Free Republic

Groups Fear Citizens Abroad Will Be Compromised In a highly unusual pairing, the Republican and Democratic party organizations for citizens living abroad have banded together against the Pentagon's Internet voting program for the presidential election. Concerns about the security of the online ballots could cast the entire election under a cloud of suspicion, they said in a joint letter urging a halt in the program. The letter released yesterday is being sent to several congressional committees. "We do not want to undermine confidence in our system of voting by discovering some real or imagined fraud in the November balloting," wrote...

N.H. Among Few Using Paper in Vote Records By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer Wed Jan 28, 6:19 PM ET The technology troubles that could bedevil elections this year in California, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere were absent in New Hampshire this week. That's because it is among the few states that require a paper record for every ballot cast.   New Hampshire's relatively low-tech system — adopted after disasters with both antiquated punch cards and touch-screen computers — could become a nationwide model as scrutiny over electronic voting grows. "Maybe people elsewhere trust machines more than they trust humans,...

UC Expert Urges Defeat Of Feds’ E-voting System By JAKOB SCHILLER (01-27-04) Washington should abandon a new Internet-based system designed to facilitate voting for American citizens overseas, declared a panel of top computer experts—including UC Berkeley professor David Wagner—in a recently issued report. Wagner—along with Aviel Rubin, an associate professor of computer science from John Hopkins University, David Jefferson, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Barbara Simons, a Bay Area technology consultant—say the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) has several important security risks and should not be used to tally votes during trial runs that are...

WEST PALM BEACH -- Florida's three most populous counties took a rare, unified stance Monday, calling for the state legislature to require a ballot-by-ballot paper record of votes cast on electronic voting machines. Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade county commissioners -- dissatisfied after spending millions on touch-screen voting machines since the tumultuous 2000 presidential election -- agreed paper printouts are the only way to instill public confidence in touch-screen ballots. The tri-county coalition voted unanimously to send state legislators a letter endorsing a paper trail. "I hope this gets the legislative body to understand what we're concerned about," said Palm...

Internet voting has been viewed as a possible cure for some of the ills that afflict the mechanics of American democracy. Recently, the technology has seemed to move ahead of any serious consideration of whether it is actually a good idea to allow home computer owners to choose a president in the same way they order bath towels online or send e-mail to their relatives. But now there are grave questions about whether even the technology makes sense. Four computer scientists brought in by the Pentagon to analyze a plan for Internet voting by the military issued a blistering report...

<p>January 22, 2004 -- MANCHESTER, N.H. - Howard Dean unleashed a new line of attack yesterday by hinting at Republican corporate conspiracies to steal elections. Discarding his old stump speech, slipping-in-the-polls Dean took an Oliver Stone-ish shot at the GOP hierarchy, telling New Hampshire voters about his fear that new high-tech voting machines will be programmed to steal ballots from Democrats.</p>

Report Finds Risks in Internet Voting by Americans Overseas A $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to a report by computer security experts asked to review the new program. The system, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or Serve, was developed with financing from the Defense Department and will first be used in the primaries this year. Advertisement The review, requested by the government, noted that experts had voiced increasingly strong warnings about the reliability of electronic voting systems. It said the...

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program. The system, Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, was developed with financing from the Department of Defense and will first be used in this year's primaries and general election. Advertisement The authors of the new report noted that computer security experts had already voiced increasingly strong warnings about the reliability of electronic voting systems, but they...

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- A congressman pushing to require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail is taking his case to the courts. U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, filed a lawsuit Friday in Palm Beach County against Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood and Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, claiming the officials are violating their duties to ensure votes are counted accurately by not using machines with paper printouts. Wexler, who said he wrote Hood and LePore over the issue several months before he filed the suit, wants printed duplicates of all ballots...

The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines. This is no way to run a democracy. Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the...

Bogdanoff certified as 12-vote winner A heated recount for a state House seat finally ended Monday night, but the six-day wait for a winner has reignited demands for assurances that electronic voting machines are accurate. Ellyn Bogdanoff's 12-vote victory margin over Lauderdale-by-the-Sea Mayor Oliver Parker ultimately held up in the House District 91 race, but controversy swirled after 137 voters in parts of Boca Raton and coastal Broward County went to the polls but didn't cast a vote for any candidate. State Rep. Joe Negron doesn't think that many people would go to the polls without voting. The result raises...

