Electronic Voting and Other Election Day Issues

Electronic Voting and Other Election Day Issues

People who can't figure out how to mark a paper ballot (or use a punch card ballot) really shouldn't be voting. How hard could it be? Even if English isn't your native language, it shouldn't be a great challenge to recognize your favorite candidate's name (or the party name) on a ballot.

As we've seen in places like Louisiana and Chicago and Florida, when there's a close contest and the Democrat is losing, it is likely someone will "find" a bunch of "lost" ballots in a warehouse somewhere that are just what the losing candidate needs to pull into the lead. If you think such shenanigans are a problem now, just wait until the ballots don't even exist, and all it takes is the manipulation of a few bytes in a computer to change the outcome of an election. Who will be able to say with any certainty that a fair election took place? Unfortunately, when that day comes, I predict that it will result in widespread voter apathy rather than a revolt. And if there is a massive public outcry, it could be that the "solution" will be a National ID Card.
...or a barcode on your forehead.
Please note that some of the material on this page relates to voting problems in general, not just to electronic voting, but these are problems which will not be solved (as some claim) by switching over to electronic ballots.

Rebecca Mercuri wrote her PhD thesis on the subject of electronic voting, and it is well worth reading." She says,

"I am adamantly opposed to the use of fully electronic or Internet-based systems for use in anonymous balloting and vote tabulation applications. The reasons for my opposition are manyfold, and are expressed in my writings as well as those of other well-respected computer security experts. At the present time, it is my strong recommendation that all election officials REFRAIN from procuring ANY system that does not provide an indisputable paper ballot."

Note: There are large subsections on this page about Ohio and Voter ID laws.

New: To reduce the size of this page, all the discussion about ACORN has been moved here, and all the material about the Coleman vs Franken race in Minnesota has been moved here.

Regarding Rebecca Mercuri's web site, the experts at Counterpane say, "This is the Web site on electronic voting."

How To Vote From Six Feet Under. States such as California, Texas and Florida intentionally count ballots sent in by voters who then died before Election Day, while states such as Colorado, Washington and South Dakota have no reliable method for discarding the votes of the deceased. In the old days, voting by the dead was reserved for big-city political machines looking to stuff the ballot box illegally.

The Editor says...
People who are within 30 days of a natural death generally don't concern themselves with politics. I suspect the root of this problem is the act of harvesting votes at hospices and nursing homes, getting otherwise confused and disinterested citizens to go through the motions of voting, even if they don't really want to. On the other hand, there's no way the state would be able to certify that all voters are still living at the moment to polls close. Like so many other aspects of our society, the feasibility of our system depends on people doing the right thing, and many among us do not.

More than 3 Million Registered Voters are Dead. Regardless of how lively an election season might be, a new study shows that more 3.3 million voters on current registration rolls across the country are dead. Another 12.9 million remain on voter registration lists in an area where they no longer live.

Dead Mayors Win. In Pennsylvania, the dead don't vote, they win elected office. At least that's what happened in Tarentum and Freeport, both cities in Allegheny County, when the two candidates for mayor — both of whom died in September — ran unopposed.

Maryland Voters Test New Cryptographic Voting System. It's an election system voters and math geeks can embrace. On Tuesday [11/3/2009] voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, got to try out a new, transparent voting system that lets voters go online to verify that their ballots got counted in the final tally. The system also lets anyone independently audit election results to verify the votes went to the correct candidates.

Kentucky election fraud indictments: In the November 2009 election in Kentucky, there was a serious discrepancy between how ES&S's iVotronic voting machines worked and how some voters were instructed. Some voters were apparently falsely told that touching 'Vote' completed the voting process. However, that only displayed the review screen, whereas subsequently touching 'Cast Ballot' was required. Conspiratorial election judges were then able to modify the ballot and cast it.

'They Tried to Steal an Election,' N.Y. Voter Fraud Case Heats Up. Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out, according to records at the Rensselaer County Board of Elections in Troy, N.Y. Enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the November election to the Democrats.

Can Your Vote Be Bought? Given his incompetence in handling the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was surprising to many that Mayor Ray Nagin was reelected. A poster on the Huffington Post put this absurdity down to the stupidity of the New Orleans voters. Next month, we'll see if New Yorkers will rate the same judgment. Both Mayor Bloomberg and many City Council members will be seeking reelection despite residents voting for term limits twice.

Voting Drops 83 Percent In All-Digital Election. Officials saw an 83 percent drop in the number of voters participating in the Honolulu Neighborhood Board's recent election that is the nation's first all-digital election, where people could vote over the Internet or by phone. For the first time, Oahu voters had to use computers or the telephone to vote for their neighborhood board candidates and many people did not bother.

CIA agent testifies on risks of electronic voting. A CIA agent testified before the Election Assistance Commission. His position (or perhaps the CIA's?): electronic votes are not secure and can be altered — and are being altered in some locales.

Voter fraud probe nets a fifth suspect. An investigation into the stuffing of ballot boxes in Essex County continues to widen, with a fifth person indicted yesterday for election fraud. The criminal probe by the state Division of Criminal Justice and the Essex County prosecutor has been focusing not only on campaign workers, but on county workers as well as it examines dozens of absentee ballots cast in the 2007 election of state Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex).

Freedom is Hard Work. The Founders were endlessly concerned about giving ordinary Americans an unprecedented measure of liberty as offered by the Constitution they were drafting. They wondered if regular folk could muster the sophistication necessary to make rational, intelligent decisions at the polls... Fast forward to 2009 and it's easy to see why the Founders were so worried. In spite of various streams of round-the-clock news and data, most of our electorate is misinformed, blissfully ignorant or simply apathetic with respect to the means by which they are governed.

E-voting In Ireland: The [Irish] government finds itself in a deep hole because of the purchase and storage of thousands of electronic voting machines. It should stop digging. What had seemed like a good idea, way back in 1999, has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. The initial waste of public money on the purchase of this dangerously insecure system has been compounded by the establishment of long-term leases of up to 30 years for the storage of machines in controlled environments.

Irish reject e-voting, go back to paper. The Irish government has given up on e-voting and is moving back to paper. The cost of continuing with the failed system is too high, and the crisis-stricken country is too cash-strapped.

Zelaya Attempted Honduran Referendum Vote Fraud. Stories reported almost exclusively by the Blogosphere which are mostly ignored by the mainstream media have become such a recurring theme recently that it deserves to be filed under the category of "Blogosphere Roars, MSM Snores." And the latest entry in this category is the report from the Catalan Europa Press in Spain relayed via the Babalu Blog about an attempt by former Honduran president Manuel (Mel) Zelaya to fix the results of a planned referendum via programmed computers on the very day he was ousted.

Fairfax County Virginia voting glitches: While a winner was eventually declared, there are two unexplained problems: in one, the "zero tape" printed before the polls opened (which is supposed to show that there are no votes recorded) showed that the total votes was 0, of which 3 were for the Republican, 2 for the Democrat, 1 for the independent, and 1 write-in. Or mathematically, 3+2+1+1 = 0.

