Editorials: Voting Requires Vigilance. Popular Isn’t Always Prudent | CT News Junkie

One third of Americans vote on machines, without the paper ballots we use in Connecticut. Our president is chosen based on faith in those unverifiable machines, vote accounting, and unequal enfranchisement in 50 independent states and the District of Columbia. In 2000, we witnessed the precarious underpinnings of this state-by-state voting system combined with the flawed mechanism of the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Accounting Act. The Supreme Court ruled votes could not be recounted in Florida, because even that single state did not have uniform recount procedures. What could possibly make this system riskier? The National Popular Vote Compact now being considered in states, including Connecticut, would have such states award their electoral votes to a purported national popular vote winner. The Compact would take effect once enough states signed on, equaling more than one-half the Electoral College. Then the President elected would be the one with the most purported popular votes. Sounds good and fair at first glance. Looking at the touted benefits and none of the risks many legislators, advocates, and media influence the public to make the Compact popular in some polls. Popular is not always prudent. Voting requires vigilance.

New York: Cecilia Tkaczyk not giving up election fight in NY 46 Senate District | DailyFreeman.com

Democrat Cecilia Tkaczyk has appealed “hyper-technical mistakes” that invalidated more than 300 paper ballots cast in the race for the state’s 46th Senate District seat, her attorney said on Friday. Republican candidate George Amedore was expected to file a response to his opponent’s appeal by 4 p.m. Friday, but Amedore’s spokesman could not be reached for confirmation of that. Acting state Supreme Court Justice Guy Tomlinson on Dec. 18 certified Amedore the winner of the 46th Senate District race by a margin of just 37 votes, 63,141 to 63,104. The ruling was made public the following day, at which point Tkaczyk’s campaign indicated she would file an appeal. That appeal was filed Wednesday with the state Supreme Court Appellate Division, Third Department.

Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, State officials differ on whether computer glitch caused Election Day problem | NewsWorks

On Election Day, there were widespread reports of registered voters showing up at polling places and being told they weren’t on the rolls. They were allowed to cast paper ballots, which could be counted once their registration status was verified. A record 27,000 provisional ballots were cast in Philadelphia this November. A new review by City Commissioner Stephanie Singer concludes that 5,000 duly registered citizens didn’t appear on the voter rolls because of a “software malfunction” in the Pennsylvania-run voter registry. But Singer said those provisional votes were cast and counted.

Voting Blogs: Should pressure for a fast count determine how we vote? | EVIC

The new clerk-recorder in Riverside County, CA, Kari Verjil, has apparently avoided the pothole that ended the career of her predecessor Barbara Dumore. Riverside has the 10th fastest count among California counties, according to information just released by the Secretary of State’s office. Verjil attributes the improvement to a dedicated effort by her office to encourage citizens to cast their ballots by mail.  Verjil did the smart thing by figuring out the best way to respond to the pressures placed on her by political actors.

Virginia: Paper Ballots In Prince William County? | NBC4

According to PotomacLocal.com, Prince William County has decided to use paper ballots in elections, following long lines at the polls on Election Day. The local-news website tweeted the news Tuesday night: “Breaking News: Prince William County Board of Elections to institute use of paper ballots following long lines at polls Nov. 6.” On Election Day, some voters in the county waited for up to four hours to vote. The long lines attracted some press reports – including from News4’s Voter Patrol – and even national attention. But it also prompted concern for the Board of Elections.

Connecticut: Manchester Registrars Describe Election Day Problems, Possible Remedies | Courant.com

The registrars of voters spoke to the board of directors Tuesday night about the many and unprecedented problems on Election Day, including long lines, voter confusion and a shortage of electronic ballots. In preparing for the election, the registrars said they looked at previous voter turnout in presidential elections and listened to political commentators who said President Barack Obama’s supporters were not as keen to cast ballots as they were in 2008. So considering that turnout in Manchester going back to 1996 had been 76 percent to 78 percent, Democratic Registrar Francis Maffe Jr. and Republican Registrar Tim Becker ordered enough ballots for an 82 percent turnout.

