rest of this entry »
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01.14.08
Posted in Diebold, Elections, NH Primary, election audits, paper ballots, politics, voting, voting machines tagged politics, ES&S, Diebold, post-election audits, New Hampshire primary, South Carolina primary, Kucinich, Howard at 9:19 pm by bluebanshee
…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 »
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01.11.08
Posted in Barack Obama, Diebold, Election fraud, Elections, Hillary Clinton, Hr 811, NH Primary, election audits, paper ballots, politics, voting, voting machines tagged Barack Obama, Diebold, Election fraud, Hillary Clinton, NH Primary, optical scan, paper ballots, post-election audits at 11:45 pm by bluebanshee
The internet has been abuzz since Tuesday night with wild claims that Hillary Clinton “hacked” the NH Primary — or that someone else perpetrated the dirty deed to help Clinton and McCain triumph in the Granite State. Some point to differences between the margins in hand-counted precincts vs. optical scan precincts. Others claim that the pre-election polling could not be so far off from reported results.
Both of these cries of “fraud”, and “hacking” are based on flawed logic — and stunning ignorance or basic misunderstanding of statistics. They also fail to look at the demographic make-up of precincts that produced different margins for the candidates. On the other hand, there has been an almost universal failure to consider whether well-documented problems with the type of optical scan machine used in New Hampshire offers at least a partial explanation of how this happened. Read the rest of this entry »
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01.07.08
Posted in Diebold, ES&S, Elections, Florida voting, election audits, paper ballots, politics, voting, voting machine certification, voting machine testing, voting machines tagged Clive Thompson, election audits, New York Times, optical scan, paper ballots, voting machines at 10:24 pm by bluebanshee
“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 »
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