Arose by any other name. Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a California hearing on 17 Mar 2009 that the audit logs in its tabulation software do not record significant events that occur on the system during an election, such as the deletion of votes.

Computer Experts Fear Fraud in Recall Vote. California voters will be using touch-screen machines, which don't produce printouts voters can see. And no paper printouts, the scientists say, would make a legitimate recount impossible.

Ron Rivest's ThreeBallot Voting System. A new paper-based voting method with attractive security properties. Not only can each voter verify that her vote is recorded as she intended, but she gets a "receipt" that she can take home that can be used later to verify that her vote is actually included in the final tally. Her receipt, however, does not allow her to prove to anyone else how she voted. The new voting system is in some ways similar to recent cryptographic voting system proposals, but it achieves very nearly the same objectives without using any cryptography at all. Its principles are simple and easy to understand.

Paper trail law for e-voting has fans and foes. California will require all electronic voting machines to produce a printed record of votes in the June election, but there are still concerns that the expensive overhaul may cause more problems than it solves.

Voter Fraud: Extensive voter fraud has persisted to this day. Former Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky discusses in a recent Heritage Foundatioin report a shocking 1982 election for Governor in Illinois in which 10% of the votes cast in Chicago, 100,000 overall, were found to be fraudulent by a federal grand jury investigation that produced 63 criminal convictions for vote fraud.

The coming cataclysm: election by litigation. In his newly revised book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," John Fund of The Wall Street Journal explains that we are on the verge of "election by litigation," and that our civil sacrament of free and fair elections is at risk. "You can lose your vote through voter fraud as surely as you can through voter intimidation," Fund writes. Then, in page after page, Fund details voluminous evidence of voter fraud that has been growing in recent years across the nation ... .

E-Voting Fraud? I have read dozens of anecdotal accounts of "accidents" and "glitches," which have been promptly followed by claims of foolproof "fixes" e.g., memory loss due to low battery, memory overload, key over-sensitivity, software compatibility flaws, keycard malfunctions, physical security of machines and their components.

E-voting machines face tough new standards. California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could banish ATMlike touch-screen voting machines from the state. For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with "red teams" of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes.

All you need is a screwdriver. "This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines," says Open Voting Foundation president, Alan Dechert. Upon examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless touch screen voting machines used in public elections in the United States, it has been determined that with the flip of a single switch inside, the machine can behave in a completely different manner compared to the tested and certified version.

The Case for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots: I remain an advocate of paper ballots, counted by hand, at the precinct level, in full public view, on Election Night, no matter how long it takes. Here is an outline of my reasons….

Revoting: There are two basic types of voting errors: random errors and systemic errors. Random errors are just that, random — equally likely to happen to anyone. … The other kind of voting error is a systemic error. … An example would be a voting machine that mysteriously recorded more votes for A than there were voters. (Sadly, this kind of thing is not uncommon with electronic voting machines.)

A Wave of Likely Voter Fraud and the Linguistic Ripple. The solution [to unauthorized voting] is not yet — and perhaps never may be — politically acceptable. Two possibilities come to mind. One would be a Federal or State identification card, driver's license or otherwise, which displays not less than full name, home address, voting situs (township, ward, precinct, etc.), date current residence acquired, photograph. Another would be a document created and certified under State law evidencing that the holder owned the property of his or her residence, fee simple or condominium, or rented pursuant to a written lease. Simplest of all, State law also could require advance registration of six months, preferably one year, perhaps with an exception for active-duty military personnel and their spouses.

Pro-Obama, Muslim-led voter registration in mosques. A leading critic of Islam isn't surprised there has been virtually no coverage or action taken against a Muslim group that has been running an illegal "get out the vote" campaign in swing-state mosques.

Black Box Voting Tool Kit 2008: In the end, this isn't about getting your favorite presidential candidate elected. This is about more permanent solutions: getting durable, ongoing citizen-based controls to oversee all elections. Elections ultimately control your daily life: your property rights, roads, the public safety, the justice system, and ultimately, the economy, your freedom, and your health. Regardless of who your next president will be, another election will soon be on the horizon. Much work remains if we want open, fair elections.

DC Primary votes don't add up... even with a fudge factor. As District officials continue to investigate errors in the early vote tallies from the Sept. 9 primary, one number stands out: 1,542. That number appeared in the category for "overvotes" in 13 separate races when the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics released early results on election night. But those votes inexplicably vanished shortly after midnight, when officials posted what they identified as corrected results.

States throw out costly electronic voting machines. The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers. What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 apiece to take back its ATM-like machines.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Paper Ballot: When it comes to elections, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen opts for blander, more traditional technologies, and that preference is helping her sleep better at night. Speaking Wednesday [7/30/2008] at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Jose, California, the state's top elections official laid out a decidedly low-tech approach for ensuring that each voter's ballot is recorded as cast. It involves the use of ink pens to record votes on old-fashioned paper.

PA Lawsuit Seeks Paper Trail for Election Day. Twenty-five voters from across Pennsylvania sued the state today seeking to stop the use of electronic voting machines that do not provide back up paper records. The records are necessary for people to verify that their votes were accurately recorded, attorneys said at a news conference at the Philadelphia offices of Drinker Biddle & Reath, one of the law firms representing the plaintiffs in the suit.

Man admits voting for Obama in late wife's name. A Wisconsin man has acknowledged that he illegally cast an absentee ballot for Barack Obama in his wife's name to fulfill her dying wish. Stephen Wroblewski of Milwaukee said Wednesday he plans to plead guilty to voter fraud to end the embarrassing episode.

No-confidence vote on voter rolls. Detroit election officials confirmed Monday [4/6/2009] what an analysis of census and population records shows: The city has more registered voters than it has residents over the voting age of 18. But Detroit is doing nothing wrong. The problem? The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which took effect in 1995, requires local officials to wait two federal election cycles before purging their voter rolls. That means that all cities carry ineligible voters each year.

The End of Fair Elections? It may come as a surprise to some; we may have witnessed the last free and fair election in this country. How long ago that election was does not matter now; there will not be another one. Remember when "B1 Bob" Dornan lost his House seat to a woman named Sanchez? The election was stolen by Hermandad Nacional Mexicana[,] a group that made a concerted effort to register illegal aliens. Since then, the art of rigging the vote has been refined and perfected by the likes of ACORN and other community activist organizations. The modus operandi is clear. First, there must be a team of lawyers to challenge any efforts to determine voter eligibility. What we end up with here in California is "motor voter" registration.

ACORN Throws Out Republican Voter Registrations. ACORN wants people to register to vote — as long as they're Democrats. Republican registrations go into the trash. Here is a first-hand account of how it happens.

The Nine Voting Lives of ACORN's Darnell Nash. The activist group ACORN, which has long worked with criminals as it preys on the weak and the troubled, is on the verge of yet another public relations catastrophe. That's because a cross-dressing Ohio male escort whom ACORN registered multiple times to vote was convicted of full-fledged vote fraud in addition to the lesser crime of voter registration fraud. A spokesman for Cleveland prosecutor Bill Mason confirmed yesterday [10/7/2009] that a local investigation of ACORN remains wide open.