Florida: Almost 1K ballots found in Broward elections warehouse | WSVN

Nearly a thousand ballots that were not included in Florida’s final count have been found in a warehouse in Broward County. Tuesday morning and into the night, there was a buzz of activity at the Voting Equipment Center in Lauderhill, a week after the general election. There was a recount going on for two commission seats that were too close to call, one in Hallandale Beach and another in Dania Beach. Workers had to count those votes manually.

US Virgin Islands: Paper ballots leave St. Croix race largely unchanged | Virgin Islands Daily News

The St. Croix Board of Elections continued throughout the weekend to count paper ballots from Tuesday’s General Election. The board put in 19 hours beginning Friday and continuing Saturday and Sunday. They counted close to 2,000 paper ballots that left little changes from the initial results of the Senate races after electronic votes were tallied Tuesday night. According to the unofficial results, which includes tallies from 13 of 14 precincts, the paper ballot votes widened the gap between some of the candidates and narrowed the gap between others, but the positioning stayed the same.

Hawaii: Office of Elections Apologizes for Election Day Glitches That Left 24 Polling Places Without Paper Ballots | Hawaii Reporter

Election officials have confirmed 24 out of 140 polling places on the island of Oahu ran out of paper ballots during the General Election on Tuesday, November 6. (See the list here – BALLOT INVENTORY ISSUES BY POLLING PLACE). The number was originally reported as 5 polling places, but by the day after the election, that number had increased by nearly five times. With just one electronic voting machine at each location, only about 10 voters per hour could be accommodated. Others waited in line for sometimes more than hour for additional paper ballots to arrive.

Turks and Caicos Islands: Official recount of ballots confirms results giving Turks & Caicos closely divided Parliament | The Washington Post

A Monday recount of paper ballots from parliamentary elections in the British territory of the Turks & Caicos Islands confirmed no changes from the provisional tally. The recount established that the Progressive National Party won eight of the 15 Parliament seats in Friday’s elections that will lead to a government that will resume local administration after three years of direct rule by Britain, the governor’s office said in a statement Monday evening. Provisional results announced Saturday showed that Ewing’s party won the election, but People’s Democratic Movement leader Oswald Skippings pushed for a recount of the overall vote. He failed to win a seat but his party claimed the remaining seven seats.

US Virgin Islands: Thousands of votes will not be counted until Friday | Virgin Islands Daily News

Virtually no race on the V.I. ballot Tuesday could be definitively settled as of Wednesday night because at least 4,319 paper ballots have yet to be counted. The Boards of Elections in both districts have indicated that they likely will not begin tallying the votes until Friday. With the exception of Delegate to Congress Donna Christensen, who won with an 8,000 vote margin; Senator-At-Large Craig Barshinger, who won with a 6,000-vote margin; and Clifford Graham, who topped the St. Thomas-St. John Senate race by a margin of 1,969 votes, the order and outcome of almost every other race could, mathematically, change once the paper ballots are counted.

National: Long lines, confusion reveal flaws in US elections | Missoulian

Even as President Barack Obama was about to give his victory speech early Wednesday, dozens of Florida voters waited in line waiting to cast ballots more than five hours after the polls officially closed. Thousands of people in Virginia, Tennessee and elsewhere also had to vote in overtime. Well into the 21st century, it strikes many people as indefensible that the U.S. can’t come up with a more streamlined and less chaotic election system. The president said as much at the very start of his speech. “I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time,” Obama said. “By the way, we have to fix that.” Easier said than done. There’s no single entity that sets the rules for voting in this country. Congress and the states enact overall election laws, but in most places it comes down to county or even city officials to actually run them. And those local systems are prone to problems. “We have 10,000 different systems. I wish there were only 50,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California-Irvine and author of “The Voting Wars.”

National: How Faulty and Outdated E-Voting Machines Contributed to Voter Lines and Frustration | ABC News

“By the way, we have to fix that,” President Obama said in his acceptance speech last night. No, he wasn’t referring to a specific economic, social or policy issue. He was referring to the issue of voting lines. Long, long voting lines. Across the nation yesterday, and then subsequently across Twitter and Facebook, U.S. citizens shared frustrations, photos and information about voting lines. The images of the long queues were a dime a dozen, especially when you looked at the #stayinline hashtag on Twitter. People in states like Florida and Ohio waited up to seven hours. In other states, there were shorter, though still-frustrating two- to three-hour waits. Some experts place the blame on high turnout, but many will tell you the culprit is technology – failed and faulty e-voting machine. Gone are the days of pulling the lever. Instead now there are two main voting systems: optical scan paper ballot systems and direct recording electronic systems (DREs). Very few jurisdictions still rely on punch cards and hand-counted paper ballots.

