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Reversing Course on Electronic Voting
2006-05-12, Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114739688261250925-q5rh2ocioxu6mgjmS6b...

Some advocates of a 2002 law mandating upgrades of the nation's voting machinery now worry the overhaul is making things worse. Proponents of the Help America Vote Act are filing lawsuits to block some state and election officials' efforts to comply with the act. The Help America Vote Act called for upgrading election equipment to guard against another contested outcome such as the 2000 presidential vote. At the time, the electronic voting machines were seen as a reliable contrast to the older technology. The lawsuits—nine so far—coincide with a stampede by state and county officials to spend $3 billion allocated by Congress to help pay for upgrades. To comply with the Help America Vote Act, a number of states and dozens of counties purchased touch-screen voting machines. The 2004 presidential campaign and some early primary elections this year have provided evidence that the machines don't always work smoothly. And several states, after experiencing problems with touch-screen electronic systems, abandoned them to return to optically scanned paper ballots, already commonly used for absentee balloting. Typically, paper ballots require a voter to use a pencil to fill in a circle. The system is less costly to buy and maintain, and provides a paper record of ballots that can be reviewed in close or disputed elections. In Indiana, an ES&S employee alerted local-election officials that another ES&S worker had installed unauthorized software on the machines before the election. That and other disputes led to a multimillion-dollar settlement.

Note: See our new elections cover-up summary at http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsmanipulations

Computer Glitch Changes Election Result
2004-11-12, Los Angeles Times/Associated Press
http://www.WantToKnow.info/041112latimes

A hand recount of ballots cast using optical scanning technology gave a Democrat enough extra votes to bump a Republican from victory in a county commissioner's race. The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana's Franklin County.

Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed?

3 Days Late, Bush Is Awarded Iowa
2004-11-06, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29190-2004Nov5.html

The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. The most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct out of 638 votes cast. It was not clear whether Ohio experienced any other problems with electronic ballots. About 30 percent of the voters in the state voted electronically. In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials misjudged the amount of data that could be stored electronically by a computer.

Election fixing charges fly in Utah county
2006-11-07, CNN News/Associated Press
http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/blogs/politicalticker/2006/11/election-fixing-cha...

Voting appears to be very popular in Daggett County, Utah. Daggett County has registered 947 voters for Tuesday's election. According to the most recent Census figures, that's four more than the county's population in 2005. A spokesman for Attorney General Mark Shurtleff says complaints of vote-stuffing in the county are being investigated. Democrats suspect County Clerk Vickie McKee is letting outsiders swell the Daggett County registration rolls to give Republicans an advantage. The Democrats also say the father of a Republican deputy running for sheriff has 14 adults registered at his household. McKee hasn't responded to messages from The Associated Press.

Note: In such a small county, it is easy to spot the discrepancies. How often does this happen in much bigger counties and go unnoticed? For more, click here.

Florida Elections Anomalies Go Unreported
2004-11-12, UPI (United Press International News Service)
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20041112-010916-6128r

In Baker County, Fla...there are 12,887 registered voters: 69.3 percent are Democrats, 24.3 percent are Republicans. Yet 2,180 of county residents voted for Kerry while 7,738 voted for Bush -- the opposite of what some election critics say was the typically pattern elsewhere in the United States. In Florida's Dixie County...77.5 percent of the 4,988 registered voters are Democrats, 15 percent are Republicans. On Election Day, Bush carried the county with 4,433 votes vs. 1,959 for Kerry. Nationally, few outlets have pursued the story of what happened in Baker and Dixie.