When Will a National Voter Fraud Investigation of ACORN Begin? Whatever happened with the investigation into ACORN and the 2008 election? The organization did register a mere 1,315,037 voters by October for the 2008 presidential election. And, we must not forget about the Minnesota fiasco in which Minnesotans ended up with Senator Al Franken even though Norm Coleman led by 725 votes — the morning after the election!

Coleman vs Franken

To save bandwidth, this subsection has been moved here.

The Ohio Subsection

After reading about voting irregularities in the news for the last few year, I've noticed that one state seems to be mentioned more than any other.

Ohio high court tosses 1,000 ballots in tight race. The Ohio Supreme Court on Friday threw out about 1,000 provisional ballots that had been improperly filled out by voters in a tight congressional race. In a 4-2 decision, the court struck down Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's directive that said the votes should be counted. ... Justices said Brunner improperly instructed county elections officials to apply conflicting standards to election law by ruling that the votes should be counted, even though the envelopes failed to comply with legal guidelines set out before Nov. 4.

Hijinks Mar Ohio Vote. "Ecuador has more voting integrity than we have here in East Cleveland today." That is the considered opinion of a Republican attorney who is helping to monitor elections in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. He requested anonymity to avoid drawing attention to his employer. I have known him for years as an honest and very serious patriot and consider his comments reliable. He rang me to discuss the shenanigans that he and other Republican poll watchers have witnessed today in greater Cleveland.

Homeless 'Driven' to Vote for Obama. Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday [10/6/2008] on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked. The huge effort by a pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, takes advantage of a quirk in the state's elections laws that allows people to register and cast ballots at the same time without having to prove residency.

Voter-fraud Chaos. Developments in several states create the possibility that the 2008 vote could result in "Election Month," rather than Election Day. Court rulings on various absentee-voting procedures — along with early voting and other new forms of balloting — open the door to widespread abuses that could undermine the election. The possibility of voter fraud or voting irregularities on a massive scale could provide a multistate repeat of Florida 2000. A perfect example is Ohio.

Campaign Dynamics, Fraud Potential Impacted by Early Voting. Three years ago, Ohio changed its law to allow absentee voting to begin 35 days before Election Day, which is Sept. 30 this year. But residents of the state are allowed to register to vote as late as Oct. 6, creating a one-week overlap in which they can register and vote on the same day. That overlap has come under fire by the Ohio Republican Party and some Ohio voters, who point out that state law requires voters to have been registered for 30 days before they can cast an absentee ballot. This, they say, creates an unfair situation because it is difficult to immediately verify a voter's identity.

Ohio is a Hotbed of Vote Fraud in 2008. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is touting triumphantly that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is predicting an 80% voter turnout in the 2008 election. This would be an amazing statistic if true. ... There is no doubt that Cuyahoga County is "leading" in this year's vote situation. But, unfortunately, that "leading" seems to be in fraud, not legal, proper votes.

Judge rules Ohio homeless voters may list park benches as addresses. A federal judge in Ohio has ruled that counties must allow homeless voters to list park benches and other locations that aren't buildings as their addresses. U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus also ruled that provisional ballots can't be invalidated because of poll worker errors.

Bam Staffers Pull Their Bogus Ohio Ballots. Thirteen campaign workers for Barack Obama yesterday [10/24/2008] yanked their voter registrations and ballots in Ohio after being warned by a prosecutor that temporary residents can't vote in the battleground state. A dozen staffers — including Obama Ohio spokeswoman Olivia Alair and James Cadogan, who recently joined Team Obama — signed a form letter asking the Franklin County elections board to pull their names from the rolls.

Hall adviser fired, linked to Ohio voting fraud probe. Congressman John Hall (D-Dover Plains) fired one of his long-time campaign advisers Tuesday, after learning that she's embroiled in voter fraud investigations in Ohio. Amy Little, 49, has been a registered Democrat in New York since 1991, and Ulster County election officials said she voted in the party primary here in February. But in October, Little registered to vote in Ohio.

Ohio official mulls new voting machine rule. Ohio's elections chief is reconsidering a plan to prohibit poll workers from taking voting machines home for safekeeping in the days before the November presidential election. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner announced plans in February to scrap the practice known as "sleepovers" because of security concerns but is now facing opposition from county elections officials who say the custom makes it easier to transport machines polling sites.

Update:
Ohio says no to voting machine 'sleepovers'. Poll workers will not be allowed to take voting machines home for safekeeping in the days before the November presidential election because the practice known as "sleepovers" is an unacceptable security risk, the state elections chief said Tuesday [8/19/2008]. Taking machines home makes it nearly impossible to keep track of what happens to a machine or memory card once it goes into the custody of a poll worker, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said.

Ohio Voting Machines Contained Programming Error That Dropped Votes. Premier (formerly Diebold) has admitted to a software flaw in its GEMS system used in 34 states that can cause votes to be dropped while being transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point. This flaw has existed for at least 10 years….

Glitches galore as US votes. Programming errors and inexperience with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts during Tuesday's US elections, delaying voters in Indiana and Ohio and forcing some in Florida to cast paper ballots instead. In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they couldn't get to start properly. "We got five machines — one of them's got to work," said Willette Scullank, a trouble-shooter from the Cuyahoga County elections board.

Brunner declares Ohio's voting systems vulnerable. All of the voting systems used in Ohio have "critical security failures" that make them vulnerable to tampering and should be replaced with paper ballots counted at a central location, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner concluded after a top-to-bottom review of the systems.

Ohio voting law may be a boon for Obama supporters. Never mind the last days of the presidential campaign. The busiest days for Barack Obama's campaign in this perennial swing state are likely to be a month before Election Day. Ohio has created a window in the election calendar that would allow residents instant gratification — register one minute, vote the next.

Critics see voting loopholes in new rules. With Ohio expected once more to play a deciding role in the presidential race, the battle over state voting rules that plagued the 2004 election has begun again in earnest. Republicans are raising concerns about Ohioans registering to vote and immediately casting absentee ballots during a five-day window after absentee voting starts Sept. 30 and before the deadline for registration Oct. 6.

Supreme Court rejects Ohio GOP bid. The Supreme Court sided Friday [10/17/2008] with Ohio's top elections official in a dispute with the state Republican Party over voter registrations. The justices overruled a federal appeals court that had ordered Ohio's top elections official to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility.

No Righting Voting Wrongs in Ohio. Topping the list of most important legal cases this election year may be one in which the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits, and about which the U.S. Department of Justice turned a blind eye to justice. Rampant voter fraud may well result. The nation's highest court ruled Friday [10/17/2008] that, for now, a federal district court cannot force Ohio's Secretary of State to enforce federal elections laws that she is flagrantly ignoring.

Lawyers demand vote fraud probe. The lawyers pointed to Ohio and Wisconsin, where the Justice Department has decided against requiring state officials to confirm voters' identities by releasing their names to local election authorities as "difficult to fathom." At issue in both states are thousands of voters whose names did not match listed Social Security and driver's license numbers in other government databases, or otherwise did not pass identity verification standards. "This appears to be a dereliction of the department's obligations to enforce federal law," the attorneys wrote.