Editorials: What could go wrong on Election Day? | The Detroit News

“A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.” This was Ben Franklin’s description of the fragile product of the new United States Constitution, in answer to a Mrs. Powel, as he left the convention hall on Sept. 17, 1787. He could as well have been describing the country on Nov. 6, 2012. We share Ben’s anxiety as members of a growing number of worried computer scientists, analysts and election administrators who fear what will happen on Election Day. We worry that the nation will end up with no confidence in the election results, regardless of who wins.

National: Electoral tech: How e-voting has evolved | TechHive

Though early American elections involved shouting out your vote to the county clerk, oh, how the times have changed. Thirty-one states now use electronic voting machines; the remaining 19 rely on paper ballots or punch cards. The technological march from voices to touchscreens took hundreds of years, but widespread adoption of e-voting began in earnest a decade ago, shortly after the 2000 presidential election revealed the myriad ways in which outdated punch card and lever voting systems could throw the country into a tailspin. But now new fears have arisen: Both paper ballots and electronic systems are vulnerable to fraud, as electronic votes often leave no paper record (depending on the jurisdiction). Without paper trails, fraud is easier to perpetrate and harder to detect. Many experts say the march toward e-voting, and even the specter of Internet voting, should be slowed until we figure out a way to craft a better system and defend it from attack.

National: Use of e-voting machines unaltered despite power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy | Computerworld

Plans to use electronic voting machines in Tuesday’s presidential election appear to be largely unaltered in states that were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. Despite widespread power outages and other hurricane related damage, election officials in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Delaware remained confident that their electronic voting machines would be up and running on Election Day.

National: Despite e-voting improvements, audits still needed for ballot integrity | Computerworld

Technology and process upgrades implemented since the controversial 2000 presidential election have made electronic voting machines more secure and reliable to use, the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project said in a report last week. Even so, the only way to ensure the integrity of votes cast with the systems is to have mandatory auditing of the results and of all voting technologies used in an election, the 85-page report cautioned. Rather than setting security standards for election equipment, the better approach for safeguarding ballot integrity is to hand-count a sufficiently large and random sample of the paper records of votes cast electronically, it said. “The 2000 United States presidential election put a spotlight on the fragility and vulnerability of voting technology,” the report said. “It became clear that providing robust, accurate, and secure voting systems remained an important open technical problem” for the United States. The Voting Technology Project is a joint initiative between MIT and Caltech and was launched originally to investigate the causes of the voting problems in Florida in 2000 and to make recommendations based on the findings.

National: E-voting puts vote accuracy at risk in four key states | CSMonitor.com

Touch-screen electronic voting machines in at least four states pose a risk to the integrity of the 2012 presidential election, according to a Monitor analysis. In four key battleground states – Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado – glitches in e-voting machines could produce incorrect or incomplete tallies that would be difficult to detect and all but impossible to correct because the machines have no paper record for officials to go back and check.

National: The state of the U.S. election system | MIT News

When it comes to the integrity and accuracy of voting systems in the United States, the good news is that widespread technological upgrades have largely eliminated the voting-machine problems that were so evident when Florida’s disputed recount determined the 2000 presidential election. The bad news is that some of those improvements in accuracy could be undermined by increases in early voting through the mail, which is turning out to be a relatively low-accuracy method of voting, according to a new research report released by MIT and the California Institute of Technology. “A lot of changes over the last decade have made voting in America better,” says Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, who co-authored the new report with five colleagues at four universities. “The possibility of a [situation like Florida’s 2000 election] is much lower now than it was 12 years ago.” However, Stewart adds, “We have possibly gotten way ahead of ourselves in encouraging people to vote by mail. It’s pretty clear that the improvement we’ve gotten by having better voting machines in the precincts may be given back by having more and more people voting at home.”