Folks, Some of you know I've been tracking the Diebold vote fraud scandal in some detail. If not, check out my letters to the California Secretary of State at: http://www.equalccw.com/voteprar.html Extreme short form: Diebold sells the hardware and software to vote with, to county governments. The security of same is so bad, it seems highly likely this turkey was rigged for vote fraud. Internal memos have been leaked showing the %$#^@s laughing about it amongst themselves . It's *bad*, OK? Well on Thursday at 10:00am, the "voting certification panel" will be meeting to, supposedly, make a decision on whether or...

Solano County voters may be using a pencil or pen to fill in circles for the March primary instead of new touch-screen technology, if a state voting systems panel decides this week to block use of the machines. Today, the Solano County Board of Supervisors is set to discuss the pending certification of the touch-screen voting machines. Registrar of Voters Laura Winslow says in a report to the supervisors that the new technology "continues to be good system for Solano County." Some board members and community members - including a nonprofit activist group, Community Labor Alliance - are skeptical about...

Hello. I’m the webmaster of www.verifiedvoting.org. I’m a Democrat, and you folks presumably will want to flame me on that point alone. But if you would bear with me, perhaps we could avoid that. I need to talk about an issue that affects all of us, and I am not here to pick a fight. I need your help. VerifiedVoting.org is NOT about conspiracy theory. We are NOT about screaming about “Wally O’Dell delivering the votes to GWB”, but I do have to admit that his remarks were about as ill-conceived as they might have possibly been, and have made...

DETROIT, Jan. 7 — The virtual ballot box has arrived in Michigan. Democrats in this state are the only voters in the country who have the option of voting online in the presidential primaries this year. Since New Year's Day, voters have been allowed to apply for ballots and vote by mail or Internet in advance of the Feb. 7 caucuses. Or, on Feb. 7, they can go to one of 576 caucus sites and vote the old-fashioned way. By Thursday night, 11,000 people had applied for ballots, three-fourths of them over the Internet, according to the Michigan Democratic Party....

<p>Much has been written over the past month about the phenomenon of an increasing number of prominent Democrats marching in lockstep into the fever swamps of paranoia.</p> <p>Most memorably, Howard Dean has referenced an "interesting" theory that the president of the United States was warned in advance by the Saudis about the Sept. 11 attacks.</p>

Ballots cast by 134 voters in a special election Tuesday weren't counted, apparently because people failed to use touch-screen machines properly. It's the electronic equivalent of a voter failing to punch a stylus all the way through on a paper ballot, leaving a hanging chad. Only with electronic voting, there's no way to review the ballot and determine how a person wanted to vote. The vote is not counted, and in this case, the vote of 134 people who left polling places without hitting the ''vote'' button on the machines was not counted. The Broward Supervisor of Elections office wasn't...

Three years after helping render punch-card voting systems obsolete, Broward County voters have proven that no election system is foolproof. In Tuesday's special election to fill state House seat 91, 134 Broward voters managed to use the 2-year-old touch-screen equipment without casting votes for any candidate. How so many happened to cast nonvotes remains a riddle. Unlike with punch cards or paper ballots, there's no paper record with electronic voting that might offer a clue to the voter's intent.

E-Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? Controversy surrounds new e-voting systems set for wide use in 2004 elections. Janet Rae-Dupree From the February 2004 issue of PC World magazine Posted Monday, January 05, 2004 This election year, rather than punching holes or connecting dots on paper ballots, many of us will cast our votes on electronic touch screens. Electronic voting systems are already in place in eight states and were used in last November's elections. Many more states will use them in this year's primaries and in the presidential election. Good news, right? After all, computers have to be more accurate...

Boca raton · Critics warned Monday that computer error or outright fraud easily could alter the outcome of elections conducted on Palm Beach County's electronic voting machines. For example, he said, it would be easy for a beginning computer science student to rig the devices so that 57 percent of all votes next fall go to President Bush -- regardless of who the voters actually select.