Ohio Secretary of State Linked to ACORN, Project Vote. The national development director for Project Vote, an affiliated organization of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, has been linked to embattled Ohio Secretary of State, Democrat Jennifer Brunner. Karyn Gillette of Project Vote was a campaign consultant for the Brunner campaign, according to information found in a post made by Rick Brunner on April 11, 2006 on the secretary of state's own blog.

Liberals: The Enemy Within. Feeling as I do about Barack Obama, it's only natural that I would look for people to blame for putting him in the Oval Office. I mean, aside from the 63 million oafs who actually voted for the guy. The first villains who come to mind are members of the media who are still, in the words of Bernard Goldberg, slobbering over him. But I have come up with another group of troublemakers. They're the folks who came up with the cockamamie primary system.

The ACORN Subsection

To reduce the size of this page, all the discussion about ACORN has been moved here.

Making a Dent in Liberal Disinformation: Voter Disenfranchisement. Democrats have never been known to cast fraudulent ballots, eh, Mayor Daley? We won't go into the NAACP allegedly paying Chad Staton in crack cocaine to register such stalwart Dems as Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins, and Janet Jackson in Ohio. Or the 8,000 fraudulent Democratic voter registrations discovered in Lansing, Michigan. That's "Get out the Vote."

Voting initiative could create a millionaire. With supporters hoping to boost voter participation, an initiative filed Monday [5/22/2006] for [Arizona's] November election would provide $1 million to one randomly chosen Arizona voter just for casting a ballot.

[How would that improve the quality of elected officials?]

Californians are sick of voting. Californians set a record in 2002: Fewer turned out for a primary election than ever before — just 34.6% of registered voters. Even fewer may turn out for June's primary.

[There's nothing wrong with low voter turnout. Those who are informed and motivated will vote every time. Many Democrats show great determination to get to the polls on election day, even if they're dead!]

We would be better off if fewer people voted. Does this seem out-of-line? Suggesting that people who vote should be American citizens, non-felons, informed, not-crazy, and able to speak English if they're going to be voting? I don't think so. That's why if anything, we'd be better off encouraging people like that to stay home, instead of encouraging them to vote.

Voting Equipment Usage in the United States: Voting equipment maps and reports provide statistics on the types of voting equipment and used by election jurisdictions in the United States. Information from voting equipment maps is summarized on a voting equipment report that also includes names of voting equipment vendors and information on voting precincts, population, and registered voters.

E-voting: Communities across America are purchasing electronic voting (e-voting) machines, but the technology has serious security problems that aren't being addressed. Most of the machines use "black box" software that hasn't been publicly reviewed for security. Almost none provide voter-verifiable paper ballots to detect fraud. A recent analysis by several academic researchers outlines the many and varied ways that anyone from a technically proficient insider to an average voter could disrupt an e-voting system to defraud an election.

How to steal an election: A recent story that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved was the New York Daily News report that 46,000 registered New York City voters are also registered to vote in Florida. Nearly 1,700 of them have had absentee ballots mailed to their home in the other state, and as many as 1,000 have voted twice in the same election. Can 1,000 fraudulent votes change an election? Well, George W. Bush won Florida in 2000 by just 537 votes.

Interesting: Multiple vulnerabilities in Diebold Optical Scan. A Technical Report published by BlackBoxVoting.org details multiple critical security vulnerabilities in the Diebold Optical Scan voting equipment that was used to tally approximately 25 million votes in the 2004 US election. … According to the report: "Exploits available with this design include, but are not limited to: Paper trail falsification – the ability to modify the election results reports so that they do not match the actual vote data … removal of information about pre-loaded votes, the ability to hide pre-loaded votes, the ability to hide a pre-arranged integer overflow, the ability to program conditional behavior based on time/date, number of votes counted, and many other hidden triggers.

Election protests have already started. In Denver, an estimated 165,000 new voter sign-ups brought warnings of potential vote fraud. State officials have sent several hundred registrations to the attorney general for review, and the Denver district attorney is investigating 200 more. Both parties have enlisted hundreds of lawyers for Election Day challenges and for post-election fights over disputed ballots. Rep. Pat Tiberi, an Ohio Republican, noted that four counties in his state have voter registration numbers that exceed the number of voting-age residents in the counties in the last Census.

Half of Lost Voter Records Found in Denver. More than half of the 150,000 voting records reported missing from city election offices have been found, raising hopes that they were simply misplaced during a move in February, not lost or stolen. The lost microfilmed voter registration files records contain Social Security numbers, addresses and other personal information from 1989 to 1998.

Report blames Denver election woes on flawed software. The software was supposed to make it easy for officials at any voting center to check online and make sure a voter had not already voted somewhere else in Denver. Instead, it led to massive problems on Election Day due to "decidedly subprofessional architecture and construction," according to the report from consultants Fred Hessler and Matt Smith at Fujitsu Consulting in Greenwood Village, Colo.

ACLU, Chesterfield again at odds. The ACLU of Virginia is offering its legal services to Chesterfield County voters who are denied absentee ballots for refusing to give their Social Security number to election officials. The issue gained attention this month after Chesterfield election officials blocked a county voter from submitting an absentee ballot after he refused to provide his Social Security number.

500 new voters might not exist. Workers paid by a liberal group to register voters in Franklin County have turned in more than 500 forms with nonexistent addresses and potentially fake signatures, elections officials said yesterday [8/10/2006]. Board of Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said he has forwarded the cards to county authorities for possible criminal charges.

Maryland judge nixes early voting. Early voting in Maryland is illegal because the state's constitution allows only one day to cast ballots, an Anne Arundel County Circuit Court judge ruled Friday [8/11/2006].

Cleveland election workers sentenced for rigging 2004 presidential recount. Two election workers in the state's most populous county were sentenced Tuesday [3/13/2007] to 18 months in prison for rigging the 2004 presidential election recount so they could avoid a more thorough review of the votes. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Peter Corrigan allowed the women to remain free on bond pending appeal.

Editor's note:
Please note that Cuyahoga County is heavily Democratic, if that wasn't already obvious.

Washington County DA looking into suspicious absentee ballots. Washington County [Alabama] officials said Wednesday [7/19/2006] that they are unsure about their next step in dealing with 57 absentee ballots sent to a McIntosh woman's home and restaurant before Tuesday's runoff election.

Ohio lunacy. Jesse Jackson has now joined the "Ohio was stolen" team with a rally in Columbus, while civil-rights and left-wing groups are filing lawsuits. They all demand a recount! Get ready for Ohio 2004 to take an honored place in fevered left-wing lore. Speculation about Bush stealing Ohio was fueled by a voting machine in the small city of Gahanna in Franklin County that mistakenly recorded 3,800 votes for the president. It was a software error that was caught and corrected as the normal process of certifying the vote was proceeding.