Multiple Voting Machine Problems
2006-10-31, CNN News
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0610/31/ldt.01.html

[CNN News anchor Lou] DOBBS: Florida the scene of one of this country's worst election breakdowns ever. Already a series of e-voting glitches have plagued early voting in the state of Florida. KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Voter activists are warning there have been problems with electronic machines in Florida in early voting. Some of the most populous counties...have reported serious problems. In seven percent of precincts, the number of votes didn't match the tally of registered voters. PAMELA HAENGEL, VOTING INTEGRITY ALLIANCE: In Pinellas County in the primaries we found over 150 calibration errors from precinct workers' logs. That's when a voter goes to touch the screen and it hops to a candidate that they didn't necessarily vote for. PILGRIM: Today, Governor Jeb Bush gave his full vote of confidence to the machine. REGINALD MITCHELL, PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY: Despite all the problems...we have nothing in place for a paper trail in Florida. SUSAN PYNCHON, FLORIDA ELECTION COALITION: The voting started at 8:00. At five minutes before 10:00, the power failed. PILGRIM: That power outage kept the electronic voting machines down for hours and hundreds of voters were turned away. PILGRIM: Another problem, in some places representatives of the voting machines company are in charge of running the software that tabulates the votes. DOBBS: This is one troubling, concerning report on top of another. We are beginning to behave like a Banana Republic. PILGRIM: It's unbelievably shocking this close to the election we're dealing with this. DOBBS: Unbelievable. It's just -- it's incredible.

Touch-Screen Voting Fallible, Ehrlich Says
2006-03-06, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/05/AR20060305010...

Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) has embraced a legislative proposal to abandon the state's touch-screen voting machines for the coming election, in which he is a candidate, and to lease others that provide a paper record to verify results. Ehrlich's endorsement is the latest turn in the debate over Maryland's electronic voting machines that were used in nearly every polling place in the 2004 election. The state has committed $90 million to the system, which critics say is vulnerable to tampering. Last month, Ehrlich -- who championed the Diebold machines in 2003 -- express[ed] concern about reliability questions raised in California and Florida about those machines. A review of California's voting systems found more than a dozen vulnerabilities that security analysts said could be fixed. More than two dozen states now have some requirement for vote verification.

Note: These vulnerabilities were discovered after the machines were used widely in previous elections. Before those elections, voting machine manufacturers and elections officials insisted there were no such vulnerabilities. For lots more cover-ups around elections, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Profile of Wyoming's Voters
2004-11-00, Wyoming Secretary of State Website
http://soswy.state.wy.us/election/profile.htm

According to the official website of the Secretary of State, the state of Wyoming produced a strange miracle by turning out 106% of registered voters for the 2004 elections! The percentage of registered voters who turn out to vote has been rising rapidly over the last 10 years. Could this have anything to do with the increase in electronic voting machines and the accompanying increased ease of elections fraud?

Recount Likely in Harris' House District
2006-11-09, Fox News/Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Nov09/0,4670,FloridaRecount,00.html

The touch-screen voting machines Katherine Harris championed as secretary of state after the 2000 presidential recount may have botched this year's election to replace her in the U.S. House, and it's likely going to mean another Florida recount. More than 18,000 Sarasota County voters who marked other races didn't have a vote register in the House race, a rate much higher than the rest of the district. The county's elections supervisor, Kathy Dent, had requested the team after one of the candidates reported complaints about voting machines malfunctioning. Earlier, Dent defended her staff and the machines, arguing that the thousands of voters must have either overlooked the race...or simply decided not to vote for either candidate in a race marked by mudslinging. But she couldn't explain why the undervote rate in her county was so much higher than in the four other counties in the district. Republican Vern Buchanan declared victory in the race with a 373-vote lead over Democrat Christine Jennings—less than 0.2 percent. Florida law requires a machine recount if the difference between the top candidates is less than half a percent. If the machine tallies find a margin of less than a quarter percent, a manual recount is conducted. To do a manual recount for touch-screens, officials go back over the images of the electronic ballots where the machine didn't register a choice. State rules essentially say that if the machine doesn't show that a voter chose a candidate, the voter is assumed to have meant to skip the race. It would be tough to prove otherwise.

Election problems due to a software glitch
2004-11-05, Sun Journal
http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details....

A North Carolina newspaper reports that "a systems software glitch in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that ... swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast.

