The Voting News Daily: Tennessee seek machines in Dec or Jan, 2452 straight ticket votes missed in Lackawanna, Moritz on uncounted ballots
Tennessee Judge Says No to Tennessee Voter Confidence Act Injunction, Yes to Crucial Plaintiff Claim, the Secretary of State will issue requests for proposals for NEW voting equip sometime in December or January…A programming error caused 2,452 straight-party votes to go uncounted in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania…Cuyahoga County sheds its reputation for troubled elections with smooth vote count Tuesday night…
…Moritz law talks about 3 types of uncounted ballots…6.8 percent of Virginians have permanently lost their right to vote (as long as they live in Virginia)….
Today we try to catch up on election day glitch-snag-snafu-hiccup reports in Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah and Virginia…….If you think we missed something, please send us a link to the story at joyce (at)ncvoter.net and we will post it…if you think you’ve missed an issue of Voting News check online at our home page
CO: Provisional ballots could change IRV outcome in Aspen
Clerk and recorder said it’s too early to speculate
November 6, 2009 ASPEN — There are between 25 and 40 provisional ballots in Pitkin County’s mail-in election that have yet to be counted, and depending on how many of them are from Aspen residents, they could change the outcome of the Instant Runoff Voting result.
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20091106/NEWS/911069987/1077&ParentProfile=1058
MD: Maryland Voters Test New Cryptographic Voting System
Wired News… The Scantegrity code is written in Java and uses a Fujitsu high-speed scanner for reading ballots. Chaum owns the IP for the system and has promised that the first jurisdiction — county, city, state or country — that wants to implement the system can have it fully licensed in perpetuity for free.
“I’m not doing this to make money,” he told Threat Level. “I’m doing it because I want to make it happen.”
Chaum says he hasn’t decided on a cost yet for jurisdictions who will license it after the initial adopter but says he can easily sell it for half the cost of current optical-scan voting systems, which run about $6,000 apiece.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/scantegrity
MI: Election Night in Washtenaw County * After polls close, work continues for county clerk’s staff (ballot misfeeds, blank memory cards)
November 4, 2009…some ballots aren’t feeding into voting machines property, or aren’t being read. In Ann Arbor, for example, in several precincts there’s a one-ballot discrepancy between the machine count and the actual number of ballots. That count has to be resolved before delivering results to the county.
Brooks describes how the printer misaligned the perforation between the main ballots and the ballot stubs, which are torn off before the ballots are fed into the voting machine. “It looks like a six-year-old cut it with scissors,” he quips.
…
Throughout the evening, Yankee processes memory cards, uploading the information on them into the software program GEMS (Global Election Management System). A couple of times, Yankee encounters memory cards that have been wiped clean. This requires that he get the poll book and enter the results manually.
http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/11/04/election-night-in-washtenaw-county/
NJ: Voting machines absolved of blame *
November 06, 2009…The cartridge readers did produce counts of zero votes in districts spread through 10 municipalities, but they only did in response to an as-yet unknown problem in their connection to a county computer server, said Robert Giles, director of the state Division of Elections.