Ohio's odd numbers: No conspiracy theorist, and no fan of John Kerry's, the author nevertheless found the Ohio polling results impossible to swallow: Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines.

Judge rejects electronic voting suit. A federal judge on Monday [10/25/2004] rejected U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler's claim that paperless electronic voting violates the constitutional rights of Floridians.

The drunks may save our election system. The burden in a criminal case is on the state to show that the [breathalyzer] machine was certified. … Failing that, of course, you can have a "Wizard of Oz" effect, where the man behind the curtain presses a secret button and the machine says "drunk." [But it's very different in the case of electronic voting machines.]

Documents surface in NC with Deibold and Gaston Co.. In one city, Dallas, NC, a bug appears to have prevented the downloading of 11,945 votes which wasn't caught for seven days. At which point, it appears the county compared paper print-outs from the precinct with the totals reported by the tabulation server. A DESI technician reproduced the bug twice and then decided to forgo usual DESI protocol and loaded the flash-based memory packs directly into the central (GEMS) server to retrieve the votes from the memory pack.

Detroit votes don't add up. Canvassers find boxes with uncounted ballots, discrepancies in 30% of the precinct tallies.

Elections commission fines Oliphant $10,000. The Florida Elections Commission on Friday [11/18/2005] fined a former Broward County elections supervisor $10,000 for neglecting her duties during a botched 2002 primary. The commissioners said Miriam Oliphant willfully neglected her duties, which caused dozens of polls to open late and close early in the county during that year's gubernatorial primary.

Two indicted in P.G. vote fraud case. Two key players in alleged voter fraud in the Penns Grove Democrat Primary Election have been indicted by a Salem County Grand Jury, according to court officials. Anavia Green, 54, of Madole Place in Penns Grove, was indicted on Dec. 20 on a charge of forgery, according to Salem County Criminal Case Management. Green was a ballot messenger in the primary election.

Voter Registration Probe Unearths Potential Fraud in Wisconsin. Susan Tully, the Midwest field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says she became concerned about possible voter fraud in the Badger State when an admitted illegal alien suddenly was named a deputy registrar of voters in Racine, Wisconsin. ... "At no time was she asked to show identification; at no time was she asked for her Social Security number; and at no time was she asked if she was a citizen of the United States," she says. "I have a real fear, based on my knowledge now, that this election will be decided by foreign nationals and illegal aliens."

Bollixing up the Ballot: Once the Democrat pulled ahead, Washingtonians were told it was time to move on. "The election is over," Gregoire announced in December. "I hope we can move forward, unite our state and address the problems our state is facing." One problem the state faced, and presumably will face again, is voter fraud. Even in dismissing Rossi's lawsuit, the judge admitted there were at least 1,678 illegal ballots cast — more than enough to flip the outcome in either direction.

The illegal alien swing vote: Why is it that we can't protect our elections from people who have no right to vote, no right to be here, and no right to undermine our safety or sovereignty?

Should Felons Vote? Forty-eight states currently restrict the right of felons to vote. Most states forbid current inmates to vote, others extend such bans to parolees, and still others disenfranchise felons for life. A movement to overturn these restrictions gained swift momentum during the 2004 presidential campaign, and pending legal and legislative measures promise to keep the issue in the headlines in the months to come.

The felon vote: In the wake of their election defeat, Democrats have promised to mend their ways by emphasizing moral values. So, in their first major legislative initiative of the year, what are the party's two top senators offering? A bill to guarantee that millions of convicted murderers, rapists and armed robbers can vote.

Measure would restore vote to all felons. Democratic lawmakers, who have long pushed to restore voting rights to Maryland felons, say racial politics and election-year considerations make this the year they open the polls to every ex-convict. "This law seriously disenfranchises a large number of African-Americans," said Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat ... whose bill would give all felons the vote immediately upon release from prison.

[Why wait til then? If this passes, the next step will be to allow prisoners to vote while they're still in prison. This kind of incrementalism only goes one direction.]

Felon plan seen as political. Gov. Tom Vilsack insists politics played no part in his plan to restore voting rights to all Iowa felons, a move nonetheless loaded with political ramifications. By automatically restoring the vote to people who have served their time in prison and on parole or probation, Vilsack could subtly shift the political balance in a narrowly divided battleground state in favor of Democrats, the governor's party.

[Ask yourself this question: Why do people assume that felons would vote for Democrats?]

Felony conviction looms over official. Marc Hoskins won a Galveston City Council seat May 13 even though he acknowledged publicly that he is a convicted felon — a fact that usually bars a person from holding elected office in Texas.

55,000 dead or duplicate voters deleted from state database. The Secretary of State's Office has deleted about 55,000 registrations from Washington's voter rolls after finding duplicate records and dead voters with the aid of a new statewide database. The database, put in place earlier this year, allowed the state to find 19,579 dead people still on the rolls and 35,445 duplicate voter records. … So far the state has found about 900 names of people who could be in prison but still are on voter-registration rolls.

Why is it so hard to run an honest election? My advice is to vote carefully. Read the instructions carefully, and ask questions if you are confused. Follow the instructions carefully, checking every step as you go. Remember that it might be impossible to correct a problem once you've finished voting. In many states … you can request a paper ballot if you have any worries about the voting machine.

I Am Who I Say I Am — Now Let's Prove it with Some ID. Perhaps nothing can set up more of a racial firestorm than requiring a voter to show valid government-issued picture ID when casting a ballot for an election. The state of Georgia is battling courts and activists groups in its attempt to tackle voter fraud by eliminating the loose standards currently in place.

Stay home; don't vote. Here they come — the earnest exhortations to get out and vote. You'll be hearing it from television newscasters, MTV, newspaper ads, radio talk show hosts, weathermen, schoolteachers ... you get the idea. Everyone has a duty to vote, they will say. No they don't. If a person is utterly ignorant about matters of public policy, then he or she has a solemn obligation to refrain from voting. The percentage of people who fall into the utterly ignorant category is estimated to be about 25 percent of eligible voters.

Academia Still Fixated on John Kerry. John Kerry conceded defeat weeks ago, and President Bush has already revamped his Cabinet. But as states certify final election returns, an academic debate over their accuracy is heating up. None of the experts examining the returns has discovered voting anomalies significant enough to have swung the election.

Remember the Florida 'Chad' Fiasco? Uniquely, the 4.14% double-punch rate in Palm Beach County was four times larger than it was in any other voting precinct in the United States using a punch card ballot. The double-punch rate in the presidential race in the rest of Florida was 1%. The double-punch error rate for the US congressional and senatorial candidates nationwide and in Florida was also 1%. What is even more strange is that in the precincts which experienced the 4.14% double-punch rate at the top of the ticket, the double-punches for the congressional and senatorial candidates mirrored the national average of 1%. The only explanation for the 4.14% double punch rate at the top of the ticket is that precinct workers were pre-punching the ballots before giving them to the voters. In Palm Beach County, Pat Buchanan did not have any supporters handing out ballots to voters standing in line to vote. All of the double punched ballots had a vote cast for Gore. There were no double-punched ballots for Buchanan and Bush — only Buchanan and Gore or Bush and Gore.