Electronic Voting Machines Could Skew Elections
2006-10-22, ABC News
http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/Technology/story?id=2596705

Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she opened her mail [and] discovered three computer discs. The discs contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland's new electronic voting machines. An independent report commissioned by the state of Maryland...shows myriad other security flaws. Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines malfunction, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked. Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS — a touch screen version of the Diebold machine — showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election. Cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore [says] Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured. The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting." There is also the matter of computer glitches. In primary elections...machines malfunctioned in Texas, where 100,000 votes were added. In Maryland, screens froze and memory cards went missing. Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican running for reelection, advised residents to vote by absentee ballot because he had no confidence in the machines. Electronic voting machines were supposed to be the solution to the paper ballot problems from the 2000 presidential election. But to many critics, America's voting system has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Senators Propose Funds for Paper Ballots to Back Up Electronic Ones
2006-09-26, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/washington/26cnd-ballots.html?ex=1316923200...

Three Senate Democrats proposed emergency legislation today to reimburse states for printing paper ballots that can be ready at polling places in case of problems with electronic voting machines on Nov. 7. The proposal is a response to grass-roots pressure and growing concern by local and state officials about touch-screen machines. “If someone asks for a paper ballot they ought to be able to have it,” said Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Dozens of states are using optical-scan and touch-screen machines to comply with federal laws intended to phase out lever and punch-card machines after the hanging-chads confusion of the 2000 presidential election. Widespread problems were reported with the new technology and among poll workers using the machines this year in primaries in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio and elsewhere. Local and state officials have expressed concern that the new systems might not be ready to handle increased turnouts. Election experts fear that the lack of a paper trail with most touch-screen machines will leave no way to verify votes in case of fraud or computer failure. Last week, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland, a Republican, joined the skeptics, saying he lacked confidence in his state’s new $106 million electronic system and suggesting that state officials offer all voters paper ballots as an alternative.

Note: To sign an online petition supporting the move for paper ballots in case of problems with electronic ones, click here. For another great effort to clean up our elections, click here. And for lots more reliable, verifiable information on elections cover-ups: http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Election Exit-Polls to Be 'Quarantined' to Prevent Early Result Calls
2006-11-04, Fox News/New York Post
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,227559,00.html

Exit-poll data will be under lock and key Election Day to help networks avoid the Bush-Gore debacle of 2000 - and prevent bloggers from trumpeting results before the polls close. The crucial info - which could provide an early hint if a Democratic wave is in fact under way - will be squirreled away in a windowless New York office room dubbed the "Quarantine Room," the Washington Post first reported. A media consortium established to track polling results has set up ironclad rules to prevent leaks to news-hungry Web sites like the Drudge Report. Only two staffers from each of the TV networks and The Associated Press will be authorized to tear through the exit-poll data at the vote vault. Those staffers will have to surrender their cellphones, laptop computers and BlackBerrys - it's the price of admission. And they won't be able communicate with their offices until 5 p.m.

Note: Could this be a means of preventing "problems" with large discrepancies between exit polls and the elections results? How do we know that the two staffers selected from each network won't manipulate the results? Several TV networks had difficulties in the 2004 election describing sudden changes in the results of the exit polls during the elections. For lots more, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionscoverups

Glitches cited in early voting
2006-10-28, Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/politics/elections/15869924.htm

After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors -- and a caution against the careless casting of ballots. Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen -- the final voting step. In Broward County, for example, they don't know how widespread the machine problems are because there's no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems. Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist. A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, Reed said. Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly.

Ohio Voting Problems Deemed Severe
2006-08-15, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/15/AR20060815012...

Problems with elections in Ohio's most populous county are so severe that it's unlikely they can be completely fixed by November, or even by the 2008 presidential election, a report commissioned by Cuyahoga County and released Tuesday says. A nonprofit group hired to review the county's first election with new electronic voting machines found several problems with the May 2 primary. "The election system in its entirety exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences, especially in the event of a close election," wrote Steven Hertzberg, director of the study by the San Francisco-based Election Science Institute. The report, part of a $341,000 review ordered by county commissioners, suggests that the county revamp poll worker training, develop a plan to ensure all electronic votes are counted in the case of a manual count and consider adding machines to avoid long lines that might scare voters away. Mark Radke, director of marketing for Diebold subsidiary Diebold Election Systems...blamed inadequately trained poll workers, saying the totals didn't always add up because some changed memory cards without also changing the paper receipt rolls.

