The Voting News Daily: FCC considers Internet Voting, WV oks internet voting for military, NY Voting Machines had bug not virus

The biggest threat to democracy quietly sneaks forward: The FCC seeks public comment on internet elections by Dec. 10 of this year… Clearly the e-voting movement is not keeping up. Problems with voting machines pale compared to the risks of internet voting. Voting online is not secure and is not secret according to many tech experts…Meanwhile, West Virginia just passed a law allowing online voting for military, it goes to the governor to be signed…

“Voting is not a commodity or industry, it’s a democratic right…Anti-trust officials must stop this monopolization of America’s most basic democratic process. More fundamentally, though, we must restore full public ownership and management of our voting systems.”~Jim Hightower…This should be true everywhere: “Registration of voters should never be seen as a political act.” – European Commission Head of Delegation to Zambia…
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There is good news and bad news about New York’s voting systems. The problems with some New York voting machines were not due to a virus, as reported yesterday by the Gouverneur Times, but were due to a flaw/bug in the source code. The problem was not caused by election workers but by the voting vendor. The good news is that there are paper ballots. But the bad news is that elections are still being used as beta tests for voting vendors. We all know there is no perfect voting system but is it too much to ask that these voting systems work correctly? Bo Lipari has a write up on his blog and we have a press release from the New York State Board of Elections…In Utah New ID Check-In scans your drivers license….

All this and much more in today’s voting news below…

IL: Undervotes and the AccuVote
Champaign County Clerk under Elections. The formerly Diebold, formerly Premier, now ES&S Accu-Vote ballot tabulation system is under the gun to meet the state standards for rejecting undervotes. (We do not use the Accu-Vote) At the State Board of Elections meeting yesterday we learned that their first go around on testing failed, and now they are making programming changes and retesting.
http://blog.champaigncountyclerk.com/2009/11/18/undervotes-and-the-accuvote/

IL: Illinois Newspaper Story on Challenge to Green Party U.S. House Candidate in 14th District
November 20th, 2009 The Daily Herald, a newspaper in Arlington Heights, Illinois, has this article about a Democratic Party-connected challenge to the Green Party’s candidate for U.S. House in the 14th district.
http://www.ballot-access.org/2009/11/20/illinois-newspaper-story-on-challenge-to-green-party-u-s-house-candidate-in-14th-district/

MA: BREAKING NEWS: Vote-Rigging Alleged in UC Presidential Election
November 19, 2009 In an unprecedented reversal following allegations of fraud and vote-tampering, the Undergraduate Council Election Commission decided to “de-certify” the results of the presidential election released today, pending further notice.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/11/19/11-bowman-votes-seiler/

MN: Kummer wins Park Board seat without a majority
Candidate is first under ranked-choice voting to be elected without support from a majority of voters.
November 19, 2009 …Incumbent Kummer amassed 46 percent of the vote to almost 42 percent for Jason Stone in a replay of their 2005 finish. Her election without a majority occurred because 957 ballots, or 12 percent of those cast, were exhausted.

Verified Voting Blog: No Voting Machine Virus in New York-23 Election

Erroneous reports are circulating that a virus caused a problem in the scanners used in the NY-23 Congressional race. The reports, based on an inaccurate article published in the Gouverneur Times, are incorrect. There was no virus in the NY-23 machines. How do I know? Well, in the first place, the Dominion ImageCast scanners in question run the Linux operating system, which is nearly immune to viruses due to its inherent ability to lock out programs that lack explicit permission to run, unlike the highly vulnerable Windows operating system. Second, the State Board of Elections gave an account of the problem at their public meeting on November 10, and which I confirmed in a phone conversation with staff earlier this week. Here’s what really happened:

Let’s be clear. While no votes were lost due the ability to independently count the paper ballots, a problem did occur that affected certain machines around the state. The issue was a bug in the Dominion source code that caused the machine to hang while creating ballot images for certain vote combinations in multiple candidate elections (the ImageCast, like the other scanner used in New York, the ES&S DS200, creates digital images of each ballot which can be reviewed after the election). So if, for example, a “vote for three candidates out of five” race was voted in a certain way, the scanner would hang. This is one reason why the defect affected some, but not all machines with ballots containing this type of race, because only certain combinations of votes caused the memory problem. But here’s the thing – the problem was discovered before the election.