Stop and think. While many people are urging us to vote — regardless of for whom, for what, or for what reason — there are very few urging us to do what is far more important: Stop and think! Voting is not a matter of personal expression but a serious responsibility for choosing what course this country will take in the years — and decades — ahead.

Are facts obsolete? People who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts are a danger to the whole society. Since the votes of such people count just as much as the votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are widespread.

Do Voters Choose Politicians, or Do Politicians Choose Voters? Gerrymandering, campaign finance reform, and public subsidies are three ways that government intervention has reduced political competition, according to a new study.

Get-out-the-dopes drives: While it is true that each succeeding generation is more deeply immersed in a decadent popular culture and more devoid of important knowledge than the one that preceded it, the existence of uninformed people is not unprecedented. What is unprecedented, though, is our obsession with encouraging such people to exercise greater control over our lives and those of our progeny, over policies that can send us down a road toward prosperity or one toward destruction, by encouraging them to vote. What I'm talking about is that another election is approaching and, as always, we see organizations that launch "Get Out the Vote Drives."

A Skeptic's View of Voting: Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen, if we raised the voting age to, say, 25, the Democratic party would go the way of the dodo and the Whigs. Liberals want young kids voting for pretty much the same cynical reason they want to extend suffrage to illegal aliens, convicted felons and dead people. It takes a certain mentality, a certain degree of gullibility, after all, to believe … that "hope" and "change" are any more profound and meaningful than "Tastes great, less filling" or "My bologna has a first name."

Generation Gap: Today, Americans under the age of 30 are by far the most Democratic age group in the electorate. They are also by far the most liberal age group. In the 2006 national exit poll, self-identified liberals outnumbered self-identified conservatives 34 percent to 25 percent. In contrast, self-identified conservatives outnumbered self-identified liberals by 33 percent to 18 percent among those 30 and older.

The ignorant American voter. Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, observes in a new study for the Cato Institute that voters tend to be "abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information." This may not be news to scholars, who have documented it in depressing detail, "but the sheer depth of most individual voters' ignorance is shocking to observers not familiar with the research."

GOP bashes county clerk over mistakes. The Mercer County Republican party slammed Democratic county clerk Paula Sollami-Covello yesterday [6/12/2006] for what it said were egregious errors affecting elections.

Electronic voting machines vs Tempest technology. Tempest is a code word for electromagnetic snooping. It's usual for military electronics to be "Tempest hardened" in order to shield them from high-tech spying, disruptive interference, and EMPs. It isn't an exaggeration these days to consider an election to be a military target. In any case, a non-Tempest-hardened voting machine is likely to leak emissions that give a suitably-equipped passer-by the details of each voter's preferences.

Why E-Voting Still Is Not E-nough: One way to build voter confidence is to allow voters to witness tangible evidence that the vote that they cast accurately reflects their intention. Other important steps to voter confidence include preventing or overcoming security and malfunction problems. The surest way to accomplish those goals is through heightened security procedures at all stages of the election. No matter what voting machine system is chosen, carefully thought-out procedures are paramount.

In California, voters can request a paper ballot, but they might not know that — or they might not be told.

Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. The Florida Fiasco of 2000, with hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, forced Americans to confront an ugly reality. The U.S. has the sloppiest election systems of any industrialized nation, so sloppy that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.

Voting Machines Criticized, State Says Bugs Gone. Jim Noel pored over election results two years ago, trying to understand his mistake. As an attorney for the Democratic Party, Noel was examining records several days after the election that showed that about 48,000 people had voted early in Bernalillo County. The unofficial election results, however, tallied only 36,000 votes in the governor's race. "It didn't make any sense," Noel said last week in recalling the incident. As it turned out, Noel wasn't mistaken. The 12,000-vote discrepancy was caused by a software glitch related to the use of new electronic "touch-screen" voting machines.

Florida Has New Rule on Touch-Screen Recounts. Florida set new guidelines for recounting touch-screen ballots in close elections, but voter-rights groups said the court-ordered decision doesn't go nearly far enough to ensure a fair election.

E-Vote Fears Soar in Swing States. Following the 2000 election, when problems with punch cards left Florida's electoral votes in flux for 36 days before Bush was declared the winner with a 537-vote margin, state law was changed to require massive upgrades in nearly every county. Now more than half of the voters in the state are expected to vote on touch screens this November, but that technology hasn't always proved itself a perfect fix.

Florida Voting Machines Have Recount Flaw : Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.

Obion County Tennessee vote counting problems: The county had to revise its preliminary election results after they discovered that early votes weren't counted.

Lost Record '02 Florida Vote Raises '04 Concern. Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.

E-Vote Machine Certification Criticized: The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November. Despite concerns over whether the so-called touchscreen machines can be trusted, the testing companies won't say publicly if they have encountered shoddy workmanship. They say they are committed to secrecy in their contracts with the voting machines' makers — even though tax money ultimately buys or leases the machines.

Rolling Down the Highway, Looking Out for Flawed Elections. The elections director of Mohave County, Ariz., was so proud of his new electronic voting system that Bev Harris barely had the heart to point out its vulnerabilities. But she did, and before long she was ticking off the ways that she said an outsider could hijack his central tabulator — the computer that stores all of the county's votes — and steal an election. By the time she had shown him a "backdoor" way to gain access to his software without a password, the elections director was visibly concerned.

This is for all the people who believe anything that pops up on a computer screen:
The Risky Business of Spreadsheet Errors. Spreadsheets create an illusion of orderliness, accuracy, and integrity. The tidy rows and columns of data, instant calculations, eerily invisible updating, and other features of these ubiquitous instruments contribute to this soothing impression. At the same time, faulty spreadsheets and poor spreadsheet practices have been implicated in a wide variety of business and financial problems.

Spreadsheet mistakes: Cases where the careless use of spreadsheets has caused trouble.

Reconsidering E-Voting: My e-column last week, in which I attempted to get my brain around the experts' astoundingly different opinions on electronic voting machines, generated a huge number of reader responses. One note came from David Dill, the Stanford computer science professor who has created a Web site, verifiedvoting.org, dedicated to the cause of voting-machine security. "With electronic voting, a single programmer could make a change in voting machine software that would be installed in every machine in the country. And there is no reliable way to detect that this has been done. I intend this to be a strong statement!"

"Ghost vote" spooks the Assembly. Nobody was surprised that state Sen. Carole Migden voted in favor of her own cosmetics bill. The problem was that she did it in the wrong legislative house. Toward the end of Wednesday's floor session, Migden, a San Francisco Democrat, pushed the voting button of a GOP assemblyman who was temporarily away from his desk. Her action violated Assembly rules and drew an angry response from Republicans.

At this time, the Editor would like to ask a rhetorical question:
Why aren't voting systems in state capitols protected with keys or passwords?

What's up in Boulder, Colorado?

