The Voting News Daily: E-Voting, E-Nightmare. 3rd NC County has vote flipping. Canada internet vote fiasco

See it on iTunes: Dan Rather’s “Digital Democracy in Doubt”…TX vote flip video is on internet again..3rd NC county reports vote flipping…VerifiedVoting on Vote Flipping & Touch Screen Calibration…NH voters beware internet voting scam…S Carolina voting system needs overhaul..Report vote probs by cell phone 866-OUR-VOTE..Still Time for Overseas Voters to get ballot…Serious system failures in Canadian muni internet voting…Ahmedabad India Congress leaders sue to stop internet voting…

All this and more in today’s voting news.

AK: Write-in lists ruled a violation of election law
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/blogs/political-animal/7294-write-in-lists-ruled-a-violation-of-election-law In a ruling sure to disappoint supporters of U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a temporary restraining order was issued against poll workers providing voters with the names of write-in candidates.

AR: Ballot Problems For Some Voters In St. Francis County, AR*
http://www.wreg.com/news/wreg-saint-francis-county-races-story,0,5413549.story
Races For District 51 House Seat & Forrest City Council Position Impacted
Alex Coleman
In Saint Francis County, Arkansas, early voting is underway, but some voters ran into a problem trying to cast their ballots for a city council position in Forrest City, AR.
…
Patton said, “I don’t know every detail, but I do know there was a problem with a position of the candidates on the ballots that one of the candidates had drawn and was supposed to be in a different position and the ballot wasn’t printed that way.”

The Saint Francis County Election Commission found problems with some of its ballots.
The race for Arkansas State House of Representatives between Democrat Marshall Wright and Republican Anna Grizzle was also affected.
…
The ballot problem will mean the election commission chairman, Frederick Freeman, will likely total out voting machines and maybe restart the early voting process.

AZ: Restrictive Voter Registration Law Struck Down In Arizona
http://networkedblogs.com/9GsmI
By a 2-1 vote (the majority included retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor), the court struck down Arizona’s documentary proof of citizenship requirement for all new voter registrants because it is superseded by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993

CA: Voter fraud warning: Don’t give ballot to door-to-door solicitor* (dirty trick)
http://www.bakersfieldnow.com/news/local/105890433.html
If someone comes to your door asking for a mail-in ballot, don’t give it to them. That’s the warning from Kern County Elections officials.

CO: Boulder voters given wrong ballot language on tax question* (ballot info wrong)
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/ci_16440973
Electronic voting machines that should have shown early voters in Boulder the text of the proposed utility tax ballot measure instead showed the text for the county open space measure. Those voters’ yes and no votes were then recorded for the utility tax.

Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall said election workers discovered the problem around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday when a voter noticed the discrepancy.

Electronic voting was immediately discontinued for the day, and a new ballot program was uploaded to new voting

CO: Election glitch sends ballots with wrong state house district to Fort Collins senior complex* (ballot missing contest)
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20101027/UPDATES01/101027020/Election+glitch+sends+b allots+with+wrong+state+house+district+to+Fort+Collins+senior+complex
http://tinyurl.com/268pueg Mary Willhite wanted to vote for her friend Bob Morain in House District 52. But when she got her ballot in the mail, it listed the House District 53 race.

National: Vote Flipping and Touch Screen Calibration

Again this election cycle, stories have emerged about “vote flipping”, most notably in Texas, where a video of erratic touchscreen behavior was posted on several sites, and in several North Carolina counties. (link, link, link, link) As voting technology expert Douglas Jones wrote several years ago, it seems unlikely that vote flipping is evidence of intentional hacking. However, these incidents do highlight the lack of transparency of software-generated election results and undermine confidence in elections generally. Vote flipping can be caused by a voter touching the screen in two places, for example resting one hand on the machine while making selections with the other (see pp. 20-22 here), but the most likely cause of "vote-flipping" is miscalibration. As Rice University computer scientist Dan Wallach explains in a post at ACCURATE:

The screen shows pictures of buttons with labels for the various candidates, which the voter selects by touching the screen with their finger. Some voters using these machines have reported problems where they pressed the button for one candidate and a different candidate was selected. These issues are most likely the result of poor touchscreen calibration rather than any security problems with the voting machines’ software.

The clear, touch-sensitive layer is separate from the part of the screen that displays the buttons. The thickness of the touch-sensitive layer directly implies that when different voters are looking at the screen from different angles, they will naturally want to touch the screen at different locations. This can be partly addressed by “calibrating” the touchscreen in advance. The calibration process, familiar to anyone who owns a PDA, involves the machine displaying a series of cross-hairs and asking the user to press on the center of each cross-hair. The machine then computes a correction to ensure that selections are mapped to the correct part of the screen below. Of course, if the calibration was done incorrectly, or even if the voter is notably taller or shorter than the person who did the calibration, then presses on the screen might still be misinterpreted. Furthermore, different voters may use different parts of their finger (ranging from the fingernail to the whole finger), which may differ from how the system was calibrated. (See also "Touch Screen Usability: Election Edition!" and "Vote Flipping and Touchscreens") Vote flipping was investigated in several articles during the 2008 election cycle. Computerworld interviewed both voting machine vendor and election integrity activists for “Are design issues to blame for vote 'flipping' in touch-screen machines?” and Wired magazine posted an article about the potential for maliscious calibration as detailed in the Ohio EVEREST report.