A perfect storm is brewing for Tennessee voters for the 2010 election.Tennessee is set up for an election debacle, thanks to the states’ reliance on paperless electronic voting. Currently 93 out of 95 counties in Tennessee use these machines.Unless the Secretary of State Hargett takes swift and certain prompt action, thousands of votes will be…
In Tennessee, State Rep Odum calls on State’s top election official to do his job – implement the paper ballot law. Microvote voting machines for sale in Indiana, Newark Ohio selling punch card machines. Some 866OURVOTE applauds Kansas’ move to allow online voter registration. New Mexico’s SOS wants people to register now to officials time…
There are several types of voting machines and election equipment for sale over at GovDeals. Click on Election Equipment to see the latest holdings. Here’s a list of what is up for auction today: Inventory IDDescriptionAsset LocationEnd Date/Time ETStart/Current Bid BOE9Board of Election Votomatics Newark, OH8/15/09 5:35 PMCurrent: $16.00 Bids: 2 BOE9Board of Election Votomatics…
The sour economy is impacting election administration. WVa approved early voting but provided no funding to pay for it. PA activists need volunteers to audit their paperless elections. Woodbury County, Iowa dropped plans for Vote Centers when Sioux City threatened to sue. A Tennessee County took inventory and learned they were missing 1 voting machine…
The Elections Assistance Commission gets a YouTube Channel. What next, the EAC on Twitter? New York Counties discover costs of switching to voting machines; EVoter Education Project says that for NY: “A bigger problem in our opinion is that the new ballot scanners are not ‘stand-alone’ devices at all, as many have been led to…
U.S. ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION1225 New York Ave. NW – Suite 1100Washington, DC 20005 EAC Newsline: August 3, 2009Public Meetings The EAC Standards Board will meet August 6-7 in Phoenix, Arizona.For more information, click here. EAC’s next public meeting will be Sept 2: agenda to be announced. Visit our Web site to view the webcasts of…
Sequoia/Dominion has succeeded in getting its machines in most New York Counties. The National Association of Letter Carriers) wants the the Postal Service to aggressively pursue “vote-by-mail” initiatives. Aspen is holding a special election by mail only, the town’s mayor worries voters will be caught unaware. A felon disenfranchisement case may head to the US…
It looks like Sequoia aka Dominion Voting Systems has taken NY. There are 62 counties in the State of New York, and 54 will be or are using the Sequoia Image Cast. Here’s a list from the New York State Board of Elections website: 1. Allegany County2. Broome County3. Cattaraugus County4. Cayuga County5. Chautauqua County6.…
The US House passed a bill that authorizes reimbursements to States that offer absentee ballot tracking services. Aspen Colorado activists hoping to audit a recent electon are still fighting for access to ballots after the city attorney said the ballots were not public information. In North Carolina, lawmakers consider a bill to allow teens to…
A Tennessee Supreme Court may decide if election officials must pass a religious or political test. This comes after the May firing of 28 election directors Hawaii considering Vote by Mail as a way to increase voter turnout. Maybe because Honolulu’s recent internet election was quite a dud with 6.5% turnout. Meanwhile, Michael Hamner (University…
The head of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board wants internet voting for the state. The claim is that this would increase voter turnout, but we know better after Honolulu’s recent internet election with 6.5% turnout. Tennessee’s paper ballot law still under threat and may end up back at the legislature. An Texas County proposes reducing polling…
Ballots so private you can’t audit them: Colorado Voting Activist Harvie Brancomb leads a team conducting an independent audit of Aspen’s recent instant runoff voting election. The town’s attorney has denied a public info request to obtain the 2,600 ballots, citing that the ballots are “private”. It is ironic that ballots have to be stored…
The Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) just approved Everyone Counts, an Internet Voting Company to participate in the EAC Voting System Testing and Certification Program. E1C now joins several other EAC registered voting vendors. The whack-a-mole attacks on election transparency have stepped up a level. In a letter to Everyone Counts, dated July 21, 2009, the…
Concerns are raised about New York’s Pilot program that allows the use of uncertified computerized vote counting machines. This month citizens learned that a statewide switch from levers to optical scan will cost $200 million, with only $50 million covered by federal funds. Howard Stanislevic of the E-Voter Education Project warns that the increased risk…
