Free Republic

Yesterday was the first election for which I was old enought to cast a ballot. I was the fifth voter of the morning at my rural polling place and proudly voted for Lynn Swann for the GOP nomination for Governor. Thanks to the unfunded mandate of the Help America Vote Act everyone had to get used to the touch screen Sequoia machines. I noticed that these machines have been programmed to make "undervoting" extremely cumbersome. You have to hit "confirm" two time, rather than the normal one time, if you have deliberately decided not to dilute your vote by spreading...

ALBANY, March 1 — The Justice Department sued New York State on Wednesday for failing to overhaul its election system and replace its aging voting machines. It is the first lawsuit the federal government has filed to force a state to comply with the voting guidelines enacted by Congress after the 2000 election debacle. The new federal guidelines were designed to prevent the kind of electoral chaos that marred the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and to make casting ballots easier for disabled voters. But New York State's efforts to modernize its election system have fallen far behind the rest...

In Controlled Test, Results Are Manipulated in Florida System As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself. Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems,...

ALBANY, Jan. 11 - The federal Justice Department has threatened to sue New York State over its failure to modernize its voting system, saying New York "is further behind" every other state in complying with new guidelines stemming from the 2000 presidential election dispute. The state has yet to decide what kind of new voting machines it will certify, leaving many local elections boards in uncertainty as they try to modernize their voting systems in time for next fall's primary elections. And the state missed the Jan. 1 deadline for creating a statewide database of registered voters, as required by...

Decision means precincts will have to spend millions over the next 18 months AUSTIN - All Texas counties must do away with punch-card voting systems or paper ballots in the next 18 months. Starting Jan. 1, 2006, federal law requires every voting precinct in Texas to have a Direct Recording Electronic-voting machine, which electronically records votes, eliminating the use of paper and punch cards. Upgrading voting equipment will cost Texas counties millions of dollars as the federal government is providing grant funds that just cover about a third of the upgrade cost. Some county officials this week protested having to...