Note: Interesting that the electronic voting machine makers are blaming the poll workers for vote totals that didn't add up.. Interesting also to note that no mention is made of the serious problems in this county during the 2004 presidential election. For more reliable information: http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Broward machines count backward
2004-11-05, Palm Beach Post
http://www.WantToKnow.info/041105palmbeachpost

Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."

U.S. Investigates Voting Machines' Venezuela Ties
2006-10-29, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/washington/29ballot.html?ex=1319774400&en=e...

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez. The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation...and its subsidiary, Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif.. Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chávez as president in August 2004. With a windfall of some $120 million from its first three contracts with Venezuela, Smartmatic then bought the much larger and more established Sequoia Voting Systems, which now has voting equipment installed in 17 states and the District of Columbia. The concern over Smartmatic’s purchase of Sequoia comes amid rising unease about the security of touch-screen voting machines and other electronic elections systems. The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chávez government have been well known to United States foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. Chávez...won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent. But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities. Smartmatic’s new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help with the vote.

Report Warns of Potential Voting Problems in 10 States
2006-10-25, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR20061024011...

Two weeks before the midterm elections, at least 10 states...remain ripe for voting problems, according to a study released yesterday by a nonpartisan clearinghouse that tracks electoral reforms across the United States. The report by Electionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on Election Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules -- and close races. The report cautions that the Nov. 7 elections, which will determine which political party controls the House and Senate, promise "to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections -- a divided body politic...and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls nationwide." The report of the clearinghouse, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is the latest of several warnings in recent weeks and months by organizations and scholars who say that electoral problems persist in spite of six years of efforts by the federal government and states to correct voting flaws. The decisions by many states to convert to electronic voting machines have yielded new concerns about whether they are secure and accurate, about paper records as backup proof and...about whether the electronic or paper record should be considered the official tally if a candidate demands a recount.

AP, networks sue over Fla., Nev. exit poll laws
2006-10-11, MSNBC News/Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15226960

A Florida law that bars exit polling near voting places violates the press' rights under the First Amendment, a lawsuit filed by The Associated Press and five television networks alleges. The lawsuits...contend that state laws that prohibit asking a voter a "fact" or "opinion" within 100 feet of a polling place is unconstitutional. The AP and the five television networks - ABC, CNN, CBS, Fox News and NBC - formed a consortium to collect exit-polling data in Florida and other states. The news organizations had also challenged a 2004 directive by Ohio's elections chief against exit polling within 100 feet of a voting place. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson ruled the verbal order by Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell before the 2004 presidential election violated the press' rights under the First Amendment. A federal judge ruled in 1988 that a Florida law prohibiting exit polling within 150 feet of polling places was unconstitutional.

Note: A university study of exit polls in the 2004 election showed strong evidence of elections manipulations. Could this be why certain powerful individuals want to limit exit polls?

Americans Skeptical About Gas Price Drop
2006-09-25, CBS News/Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/25/ap/business/mainD8KC5MEO0.shtml

Almost half of all Americans believe the November elections have more influence than market forces. For them, the plunge at the pump is about politics, not economics. According to a new Gallup poll, 42 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections." Fifty-three percent of those surveyed did not believe in this conspiracy theory, while 5 percent said they had no opinion. The excitement—and suspicion—among U.S. motorists follows a post-summer decline in gasoline prices that even veteran analysts and gas station owners concede has been steeper than usual. The retail price of gasoline has plunged by 50 cents, or 17 percent, over the past month to average $2.38 a gallon nationwide, according to Energy Department statistics. That is 42.5 cents lower than a year ago, when the energy industry was still reeling from the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which damaged petroleum platforms, pipelines and refineries across the Gulf Coast. Fimat USA oil analyst Antoine Halff said there is no doubt that "the downturn in prices is welcome news from an electoral standpoint for the ruling party." But he scoffed at the notion that the U.S. president had the power to muscle around a global market.

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