What is Boulder County trying to hide? There must be something terribly wrong with their new election system, and Boulder County election officials are doing everything in their power to keep it hidden from the public. The Boulder County Republican Party was kicked out of Thursday's official test [8/5/2004] of the new election system. Election officials insisted that the legally appointed Republican Party representative change his test decks, presumably so that the system can pass the tests. The Republican representative refused, and the clerk told him to leave.

Kolwicz evicted for submitting real tests. Al Kolwicz, official representative to Boulder County's test of its new vote counting system, was asked by County Clerk, Linda Salas, to leave the test. When asked what happened, Kolwicz said, "we submitted sample ballots to test the security and accuracy of the county's new vote counting system." The sample ballots included tests such as - (1) what happens if a voter circles the box rather than filling in the entire box with a black pen, and (2) what happens if a voter marks over the ballot serial number in hopes that this will make the ballot secret. (Boulder County's new ballots are not secret.)

Free Al Kolwicz! Last we looked, being fastidious wasn't a crime. But the Boulder County Clerk and Recorder's Office evidently didn't get that memo. Last Thursday [8/5/2004], officials ordered Al Kolwicz, a Republican representative to the elections canvass board, off the premises, and reported him to police for allegedly "interfering" with an election.

Note: A test of voting machines is not an election.

Elections must be verifiable. So, are you ready to hand off the security of your precious vote to a bunch of software programmers who work for huge corporations? You, the average voter, could soon find that you have no way to verify that the votes you cast on fancy-schmancy "touch-screen" voting terminals are what you intended. Sound alarmist? It's happening across the United States under provisions of the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in response to the 2000 Florida election debacle. HAVA, as currently written, is no solution.

Safeguarding the Vote: Last November, I voted. At least I think I did. When I got to my polling place, instead of the familiar ballot where I drew a fat, black line to connect two parts of an arrow, I was handed what looked like a blank credit card. I plugged that into one of the spiffy new touch-screen voting machines and started touching the screen. When I was done, the machine showed me a summary of the votes I'd cast. I returned the magnetic card, and that was it. It was a bit spooky. No ballot, nothing tangible, just a momentary display on a screen.

"The counting system is NOT VERIFIABLE. There is no ballot by ballot way to compare the original ballot to the votes that the computer (as amended by the officials) interpreted from that ballot. We cannot know what the computer decided. It is like using a giant calculator with no 'paper tape' to enter hundreds of thousands of numbers, and then pressing TOTAL, and believing the TOTAL without checking it. Who would possibly trust the result?"
— Al Kolwicz

Web site: Citizens for Verifiable Voting.

Electronic voting firm acknowledges hacker break-in. A Bellevue, Washington, company developing security technology for electronic voting suffered an embarrassing hacker break-in that executives think was tied to the rancorous debate over the safety of casting ballots online.

The voting process is too important to leave to technology. Depending on where you live, you may have stuck a piece of paper in box, or thrown a little mechanical lever, or punched a hole in a card. Or pushed a button — beep! John Smith gets your vote for school board president. Or does he? Electronic voting machines, it turns out, may or may not be counting your votes properly, if at all.

States scrutinize e-voting as primaries near. Some states are raising last-minute security concerns over e-voting technology as much of the country prepares to switch over from mechanical to electronic ballots in time for the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Why the Current Touch Screen Voting Fiasco Was Pretty Much Inevitable: We were stupid to expect this thing to work as planned. Except that as far as I can tell, there wasn't really a plan. Here's what I think happened. This is, unfortunately, far too common in the IT world. After the last presidential election, there was a government outcry for an electronic voting system. Firms like Diebold who make ATMs, check out systems and kiosk systems said, "Hey, we can make a voting machine out of one of our products." That was probably the total extent of thinking and requirements put together by the government agencies and the vendors.

Ohio Halts E-Voting Machines. Companies that tested the security systems of the four machine types found software that permits votes to be counted more than once, and a risk that unauthorized poll workers or others could gain access to the system. Identical passwords were discovered for more than one poll worker, while voting booth cases did not provide for locks, leaving a risk of tampering during transportation of ballots.

Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting. While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny. Critics say the development process is a model for how electronic voting machines should be made in the United States.

"Suppose you had a situation where ballots were handed to a private company that counted them behind a closed door and burned the results," said David Dill, founder of VerifiedVoting.org. "Nobody but an idiot would accept a system like that. We've got something that is almost as bad with electronic voting."*

Time to Recall E-Vote Machines? There are numerous flaws in the system. [For example] (1) Officials leave voting machines at polling stations days before the election. The machines contain memory cards with ballots already loaded on them. This means before the election, someone could alter the ballot file in such a way that voters would cast votes for the wrong candidate without knowing it. (2) The memory card rests behind a locked door on the side of the voting machine. But supervisors receive a key to the compartment the weekend before the election. The same key fits every machine at a polling station. And (3) Poll supervisors are selected with no background checks and are given keys to buildings where they can access the machines several days before the election.

Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election? Researchers and auditors [from Diebold Election Systems] who examined code for the company's touch-screen voting system released two separate reports stating that the software was full of serious security flaws.

E-Voting Blunder Creates a Stir. The strange case of an election tally that appears to have popped up on the Internet hours before polls closed is casting new doubts about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines. During San Luis Obispo County's March 2002 primary, absentee vote tallies were apparently sent to an Internet site operated by Diebold Election Systems, the maker of the voting machines used in the election.

E-Vote Software Leaked Online. Software used by an electronic voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems has been left unprotected on a publicly available server, raising concerns about the possibility of vote tampering in future elections.

Black Box Voting Blues: Unfortunately, the [Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal] machines have "a fatal disadvantage," says Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, who's sponsoring legislation on the issue. "They're unverifiable. When a voter votes, he or she has no way of knowing whether the vote is recorded." After you punch the buttons to choose your candidates, you may get a final screen that reflects your choices — but there's no way to tell that those choices are the ones that ultimately get reported in the final tally. You simply have to trust that the software inside the machine is doing its job.

If You Want to Win an Election, Just Control the Voting Machines. Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots. But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voter's hand to prove it.

Declaration of Peter Neumann before a U.S. District Court: The election process is inherently subject to errors, manipulation, and fraud. It is a process that demands extraordinary integrity of any computerized systems involved, as well as honesty and experience of the people involved in administering elections. Evidently, it may require considerable sophistication on the part of voters as well. The highest potential risks relate to electronic systems — and worst of all Internet voting, limited by the intrinsic lack of security in Internet systems and a morass of sociological problems. Old-style lever machines and well-managed optical scanning systems are typically more reliable and less subvertible than electronic ballot systems. It is interesting to note that a very large part of the world still uses paper ballots marked with an X for the selected choice; that approach is considered very reliable and surprisingly quick in the counting phase when distributed into precincts with suitable oversight.

Electronic Voting: A Can of Grubby Worms. The year 2000 marked a departure from the traditional voting method using the tried and true ballot. Suddenly, the general public began to distrust it, wanting to improve the process by using computer technology. The cry went out for Uncle to assist the states in devising an electronic voting system capable of being all things to all people. Almost immediately, the Clintons and other Leftists demanded that an electronic means of vote recording be employed.

