Verified Voting Blog: Improving the 2010 EAC Election Day Survey

The Election Day Survey plays an ongoing, important, and unique role in collecting and publishing data on election administration in the United States. Balancing the right of the public to know how our elections function with the burden of reporting useful data by those who administer our elections is clearly a complex task but one we feel is extremely worthwhile. There are several categories of data we believe are very useful to collect, and our recommendations address those categories specifically.

Voting System Reports

Beginning in 2004, Verified Voting collaborated with various partners to collect voters’, observers’ and others’ reports about incidents or malfunctions including those involving voting systems, the mechanism by which voters cast their votes. These reports came to the “Election Incident Reporting System” (EIRS) primarily via calls to a hotline operated by the Election Protection Coalition, part of an effort to protect the rights of voters to cast a ballot and have confidence that their ballot was counted. We made available a free public dataset of those reports. The project was cited in a GAO report  about electronic voting security and reliability in 2005.

The Voting News Daily: US Troops as Internet Voting guinea pigs, Texas let voters eat cake, CO, NJ, NY, PA, TX, UT, VA and WA glitch snag reports

We’re still seeing articles on Nov 3 voting problems… Ellen Theisen has updated Voters Unite’s database on Voting Problems By State to the November elections. This database has been key evidence used to help get paper ballot laws passed in several states and was key to passing a law in my home state of North Carolina. So thank you Ellen!…

INTERNET VOTING WHACK-A-MOLE: Three states plan to use our troops as internet voting guinea pigs: We reported last week that Alabama Rep. Jimmy Martin, D-Clanton is re-introducing an internet/military voting bill. This week, we see that Colorado has passed legislation to allow internet voting pilots for military, and the pilots will be partially funded by “private” parties. Will these private parties be identified? Could any of these private parties have a conflict of interest?…Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray, D-Plymouth hopes to have their troops voting over the internet this December, 2008. Considering that Cyber Warfare is the weapon of choice now for China and North Korea, is this a good idea?…

Let them eat cake: In Texas an editorial board considers running out of ballots to be a mere ‘hiccup’. If you are a voter being disenfranchised, it is hardly a hiccup, now is it? This wouldn’t happen if Texas joined other states in requiring that enough ballots be printed for all voters. No voter should go to the polls and be told “I’m sorry, we don’t have any ballots right now” and no voter should have to vote on a makeshift ballot. In Harris County Texas, it took a court order to make the voter registration office follow the law after impeding the registration of 66,000 people…Minneapolis Minnesota held its first instant runoff voting election and had the lowest voter turnout for mayor since 1910…In Lackawanna County PA, faulty computer coding cause of 2,452 straight ticket votes to go uncounted…860 ballots found in vandalized King Co. drop box…Plaintiffs Comment on Court Order regarding TN Voter Confidence Act…Miss an email or don’t want to wait? See our home page…

All of that and more in today’s Voting News below…

AL: Commission OKs polling place changes (from schools to mostly churches)
November 5, 2009. Where voters go to cast their ballots in 2010 will undergo a major change as a result of action taken by the Morgan County Commission at a regular meeting Oct. 27.

The commission acted on a recommendation from Probate Judge Greg Cain to remove nine Decatur elementary schools from the county’s polling places list and replace them with alternate locations. The move is subject to the approval of the U.S. Department of Justice and would become effective with the Primary Election next June.

In a discussion prior to the vote, District 2 Commissioner Ken Livingston said several of the new polling places are at churches and questioned if a violation of the separation of church and state could be involved.
http://www.hartselleenquirer.com/articles/2009/11/05/news/news4.txt

AL: State may be on fast track to pass military voting bill (military internet voting) The Alabama military voting bill, House Bill 30, has
been pre-filed by Rep.