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ASSOCIATED PRESS Improvements to voting machines and election administration saved 1 million votes that otherwise likely would have gone uncounted in the 2004 elections, with states and counties that made the most comprehensive upgrades recovering the most votes, an academic analysis says. The report, released yesterday by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, looked at a key measure of election integrity — residual votes, or ballots cast during an election on which voters failed to mark a choice or machines did not record it. Click to learn more... It was one of the fundamental problems of the 2000 voting stalemate and...

Franklin County pinpoints cause of inflated Bush numbers COLUMBUS, Ohio The Illinois company that manufactured election machines for Franklin County in Ohio has identified the error that made a laptop computer give thousands of extra votes to President Bush. The mistake was caught several days after the election. It had Bush receiving four-thousand-258 votes in a precinct in the Columbus suburb of Gahanna where only 638 voters cast ballots. The corrected official count showed 365 votes for Bush. The director of the Franklin County elections board says a review showed no fraud or tampering. Gurnee-based voting machine manufacturer -- Danaher...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - An electronic voting system with a paper trail that was used in Nevada elections last year became the first approved for use in California on Friday. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley certified the Sequoia Voting Systems machine for use after Jan. 1, 2006. The machine prints a paper record of a voter's choices, which the voter can inspect through a screen for accuracy. If the paper record is correct and approved by the voter, it winds into the machine. If incorrect, the vote can be voided. San Bernardino County tested the Oakland-based company's machine in one precinct...

18 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA Did you know....? 1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. link 1 link 2 link 32. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. link 1 link 23. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. link 1 link 24. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president...

A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that irregularities associated with electronic voting in this month's election may have awarded as much as 260,000 votes to President Bush in three Florida counties. The study, led by sociology Professor Michael Hout, found that e-voting increased Bush's advantage over Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties to a clearer margin of victory over the edge he held in the 2000 election against Vice President Al Gore. Depending on the method used in counting the votes, the researchers found that e-voting in the...

"On November 18, several researchers from UC Berkley released a working paper [local]. The paper alleges to present statistical evidence that, in the 2004 Presidential elections, the use of electronic voting machines in Florida gave to Bush votes that he would not have otherwise received. The finding was covered in a Wired News article. Once I correct for this shift, the "electronic voting machine effect" disappears.In response to this, I wrote a paper [html, pdf] that shows that the model used by the Berkley team is flawed. Specifically, the model fails to account for demographic shifts between 2000 and 2004....

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, said today that they have uncovered statistical irregularities associated with electronic voting machines in three Florida counties that may have given President George W. Bush 130,000 or more excess votes. The researchers are now calling on state and federal authorities to look into the problems. The study, "The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections," was conducted by doctoral students and faculty from the university's sociology department and led by sociology professor Michael Hout. Hout is an expert on statistical methods at the Berkeley...

Summary: - Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida. - Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population. - In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes. - We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not...

The State of Maryland election system (comprising technical, operational, and procedural components), as configured at the time of this report,contains considerable security risks that can cause moderate to severe disruption in an election. The team also verified that the current version of the GEMS software still contains many of the vulnerabilities widely published on the Internet. It was disappointing to see that no obvious attention was paid to addressing these weaknesses.The quantity and quality of the attacks described above is disturbing, especially given the short time the team had access to the system. Certain shortcuts were taken (e.g., assuming knowledge...

Survey: People want receipt showing how they voted LAS VEGAS SUN November 12, 2004 at 9:43:50 PST An Election Day poll in Las Vegas indicated that 81 percent of voters surveyed want to take home a private "ATM style" receipt to verify for themselves their vote was counted correctly, a consulting group said Wednesday. Lombardo Consulting Group said it surveyed 362 voters in conjunction with political science professor Michael John Burton of Ohio University. Given a choice between leaving a voter-verified paper ballot at the polling place or taking home a receipt, 60 percent of those asked said they preferred...

Numerous problems with electronic voting machines were reported around the country on Election Day and immediately afterward, but most election officials and experts say the great majority of the machines functioned as expected. Critics, however, continue to argue that the election did not prove that all is well. In fact, they say, few of the hardware and software weaknesses that make touchscreen machines unreliable and unprotected from hacking have been corrected. And the lack of a paper confirmation for each vote, they say, remains a major flaw in the machines used in most states. In fact, the lack of paper...

SAN FRANCISCO -- California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced Wednesday a $2.6 million settlement with Diebold Inc., resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company sold the state and several counties shoddy voting equipment. Although critics characterized the settlement as a slap on the wrist, Diebold also agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to partially reimburse Alameda, San Diego and other counties for the cost of paper backup ballots, ink and other supplies in last week's election. California's secretary of state banned the use of one type of Diebold machine in May, after problems with the machines disenfranchised an unknown number...

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride,...

NEW YORK — Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written “I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2… My source said they’ve also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time.” I didn’t get the memo. We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and...

Michael I. Shamos thinks outside the box -- and the polling booth. The Carnegie Mellon University professor wants to make voting so simple that someday you could cast your ballot at an ATM or lottery machine. The technology is extremely reliable, interfaces nicely, is seemingly ubiquitous and it is secure. "I am giving a course in electronic voting," Shamos said. "I'm exploring the feasibility of alternative systems used by ATMs and lotteries." He sees nothing wrong with taking a card to pick your favorite candidates instead of your favorite numbers. And voter intimidation could be eliminated.

Preliminary exit poll results had leaked throughout the day and were posted on a number of Web sites, including the widely viewed Drudge Report site, which added to the confusion and fanned the media frenzy. To compound the problem further, a server at Edison/Mitofsky malfunctioned shortly before 11 p.m. The glitch prevented access to any exit poll results until technicians got a backup system operational at 1:33 a.m. yesterday. The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left...

Just came from a non-political website that took a turn toward liberal whining about the election. Apparently, Ralph Nader is or is rumored to be requesting a recount in New Hampshire because of inaccuracies of electronic voting machines like Diebold. Can anyone confirm this? Either way, it had these Democrats up in arms and speculating about similar challenges in Ohio and Florida (through other avenues as Nader could not obviously make such a request in Ohio). So, now it's electronic voting machines that favor Bush instead of punch cards ballots that disenfranchise Democratic voters. Does it ever end?

Anyone following the sore losers know that they are claiming fraud by the GOP wherever Electronic Voting Systems (EVS) were employed. In fact, a vast right wing conspiracy is blamed. Maybe they are on to something with their data that shows "strange results" where EVS were employed, but not as they imagine. Perhaps many of the precincts using EVS are accurate for the first time. Its possible that the results can't be tampered with as before. If so, the results of this election clearly demonstrates who benefits when an accurate vote is obtained.

Posted on Fri, Nov. 05, 2004 Computer error at voting machine gives Bush 3,893 extra votes Associated Press COLUMBUS, Ohio - A computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for other candidates or did not vote for...

Yesterday my day started at 0600 hours. In my role as 'inspector' of a local polling place, I had five clerks to supervise in setting up the five electronic touch screen units we were going to use, and prepare for a 0700 hours opening of the poll to voters. Each of the clerks had received a three hour training course from staff of Registrar of Voters office, to acquaint them with their function election day. I formally opened the polling place at 0700 hours. All went well, as voters were processed - each received a plastic card which would activate...