Free Republic

Join us, as our young campaign volunteer learns about touchscreen voting… “One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Nine! Ten! YAY!” The little girl finished her turn at hopscotch and turned to face her cousin. “Now it’s YOUR turn, Cousin Pavel!” Pavel chuckled and moved over to the bigger hopscotch image on the pavement, on the other side of the swingset. “Okay, Kira, but once you’re in college, you have to use the BIG hopscotch game, like me. Okay?” His little cousin nodded, and he started hopping. Pavel may have been a bit old for hopscotch – he WAS...

"...Gov. Charlie Crist is preparing to recommend that the controversial touch-screen voting machines used in Broward, Palm Beach and 13 other Florida counties be scrapped and replaced with optical scanners that would count paper ballots..."

Two California secretaries of state have refused to certify a touch-screen voting machine, and for good reason. BRUCE MCPHERSON, California's secretary of state, has just performed an invaluable service for the voters. Only a few months into the job, he had been under intense pressure to certify the latest electronic touch-screen voting machine manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, which is supposed to help California counties meet a federally mandated January deadline for the overhaul of their election equipment. But instead of rolling over, his office conducted exhaustive tests on the Diebold TSx, discovered that it had a 10% error rate...

The Pennsylvania Department of State said Thursday that Beaver County's $1.2 million electronic touch-screen voting system is unreliable and can no longer be used, even in the primary election that is only five weeks away. "Needless to say, we're all shocked by this finding, and we need to work our way through," Commissioners Chairman Dan Donatella said. County elections chief Dorene Mandity declined to comment, saying she had not yet read the state's report. In decertifying the UniLect Patriot system, Secretary of State Pedro Cortes cited concerns he had after a re-examination of it on Feb. 15 by Carnegie Mellon...

New suit expands pre-election battles The lawsuit is at least the fourth pending against Secretary of State Glenda Hood before the Nov. 2 elecions TALLAHASSEE - As Florida inches closer to the presidential election, lawsuits are piling up against Secretary of State Glenda Hood. On Thursday, the Florida Democratic Party filed the latest in a series of lawsuits that will be heard in state and federal courtrooms over the next few days. The increasing number of suits is reminiscent of the 2000 election, when dozens of lawsuits were filed over a recount that saw President Bush win by 537 votes....

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A state rule barring the 15 Florida counties with touchscreen voting from conducting manual recounts is at odds with state law, which requires hand recounts in some close elections, a judge ruled Friday. A coalition including a labor union, government watchdogs and other interest groups sued the state, arguing the law requires provisions for hand recounts in every county, no matter what voting technology is used. Administrative Law Judge Susan Kirkland agreed, writing that state law clearly contemplates "that manual recounts will be done on each certified voting system, including the touchscreen voting systems." With a primary...

As we near the Feb. 10 Democratic presidential primary in Virginia, it seems an appropriate time for me to update voters in Fairfax County on my experiences investigating the problems with the new voting machines that were used for the first time in the November 2003 general election. As many of you may recall, there were numerous complaints about these machines. Reported complaints included removal of ballots and/or voting machines from polling places, machine malfunctions, touch-screen irregularities (e.g., highlighted names did not correspond with buttons pushed), precincts falling short on votes, complaints about privacy while voting, no paper ballot trails...

Information about the PARC Forum and directions to PARC are available at: http://www.parc.xerox.com/events/forum/ The Battle for Accountability in Election Systems David L. Dill Stanford University Computer Science Department Touch-screen voting machines store records of cast votes in internal memory, where the voter cannot check them. Because of our system of secret ballots, once the voter leaves the polls there is no way anyone can determine whether the vote captured was what the voter intended. Why should voters trust these machines? Last December, I drafted a "Resolution on Electronic Voting" stating that every voting system should have a "voter verifiable audit...

*NOTE* For those of you who do not know Mr. Niman, he is the alternative journalist who “predicted” the “assignation” of Paul Wellstone after the “fact”. In this piece, Mr. Niman establishes his next Republican-driven conspiracy theory. Here, Mr. Niman sets the groundwork to challenge all future elections won by Republicans as being rooted in Republican voter fraud. This is his preemptive strike; his attempt to taint every future Republican victory with alleged conspiracies. Mr. Niman is doing this, of course, because he knows that with voting reforms will come less opportunities for DemonRats to commit voter fraud; thereby ushering...

Black Box Voting Blues Electronic ballot technology makes things easy. But some computer-security experts warn of the possibility of stolen elections By Steven Levy NEWSWEEK Nov. 3 issue — After the traumas of butterfly ballots and hanging chad, election officials are embracing a brave new ballot: sleek, touch-screen terminals known as direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE). States are starting to replace their Rube Goldbergesque technology with digital devices like the Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal. Georgia uses Diebolds exclusively, and other states have spent millions on such machines, funded in part by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. Many...