The Voting News Daily: Tennessee judge denies injunction, Election pilots crash, Sarasota ballot disinfo

Many states run elections as if they are beta tests. An prime example are the Vote Centers in Galveston County Texas. Officials ran into surprises when all vote centers tried to start up at beginning of day, causing the state’s voter registration database to crash. And since these vote centers are dependant on the online database, voting was held up 30 and 40 minutes.Another surprise – firewalls blocking access to the county central voting system. So much for the “convenience” of Vote Centers, never mind the other problems with them but the media says it was all good….

…Brad Friedman reports: Sarasota Sample Ballots Urged Voters to Use Blue Ink, Though New Op-Scan Systems Can’t Read It. Another screw-up for notorious Election Director Kathy Dent…
…Update on Tennessee Paper Ballot Law! Judge Denies Injuction In Paper Ballot Case
Secretary Of State Should Begin To Implement Voter Confidence Act, Recommends Judge…

…A few South Carolina races trigger an automatic recount but SC uses paperless voting so if there’s a programming flaw nothing will change….Texas finally pulls IBM off voter reg database project, 13 day system outage in Aug final straw…

What Sequoia’s Source Code Publication Means…Joe Hall has more on EAC testing and Top To Bottom Review…

….There’s too many glitches, snags, snafus and meltdowns for me to do summarize, so please read about those and more in the news below…

CA: Hawthorne used car dealer turns polling place workers, voters away *
11/03/2009 …Saunders said Finance Auto Sales workers also called police to try to get the volunteers to leave after they set up voting booths on the sidewalk in front of the dealership at 11604 Prairie Ave.
Police allowed the workers to stay on the sidewalk for several hours until a nearby business agreed to let them set up inside. Hi Tech Auto Collision and Glass Centers allowed voters to use their office until polls closed.
http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/ci_13707170

CT: A Day As Absentee Ballot Moderator
November 4, 2009 This election day was spent as moderator for central counting of absentee ballots, once again, in Vernon, CT.
http://www.ctvoterscount.org/?p=2542

CT: Reporter’s notebook: Brooklyn voters complain about ballot layout*
…St. Jean said because there were three candidates on the ballot for first selectman, many residents voted for two candidates rather than just one.

When that happens, the voting machine returns the ballot and an election moderator gives the voter a new ballot to fill out, she said.
http://www.norwichbulletin.com/news/x1156075453/Reporters-notebook-Brooklyn-voters-complain-about-ballot-layout

FL: Sarasota Sample Ballots Urged Voters to Use Blue Ink, Though New Op-Scan Systems Can’t Read It *
Another screw-up for notorious Election Director Kathy Dent…
On October 17th, we reported that World’s Worst Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent of Sarasota, FL had discovered in pre-election tests that her new Diebold/Premier optical-scan voting systems failed to properly read paper ballots marked with blue ink.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7502

IN: For voters, county maps were a source of confusion *
…St. Joseph County provided a map to help voters find their special election polling place. The information was on WSBT.com

The Voting News Daily: Another Sarasota Fl election screw up – Sample ballot tells voters to use ink scanners cannot read

Sarasota Election Supervisor Kathy Dent was aware that the Diebold OSX optical scanners did not consistently read blue ink. She knew this before the Venice Florida election that was held on Nov 3.

But what does the sample ballot for Venice Voters say? It says
“Use only the marker provided or a blue or black pen.”

See the sample ballot below

City of Venice General Election

THE DIEBOLD OSX DOES NOT READ BLUE INK OR #2 PENCIL.

We don’t have time right now to outline Sarasota Florida’s inglorious failures, just google Sarasota FL 13 Jennings Buchanon or “smoothing filter” + Sarasota and learn how Kathy Dent ignored the warnings by the vendor back in 2006. She wasn’t worried then, she isn’t worried now.

Voting News by Joyce McCloy.
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Verified Voting Blog: Burstein and Hall’s Response to the EAC

Verified Voting Foundation Board of Advisors member Joseph Lorenzo Hall and Aaron Burstein submitted the following response to the EAC's letter from October 21 2009.

Thank you for your reply of October 21, 2009, to our letter of October 13, 2009. We appreciate your pointing out that relevant documents are available on the EAC’s website. Of course, it was the EAC’s commendable policy of making these documents publicly available that allowed us to initiate this dialogue. As you know, neither test plans nor test reports were available under the NASED qualification testing program; this change is important for establishing a more trustworthy voting system testing and certification program under the EAC. After carefully reviewing your letter, however, we continue to question whether iBeta’s test plan for the Premier system fully incorporates some of the lessons of the California Top-to-Bottom Review (TTBR) into EAC testing and certification. Even for the examples the EAC points to in its reply, the test plan does not state in sufficient detail what iBeta proposed to do to test the system. For example, an element of the security test—“port access is controlled” (test plan p. 73)—states a desired result or conclusion but does not describe how iBeta would arrive at that conclusion nor under what conditions would this element fail.