Florida: Does Your Vote Count? The Overvote Worries | CBS Miami

Imagine going to the polls November 6th and casting your vote for President Barack Obama or Governor Mitt Romney and somehow the machine thinks you voted for both candidates. That’s called an overvote, and your vote may be thrown out. Sound impossible? It isn’t. “You are  getting to the crux of the problem with this technology. We are supposed to trust what goes on back there blindly,” voting rights advocate and attorney Lida Rodriguez-Taseff told CBS4 Chief Investigator Michele Gillen. Rodriguez-Taseff  has spent a decade battling to pull back the curtain on election transparency. She helped get the touch screen machines tossed in Florida in favor of getting voters a paper ballot and paper trail – only to learn that the variety of optical scan machines now in use now across  America and  Florida may have flaws no one could have predicted. Or could they have?

Indiana: Concerns mount over electronic voting; some call for return to paper ballot | Journal and Courier

Ten years ago, West Lafayette artist Sandy Daniel walked into the White Horse Christian Center to vote in the primary election and had an unsettling encounter with what was supposed to be a major advance in voting technology — the touch-screen ballot. After choosing her favored candidates, a list that included her husband and Republican circuit court judge candidate Don Daniel, she touched the screen to finalize her choices and an “error” message appeared. Not knowing whether her vote counted or not, she pressed election officials for an explanation. An hour later, they tried to reassure her, saying the number of votes tallied at the poll matched the number of people who had signed in to vote and that her vote had been counted. A service technician later attributed the error to an unknown “hardware problem.” Thinking back to the incident, Daniels says she’s put it all behind her. Her husband went on to win the primary and general election and continues to hold the judicial post.

Indiana: Concerns mount over electronic voting; some call for return to paper ballot | Journal and Courier | jconline.com

Ten years ago, West Lafayette artist Sandy Daniel walked into the White Horse Christian Center to vote in the primary election and had an unsettling encounter with what was supposed to be a major advance in voting technology — the touch-screen ballot. After choosing her favored candidates, a list that included her husband and Republican circuit court judge candidate Don Daniel, she touched the screen to finalize her choices and an “error” message appeared. Not knowing whether her vote counted or not, she pressed election officials for an explanation. An hour later, they tried to reassure her, saying the number of votes tallied at the poll matched the number of people who had signed in to vote and that her vote had been counted. A service technician later attributed the error to an unknown “hardware problem.” Thinking back to the incident, Daniels says she’s put it all behind her. Her husband went on to win the primary and general election and continues to hold the judicial post.

Florida: One man’s election challenge of Brevard County FL primary continues | floridatoday.com

An employee of the Brevard County Clerk of Courts office wants to examine ballots from the Aug. 14 Republican primary, as he continues to express concerns about the results of the election, in which his boss was defeated. Sean Campbell, the chief deputy to Clerk of Courts Mitch Needelman, has been trading emails with Brevard County Supervisor of Elections Lori Scott, seeking to examine ballots from three election precincts. Campbell has suspicions about the accuracy of the reported vote counts, and wants to compare the paper ballots with reported totals. In the Republican primary, former Clerk of Courts Scott Ellis received 61 percent of the vote, to defeat Needelman, who got 39 percent.

National: Does Your Vote Count? | CBS Miami

Ion Sancho is a man on a mission.  Just weeks from the presidential election, one of the most veteran election supervisors in the state of Florida, thinks there’s plenty for him and his colleagues to lose sleep over. What keeps him awake at night?  Whether you can trust the machine you will be voting on. “We still have not secured the process to ensure that that machine has read that ballot correctly and it is 100 percent accurate. Because it is wrong to assume that the machines are always right. They’re not, ” Sancho tells CBS4  Chief Investigator Michele Gillen. “I think the citizens should be screaming from the rooftops,” he punctuates with the candor and directness he is known for. For many voters Sancho’s words hold weight. He was the first elections supervisor in America to dare a “look under the hood” of a voting machine, to see if the machines were recording votes properly and if they could be hacked. ” I sanctioned the first investigation of a voting system without the vendor’s authorization,” Sancho recalls.

