The Voting News Daily: Antitrust and Your Vote.Clay KY vote buying by the mighty.Palm Beach paper ballots save day. ACORN funding ban stricken.

The resignation letter of Former New Mexico State Elections Director A.J. Salazar is now available online. The letter outlines allegations against SoS Herrera and Deputy SoS Don Francisco Trujillo: ethics violations, cronyism, political activity at the office, concerns about chain of custody of voting machines, and retaliation….WHO didn’t buy votes in Clay County Kentucky?… Good thing they have paper ballots in Palm Beach FL. This Tuesday: “Memory cartridges affecting five Jupiter precincts as well as precincts in Palm Beach Gardens and Tequesta were corrupted and could not be read.”… Canadians are waking up to risks of internet voting…..

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

CA: The California Top Two Primary Proposal and Third Parties
http://electionlawblog.org/archives/015456.html

CA: Green Party’s San Francisco Supervisor Changes to the Democratic Party
http://www.ballot-access.org/2010/03/11/green-partys-san-francisco-supervisor-changes-to-the-democratic-party/
Mirkarimi had been the Green Party’s only county supervisor in California

CO: Commentary on Dismissal of Marks v. Koch – Aspen Election Transparency
http://aspenelectionreview.blogspot.com/2010/03/commentary-on-dismissal-of-marks-v-koch.html
On Wednesday District Court Judge Boyd decided, months into the process of litigation, to dismiss a case brought against the Aspen City Clerk to obtain public access to anonymous digital ballot images from a May 5 first-time in Colorado Instant Runoff Voting municipal election. The dismissal comes two days before an important deposition of the election contractor would have explained the election process on public record and a mere two weeks before the planned trial date.

FL: Late results, fouled cartridges hampered Tuesday’s Palm Beach County election tallies * (good thing they had paper ballots) http://bit.ly/b4fSJF
Web site problems, corrupted voting-machine memory cartridges and the late arrival of ballots from Delray Beach delayed the posting of complete election results until just after midnight following Tuesday’s municipal elections.
…
The company that hosts the site, Tampa-based SOE Software, said a file uploaded from the supervisor’s office at 8:15 p.m. had become corrupted. The file finally uploaded at 9:20 p.m. The supervisor’s Web site was subsequently updated four more times by 12:19 a.m. Wednesday, according to SOE Software records.

Memory cartridges affecting five Jupiter precincts as well as precincts in Palm Beach Gardens and Tequesta were corrupted and could not be read. That problem typically happens when poll workers neglect to shut down the voting machines before removing the cartridges.
Bucher’s office got the results from those precincts by doing a machine count of the paper ballots, which serve as a backup. The count for Jupiter ended just before midnight.
…
It’s not the first time problems have plagued the cartridges. During a special congressional primary in February, seven voting machine memory packs were corrupted, affecting nine precincts.

FL: Jupiter Election Results *
http://coastalflorida.blogspot.com/2010/03/jupiter-election-results.html
Voting machine cartridges did not read properly for several precincts in Jupiter, forcing election workers to resort to a backup method, counting paper ballots with a machine. The glitch delayed final election results for Jupiter…

IL: Getting Stonewalled on Citizenship Questions
Champaign County Clerk
http://blog.champaigncountyclerk.com/2010/03/11/getting-stonewalled-on-citizenship-questions/ …It’s very simple. If you’re going to suggest that we automatically add people to the voter rolls from government databases, shouldn’t you at least be able to tell the public and policy makers about the ability of those databases to tell us who is a citizen or not?