Levers, Vote Centers, Voter Registration and Internet Voting in the news today. Voters Unite has a new report on the costs of replacing lever machines with optical scanners. The report finds that the HAVA funds will not cover the first year costs of switching to the Sequoia/Dominion ImageCast. The New York Times has an article…
Hawaii’s top election official may need to borrow money to hold elections in 2010 because of state budget restrictions. Lots of US news. Is there a better alternative to election day registration? Several election bills add new co sponsors as there is a big push for electoral reform by 2010. US. Voter Action, NAACP National…
The Ohio Secretary of State has just certified the new ES&S’s optical scanner, the DS200 and it is already heading to Cuyahoga County. The DS200 was just certified by the EAC to the 2002 Voting System Standards, the most current in effect by the EAC. Voter Action’s lawsuit over Arizona’s touchscreen machines is back in…
The facts are NOT on the side of partisan election official Chairman Bill Giannini of Shelby County Tennessee. Mr. Giannini uses the same misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric that we in North Carolina had to disprove when special interests tried to thwart our paper ballot law. Jul 21, 2009 Optical Scan Voting “Insanity,” Says Election Commission…
Can New Mexico’s Secretary of State protect elections? The New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office doesn’t have the technical capability to manage information technology projects, or “protect the assets of the SOS and the people of the State of New Mexico.” according to a Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) evaluation.The EAC announces several certifications of software…
Is the Tennessee Secretary of State afraid that he isn’t competent enough to enact Tennessee’s new paper ballot law in time for the 2010 election? Could it be that he doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done, so he has to keep making excuses to cover his inadequacies? County may have to…
Tennessee has 5 different election cases pending in Federal Court, which may be more than any other state. Meanwhile, Tennessee lawmaker Gary Odom’s oped today states that the law doesn’t require 2005 system guidelines and Tennessee should use federal HAVA funds to purchase paper ballot/machines now. Meanwhile Tennessee SOS Hargett claims that the law requires…
Tennessee still in the news. The Tennessean says the spat is “not what Tennessee voters want” and, “More than sufficient funds are in place to purchase and install the machines, if only the bickering will stop and officials will work in a bipartisan manner to make it happen.” New Hillsboro FL elections chief is a…
Yes there really is a Goldbergian Voting Machine, and it was made by a Programming Media 2 class at UCLA. Is it more or less bizarre than New York’s new Sequoia/Dominion ImageCast voting machines? A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately overengineered apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually…
“Tennesseans deserve to know that their votes will be counted and counted correctly in 2010.” – TN Rep Gary Odom. Tennessee officials claim it is impossible to implement the paper ballot law on time. NC was able to do this because they have highly organized and competent election officials. Rep Gary Odom (TN)also advises that…
TN officials could implement the paper ballot law in plenty of time if they were anywhere as competent or organized as officials in North Carolina. NC passed a paper ballot law in August 2005 and was ready for early voting beginning in April 2006. And this even includes the time I went to court against…
Tennessee fight brouhau gets wild with one county threatening a lawsuit, state’s GOP chair asks Democrats to recraft paper ballot law, and the SOS fights back using state rep’s own words, Indiana setsnew Drivers license requirements that will make it even harder to vote there. New York will not have undervote notification on machines. A…
I’ve cobbled together some news for you today. I’ll think about whether to continue this. I don’t know if some of you see this, but I like to open with a picture first. Email me at joyce (at) ncvoter.net The cost of freedom is very high in Iran. Supporters of Iranian presidential candidate Mir…
Recently the Huffington Post published an article about Hawaii’s recent Internet and phone-based elections (“America’s Newest State Holds America’s Newest Election“). The article presents an optimistic and patriotic view of the Everyone Counts (E1C) election system that allows voters to cast their ballots from their home computers or over the phone. It was written by E1C executive Aaron Contorer and is effectively a marketing piece for E1C that exaggerates the scope of the election, overlooks or insults other election methods, and glosses over the formidable technical challenges and dangers posed by the electronic submission of voted ballots.