US Virgin Islands: St. Thomas-St. John primary to be recounted | Virgin Islands Daily News

Almost 300 paper ballots cast in the Sept. 8 primary will be counted a second time, the St. Thomas-St. John Board of Elections decided Monday. The decision came in the form of approval of a request made by Jean Forde, who is the eight-place finisher in the Democratic primary for the St. Thomas-St. John Senate district. Forde, who asked for the recount in a notarized letter to the board, trails seventh-place finisher Justin Harrigan Sr. by five votes, 1,480 to 1,475, according to election results the board announced Friday. The meeting Monday was punctuated by flare-ups of a controversy that began at Friday’s meeting.

Louisiana: State readies emergency paper ballots | The Advocate

The state is preparing to use paper ballots on an emergency basis in the fall 2012 elections in which the presidential race is the top contest. It’s because of an explosion of split precincts in the wake of redrawing of election districts that resulted in 400 one-machine locations. State Elections Commissioner Angie Rogers said the paper ballot would be in play if the locations’ sole machine quits functioning. “This is a way to keep voting going until we can get the machine back up and running or another one delivered. It’s a temporary voting method so voting is not interrupted,” said Rogers.

New Mexico: State short of money for general election costs | Farmington Daily Times

Unexpected general election costs have created a $1.4 million hole in the secretary of state’s budget, but the financial squeeze won’t prevent New Mexicans from casting ballots in November, according to New Mexico’s top elections official. Secretary of State Dianna Duran came up empty-handed Tuesday in asking the state Board of Finance for emergency funding for the $1.4 million costs of leased equipment that will print ballots at about 180 “voting convenience centers” in 15 counties. Those allow voters to go to a consolidated polling location most convenient to them rather than their traditional precinct-based voting site.

National: Decade-Old E-Voting ‘Wars’ Continue into Presidential Election | Wall Street Journal

A decade after Dana Debeauvoir helped change Travis County, Texas to an all-electronic voting system she still expects to be falsely accused of fixing the coming election, just as she had in the last two presidential races. The clerk, who has administered voting for 25 years in the county that includes Austin, says the public has remained mistrustful of the ballot system, where voters pick candidates directly from a computer screen, without marking a piece of paper. “There have been so many hard feelings,” says Debeauvoir. “You get people saying ‘I know you have been flipping votes.’” In the wake of the hanging chad controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential elections, the federal government encouraged election administrators across the country to switch to electronic systems and mandated upgrades to many election procedures. As they prepare for the presidential elections, those officials now find themselves at the center of a continuing debate over whether paperless direct-record electronic (DRE) balloting can be trusted – what Debeauvoir calls the “DRE wars.”

Canada: Credibility of democracy put at risk by online voting | Vancouver Sun

Chief electoral officer Keith Archer has announced the formation of a panel of experts to investigate whether British Columbia should adopt Internet voting. Let’s hope the panel focuses on the big picture before getting bogged down with technical details. Our democracy is built on the assurance of a secret ballot and the principle that one person gets only one vote. Under the current voting system, a voter casts his or her vote in the view of polling officials who ensure the voter is alone while marking the ballot — free of coercion. By contrast, any system that allows voters to fill out their ballot outside the supervision of officials cannot be truly secret. There are no safeguards to prevent someone looking over your shoulder while you vote on a smartphone. There’s no App for that. When you mark your paper ballot and place it in the ballot box, a magical thing happens; the ballot mixes with other ballots and you cease to have a copy. No one involved in the election process can connect you to your vote and you can’t prove how you voted.

National: Wide Divide In States’ Voting Preparedness | CBS DC

Nearly four months before the 2012 national elections, a study on U.S. voting preparedness has found that some states are far more ready than others. Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin were all labeled as the “best prepared” states for voting problems and disenfranchisement protection. While on the other hand, Colorado, Delaware, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina are the six “least-prepared” states. The Rutgers Law School released the study that evaluates each state’s preparedness for the 2012 election. According to the study, computerized voting systems have failed in every national election in the past decade in some way: they haven’t started, they failed in the middle of voting, the memory cards couldn’t be read, or the votes were lost as a whole. The study used five categories of proven failures and successes as its basis for judgment in each state. They also protect against machine failures that can change election outcomes and disenfranchised voters.