The Voting News Daily: Pennsylvania SOS hired by Internet Voting Co. AR, CA, KY and PA ballot problems
Verified Voting on May 18 primaries: “Despite signs of progress, today’s primaries in Arkansas, Kentucky, Oregon, and Pennsylvania show how much work remains to verify the vote.”..Paper ballots save day in Faulkner Co AR..San Francisco ballot mix: 1000 got wrong ballot, 1317 got dupes..178 Fayette Co, PA voters voted twice..A KY man charged with vote buying..Not enough ballots in Boone PA…A Sadsbury Twshp PA touchscreen did not compute.. Pennsylvania’s SoS Cortes quits, takes VP job @ internet vote company..BoingBoing on India’s EVMs…
All this and more in today’s voting news below…
AR: 27 votes counted mistakenly in Farmington*
http://www.ozarksunbound.com/27-votes-counted-mistakenly-in-farmington/9599
This morning 27 voters in Farmington voted mistakenly in that city’s sales tax election, said Washington County Election Commission Chairman John Logan Burrow.
An incorrect ballot was given to voters at the Farmington First Baptist Churc
AR: Only ‘minor problems’ in election, officials say* (central count/M650)
http://thecabin.net/news/local/2010-05-19/only-%E2%80%98minor-problems%E2%80%99-election-officials-say …Faulkner County Election Commission chairman Frank Shaw said on election night that one problem arose when the paper ballot counting machine inexplicably failed to “read” four ballots. Shaw said that the commission fully filled in the “bubbles” these absentee voters had marked to denote a choice, but the machine still failed to recognize the choices.
Then, the disc produced by the machine containing the absentee ballot results could not be recognized by the computer used to tally the votes.
“We’re getting an error code,” County Clerk Melinda Reynolds said.
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Twenty-one of the absentee ballots were set aside due to discrepancies, which included missing or mismatched signatures. These will be reviewed by the commission Wednesday.
Another snag involved an errant voting machine at the Mount Vernon/South Mountain precinct polling location. This machine seemed to be malfunctioning on Tuesday morning when it was turned on by election workers, and so was simply set aside.
When polls closed and results were delivered to the county courthouse, this machine was not properly “closed out,” Reynolds said, and though it had recorded no votes whatsoever, it resulted in an on-paper-only unaccounted for precinct in election results.
AR: Faulkner Co. Turnout Low, But No Problems Reported
http://www.katv.com/news/stories/0510/737333.html County Clerk Melinda Reynolds said that the only problems she’d been made aware of concerned voters who had moved to a different voting precinct without notifying her office.
CA: Bungled ballots imperil election *
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Bungled-ballots-imperil-election-94227469.html
A blunder has left thousands of San Francisco voters holding the wrong mail-in ballot for the June 8 election, in which pivotal primaries for statewide offices are at stake, along with the outcomes of local and state propositions.
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Last week, K&H Integrated Print Solutions, based in Everett, Wash., mailed out ballots with the wrong names to at least 1,000 voters
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In addition, the company sent out duplicate ballots to 1,317 absentee voters
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Arntz said they are working to contact voters…
CA: Supervisors approve purchasing machines to count absentee ballots
http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/may/18/supervisors-approve-purchasing-machines-to-count/ One machine priced at $115,000 is designed to remove a ballot from the envelope, while another one selling for $550,000 electronically verifies the voter’s signature and sorts the ballots by precinct.