The election in Honolulu was for neighborhood board members, and thus was not covered by Hawaii’s public election laws. That matters because Hawaii’s election laws, fortunately, require a voter-verified paper ballot and a post-election hand audit of a percentage of these ballots. Since such verification and audits are impossible with a purely Internet-based voting system, there is no legal way to use the E1C system under current Hawaii state law. Nevertheless, because this small election is being used to promote Internet voting generally, and because Internet voting schemes are being proposed across the United States, the issue demands thorough discussion. In response to multiple efforts to allow voting over the Internet in major elections, many of our nation’s prominent technology experts have signed a statement cautioning against adopting Internet-based voting systems without first understanding and guarding against the numerous and well-documented dangers. This is not because, as Mr. Contorer suggests, those opposing Internet voting find “[t]he introduction of technology to any process … scary”. The signatories to this statement are not at all intimidated by technology; in fact many are established experts in voting systems who are most certainly aware of the major risks associated with Internet voting.
A Michigan judge on Monday said he’ll allow a dozen tech and election experts, including the Florida firm Cyber Ninjas and others who alleged election fraud following the November presidential election, to refute a secretary of state election report that determined mistakes in Michigan voting results were caused by human error and didn’t signal vulnerability or tampering with election machines. Cyber Ninjas is the name of a Florida-based consulting firm owned by Doug Logan, who’s expressed support for election fraud “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories on social media. The company was recently hired by the Republican-majority Arizona Legislature to conduct an audit of election results in Maricopa County. That audit began last week. Now the Cyber Ninjas, as well as other experts put forth by the plaintiff in an ongoing election fraud lawsuit, are likely going to weigh in on challenges to results in Michigan’s Antrim County. Many of the experts have been involved in other election challenges across the nation, sometimes espousing debunked data in support of their election fraud claims. Proposed experts include: Retires Col. James P. Waldron, a cyber security expert who during post-election hearings before Michigan lawmakers cited incorrect reports that indicated 100% or more eligible voter turnout in some Michigan precincts; Russell James Ramsland Jr., a cybersecurity analyst and former Republican congressional candidate who produced the erroneous voter turnout report after apparently confusing Minnesota cities as locations in Michigan; and Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who has alleged numerical voting anomalies that would suggest fraud.
Full Article: ‘Cyber Ninjas’ to refute Michigan report on election errors in lingering lawsuit – mlive.com
New audit reports from the Secretary of State show that ballot machines piloted in this year’s spring municipal elections counted votes accurately, moving all of the vendors forward in the process to certify new machines in time for elections in 2024. At a Ballot Law Commission meeting Wednesday, Eric Forcier, the Secretary of State’s constitutional deputy, said all the ballot counting devices used in the March elections had minor errors — but all within what are typical margins. “I think all the vendors are excited to show New Hampshire all the great things that the machines can do if we’re willing to take her along,” he said. Four vendors are vying to gain certification from the Commission, which approves voting machines for elections in New Hampshire. The state wants to replace the current machines produced by AccuVote. Brad Cook, the chair of the Commission, said he hopes the group will select two machines at most. From there, municipalities would be able to decide which machines to purchase and use for their local races. Milford, Ashland, Winchester and Londonderry piloted ballot machines produced by three different companies: Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Clear Ballot and Dominion Voting Systems. The machines will continue to be piloted in future elections. May elections in Moultonborough and Hanover will test VotingWorks and ES&S machines, respectively.
Full Article: Pilot ballot counting machines move forward in NH certification process | New Hampshire Public Radio