Voter-verified paper trails: In recent months, many people, including hundreds of prominent computer scientists, have raised an alarm about the reliability and security of "Direct Recording Electronic" voting machines (DREs), such as touch screen machines. These machines produce no physical record of the vote while the voter is present. Many believe that computer technology is not sufficiently advanced to make this kind of voting equipment safe.

Spotlight on electronic voting flaws.

Electronic Voting: What You Need To Know.

Touch-screens dealt a blow. In January 2003, Florida election officials reported that there was a higher rate of so-called undervotes among voters using the ATM-style equipment than those voters who mark paper ballots and feed them into an optical scanner.

E-voting critic issues challenge to hackers. A leading critic of paperless electronic voting machines issued a challenge [recently] to computer hackers attending their annual Black Hat conference, encouraging them to test whether it's possible to rig an election.

California Bans E-Vote Machines. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ended five months of speculation and announced Friday [4/28/2004] that he was decertifying all electronic touch-screen voting machines in the state due to security concerns and lack of voter confidence. He also said that he was passing along evidence to the state's attorney general to bring criminal and civil charges against voting-machine-maker Diebold Election Systems for fraud.

Risks in Computerized Elections: Errors and alleged fraud in computer-based elections have been recurring Risks Forum themes. The state of the computing art continues to be primitive. Punch-card systems are seriously flawed and easily tampered with, and still in widespread use. Direct recording equipment is also suspect, with no ballots, no guaranteed audit trails, and no real assurances that votes cast are properly recorded and processed. Computerized elections are being run or considered in many countries, including some notorious for past riggings; thus the risks discussed here exist worldwide.

Voting Automation (Early and Often?) Computerization of manual processes often creates opportunities for social risks, despite decades of experience. This is clear to everyone who has waded through deeply nested telephone menus and then been disconnected. Electronic voting is an area where automation seems highly desirable but fails to offer significant improvements over existing systems.

Insider Risks in Elections: Many discussions of voting systems and their relative integrity have been primarily technical, focusing on the difficulty of attacks and defenses. This is only half of the equation: it's not enough to know how much it might cost to rig an election by attacking voting systems; we also need to know how much it would be worth to do so.

Florida 2002: Sluggish Systems, Vanishing Votes. Following the 2000 Presidential election debacle in Florida, government officials promised sweeping reforms that would prevent such chaos from reoccurring. Indeed, the Florida election code was extensively revised, punchcard systems were outlawed, and over $125 million was spent statewide on new voting equipment and training of voters and election administrators. What could possibly go wrong? Apparently enough calamity to cause Governor Jeb Bush to declare a state of emergency, extending the voting session by two hours for the September 10, 2002 primary election. Yet events earlier in the year should have provided sufficient forewarning of difficulties.

Muslim group attempts late Florida vote dump. A pushy Muslim activist demanded a county elections office worker accept a box of 550 applications to vote after the close of business on the last day to register in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Voting chaos looms for American election. The electronic voting system designed for the forthcoming American election is fundamentally flawed and could undermine the trustworthiness of the entire US democratic process, a scientist has told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Florida election stymies technology: Seven precincts reported Democratic turnouts of more than 100 percent in the 2002 elections.

Computer Experts Fear Fraud in Recall Vote. California voters will be using touch-screen machines, which don't produce printouts voters can see. And no paper printouts, the scientists say, would make a legitimate recount impossible.

Asleep at the wheel. In spite of what you hear from your government school teacher, your leftist college professor, or that smiling talking head on television, we are not a democracy. Never were. Weren't supposed to be. You won't find the word "democracy" in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States or in any constitution of any of the 50 States. There's a reason for that. Our founding fathers hated the idea of democracy. They knew that a government of majority rule would dissolve into a tyranny of plunder and chaos.

Felons call voting ban unfair to minorities. A lawsuit pending [in Seattle] and similar cases across the country have asked the courts to overturn state laws that keep felons from the ballot box, claiming the laws discriminate against minorities who make up a disproportionate number of the nation's prisoners.

E-Vote Still Flawed, Experts Say. Computer security experts hired to hack electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems found that flaws in the machines could result in malicious insiders or outsiders stealing an election.

Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election? Diebold Election Systems has had a tumultuous year, and it doesn't look like it's getting any better. Researchers and auditors who examined code for the company's touch-screen voting system released two separate reports stating that the software was full of serious security flaws.

E-Voting Undermined by Sloppiness: An audit of Diebold Election Systems voting machines in California has revealed that the company installed uncertified software in all 17 counties that use its electronic voting equipment. …Three counties, including Los Angeles, used software that had never been certified by the state or qualified by federal authorities for use in any election.

Purging illegal aliens from voter rolls isn't easy. President Clinton signed the motor-voter legislation into law, hailing it for increasing voter participation by simplifying registration. But many states do not verify citizenship when residents apply for licenses, which allows noncitizens to get on voting rolls.

Too Uninformed to Vote? A very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn't very well qualified to vote, if by "qualified" you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges. Almost half of the American public doesn't know that each state gets two senators. More than two-thirds can't explain the gist of what the Food and Drug Administration does.

Could It Be that Florida Democrats Are Too Stupid to Vote? Of course, the "uncounted votes" which somehow always are found in boxes, or in this case, machines, that were "sitting in a warehouse uncounted" have also been unsupervised by pollwatchers. In both Chicago and in Miami-Dade, this problem only seems to afflict Democratic Precincts in close elections.

On the other hand...
Pandering to the crackpot left: You'll recall that last month, Mrs. Heinz Kerry put on her shiniest tinfoil hat and blamed the Democrats' loss in November on rigged voting machines. As reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mrs. Heinz Kerry openly questioned the election results and fixated on areas of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes. "Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Mrs. Heinz Kerry intoned, and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

There's only one good thing about electronic voting: Liberals hate it.

Web sites:

VerifiedVoting.org: Will your vote count in the next election? Maybe not! How will we even know? We advocate the use of voter-verified paper ballots (VVPBs) for all elections in the United States, so voters can inspect individual permanent records of their ballots before they are cast and so meaningful recounts may be conducted. We also insist that electronic voting equipment and software be open to public scrutiny and that random, surprise recounts be conducted on a regular basis to audit election equipment. Paperless electronic voting systems are failing us. Worse yet, resistance from the elections official community is astonishing!

Voter Action "... is a not-for-profit organization that provides legal, research and organizing support to ensure election integrity in the United States. Our current focus is to protect as many jurisdictions as possible from the acquisition and use of privatized, electronic voting systems which have been shown to have the most severe security risks and records of inaccuracy and unreliability."

FEC web page about the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Full text of the Act - HTML version PDF version

Capitol Grilling: Electronic Voting Machine Controversy. (Discussion forum)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has a very good page about voting in general and electronic voting in particular.

Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. Black Box Voting is defined as any voting system in which the mechanism for recording and/or tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter, and/or the mechanism lacks a tangible record of the vote cast.

List of voting machine errors. There are several ways the mechanical lever machines can be rigged. [But] computerized voting opens the door for a single individual to manipulate votes in elections across the country.