The Voting News Daily: NV touchscreens flip votes. Internet voting security debate grows. Ontario i-vote probs

Security debate grows over Internet voting: “Nobody knows how to conduct an election that is immune to the kinds of attacks we in the security community know how to do..We can’t have our election systems exposed to cyberattacks.” ~ David Jefferson, computer scientist @ Lawrence Livermore Natl Lab. & VerifiedVoting.org chair…Vote flipping in Clark Co Nevada from GOP to DEM…Ontario Internet voting crashes…Scotland ditches computer voting…

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

Note from the editor: Does the Voting News help you? You can help keep the Voting News going by making a tax deductible donation either online or by check. If by check note “for voting news”. See this link: http://tinyurl.com/donate-vn

AK: “In Alaska Senate Race, Front-Runner Isnt’ on Ballot”
http://electionlawblog.org/archives/017583.html

AK Admits to BRAD BLOG State Has Never Before Supplied Precincts With Write-In Candidate Names http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8151

AZ: Response to voter fraud claims
http://www.kyma.com/slp.php?idN=4242&cat=Local%20News
AZ Secretary of State’s Office says accusations are incorrect

CA: Corrected Ballots Mailed to Danville and Alamo Voters* (contest left off ballot)
http://danville.patch.com/articles/corrected-ballots-mailed-to-danville-and-alamo-voters With just one week before Election Day, corrected ballots will show up in the mailboxes of Danville and Alamo homes—the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District was left off the ballots.

CO: Ballot copying under way in Routt County* (coding error on ballots)
http://www.steamboatpilot.com/news/2010/oct/26/ballot-copying-under-way-routt-county/
Four-person teams of sworn-in, paid election judges continued Monday the arduous work of hand-copying scores of ballots — filling in rectangles, one quadruple-checked vote at a time — after a coding error announced last week. The error was caused by a single, inadvertent keystroke and rendered unreadable all 5,773 ballots mailed to Routt County voters before Oct. 19.

CO: Election is for citizens, not government
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20101026/LETTER/101029851/1020&
ParentProfile=1061 http://tinyurl.com/2af5o94
Regardless of such punitive backlash, we should not allow our government to block election transparency and verifiability. Elections belong to us, not the government. The government ought not obtain nor withhold “secrets” about our elections

GA: Military, overseas votes get speedier
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/government/elections/georgia-elections/2010-10-25/military-overseas-votes-get-speedier Members of the military and Georgians living abroad can expect a quicker turnaround on their absentee ballots and greater likelihood their votes will arrive in time to be counted.

IL: New law costing McLean Co., election commission
http://www.pantagraph.com/news/local/education/article_3f4d5152-e0b3-11df-a47d-001cc4c03286.html The law, effective until March 2, requires election authorities to offer grace period registration and early voting at all public universities
…
While the clerk’s share of the cost of the ISU site program was about $4,500, Milton offset much of it by closing two off-site locations in Chenoa and Downs. That brought the net impact down to about $1,900.

MD: Errors mar most Worcester sample ballots*
http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20101026/OPI01/10260346
SNOW HILL — Voters opening sample ballots mailed to them by Worcester election officials may have done double-takes. The instructional ballots showed inaccurate candidate listings for County Commissioner and Board of Education elections in six out of seven districts.

NC: Minor problems, large turnout of voters in Havelock *(paper jams, data transm, more on vote flip prob w/straight-ticket voting using ES&S iVotronic w/VVPAT)
http://www.enctoday.com/news/election-7675-havelock-havelock-national.html
Bare said that the button for straight tickets is so close together that it is relatively easy to hit one when the intent is to hit another.

Editorials: A Common Sense Solution to Defective Voting | Lawrence Norden/The Hill Blog

In a week, millions of Americans will exercise their most important civil right – the right to vote. But as surely as some campaigns will end in a deluge of confetti and others in popped balloons, there will also be problems with vote tallies. Some votes will be counted more than once, some votes will be counted not at all, and some votes will appear as if by magic. This state of affairs is not caused by corruption. It is caused by malfunctioning voting machines. Since 2002, federal, state and local governments have spent billions on electronic voting systems. These systems are complex, consisting of tens of thousands of lines of computer code. And when, as is inevitable, some machines malfunction on the first Tuesday in November, it is election officials who will be asked to explain. They will struggle to cope with these problems while under enormous pressure to produce timely and accurate results. One would think that information about voting machine malfunctions would be just as open as the democracy for which, they are, quite literally the linchpin. Instead, defects or failures in voting machines are treated as secrets. For the most part, voting system manufacturers are under no obligation to publicly report malfunctions to a central authority. Officials in each of the nation’s approximately 4,700 election jurisdictions are left to fend for themselves.