Illinois: WBEZ answers what Chicago’s done to secure voting machines | WBEZ 91.5

Can we trust the machines that record our votes in local polling places? That’s the gist of the question that listener Ryan McIntyre submitted to Curious City. Like many people across the country, McIntyre is worried that election results could be manipulated by today’s electronic voting machines. Here’s how he phrased his question: “After watching the HBO documentary, ‘Hacking Democracy,’ I find using the electronic voting machines, usually by the corporation Diebold, very frivolous since they can so easily be tampered with. Entire elections can be manipulated, vote totals, everything. Before I make my vote I demand that I use the paper ballot. What is being done to eliminate these machines from use in the city of Chicago, a city known to be ravaged by dirty politics anyways? My question can include the entire state of Illinois, not just Chicago.” The simplest answer to McIntyre’s question is that elections officials in Chicago, suburban Cook County and other local jurisdictions are likely to stick with the machines they’re using now, at least for the foreseeable future. And for what it’s worth, Diebold, which is now called Premier Election Solutions, didn’t make any of the voting machines used anywhere in Illinois, according to a database maintained by The Verified Voting Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group based in California.

National: Election watchdogs keep wary eye on paperless e-voting systems | Computerworld

As the clock winds down to what could turn out to be an extremely close presidential race, some election watchdogs are keeping a wary eye on paperless electronic voting machines that are scheduled to be used in several key states and jurisdictions around the country. Paperless systems are basically Direct Recording Electronic systems (DREs) in which voters cast their ballots in a completely electronic fashion by using push buttons or touchscreens. Some DREs allow voters to print out a paper copy of their ballots to verify that their vote was cast as intended. Election watchdog groups such as Verified Voting and Common Cause and academicians have insisted that such a voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) is vital to ensuring the integrity of the vote in jurisdictions that use DREs.

Pennsylvania: VotePA: Reliance on Voting Machine Batteries Ill-advised in Wake of Sandy | Keystone Politics

With millions of customers in multiple states out of electricity following Superstorm Sandy, VotesPA is asking how electronic voting machines will operate in the event some polling places in Pennsylvania and other states do not have power restored in time for next Tuesday’s Presidential Election. VotePA today announced a warning that, should this become a problem next week, the answer is not to rely on batteries to run voting machines for all or even a substantial part of Election Day. … VotePA Executive Director Marybeth Kuznik says that “officials in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, other states affected by Sandy have been quoted in the press as saying that batteries could potentially run their equipment through the day”

Fiji: Concern electronic voting will confuse Fijians | ABC Radio Australia

While an electronic voter registration system has been applauded, there are fears the absence of a paper trail for voting may compromise the counting process. Professor Wadan Nasey, a Fijian academic at Australia’s James Cook University told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat program that electronic voting may also be confusing for some voters.  “A lot of our people are very, very uneducated and they’re not able to even use an ATM machine,” he said.

North Carolina: Election officials not worried about touch screen voting machines | WRAL.com

A handful of voters throughout the state have reported problems making a choice on touch-screen voting machines used in roughly a quarter of North Carolina counties. Newspapers in both Cumberland and Guilford counties have reported on voter complaints. Callers to WRAL-TV have also asked about problems their friends encountered when voting early. “We don’t even question the voter as to whether it’s true or not,” said Terri Robertson, director of the Cumberland County Board of Elections. She said her staffers are instructed to shut down any voting machine that a voter is having problems with and service it. Voters, meanwhile, are directed to another machine, she said.

Editorials: Could Romney-Linked Electronic Voting Machines Jeopardize Ohio’s Vote Accuracy? | Keith Thomson/Huffington Post

In 2006, a group of computer hackers reprogrammed a Dutch electronic voting machine to play chess. The Dutch government subsequently imposed a moratorium on the use of electronic voting machines. In 2009, German Federal Constitutional Court ruled the country’s electronic voting systems unreliable to the point that their use was deemed unconstitutional. In June, Ireland paid a metal recycling company €70,267 to dismantle and recycle the country’s €55 million worth of electronic voting machines. In the United States, 35% of this year’s general election votes will be cast on electronic voting machines that, “in terms of effort required to compromise the systems, are in the same ballpark as the Irish voting machines,” according to Dan Wallach, a professor in Rice University’s Department of Computer Science and a computer systems security specialist. “The current voting machines were designed with insufficient attention to computer security.”

National: Think the Florida Recount Was Bad? Just Wait Until November 6 | The Atlantic

The movie Unstoppable is playing this week on HBO, and it’s hard not to watch even just the trailers for the action-adventure film without seeing parallels to the coming election. Folks, we are just a little more than two weeks away from Election Day, and we may well be the runaway train, barreling straight toward an election-night, voting-rights crash-and-burn which easily could be worse and more damaging to the nation than Bush v. Gore. Not only is there no Denzel Washington to save us, not only is there no guarantee of a happy Hollywood ending, but none of the so-called adults running the country even seems willing to publicly acknowledge the danger.

National: Paper prophets: Why e-voting is on the decline in the United States | Ars Technica

Ernest Zirkle was puzzled. The resident of Fairfield Township in Cumberland County, NJ, ran for a seat on his local Democratic Executive Committee on June 7, 2011. The official results showed him earning only nine votes, compared to 34 votes for the winning candidate. But at least 28 people told Zirkle they voted for him. So he and his wife—who also ran for an open seat and lost—challenged the result in court. Eventually, a county election official admitted the result was due to a programming error. A security expert from Princeton was called in to examine the machines and make sure no foul play had occurred. Unfortunately, when he examined the equipment on August 17, 2011, he found someone deleted key files the previous day, making it impossible to investigate the cause of the malfunction. A new election was held on September 27, and the Zirkles won. A decade ago, there was a great deal of momentum toward paperless electronic voting. Spooked by the chaos of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress unleashed a torrent of money to buy new high-tech machines. Today, momentum is in the opposite direction. Computer security researchers have convinced most observers that machines like the ones in Fairfield Township degrade the security and reliability of elections rather than enhancing them. Several states passed laws mandating an end to paperless elections. But bureaucratic inertia and tight budgets have slowed the pace at which these flawed machines can be retired.

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.

Ohio: Liberal critics worry about Romney connection to voting machines in Ohio | The Washington Post

Hart InterCivic is an Austin-based voting machine company that serves local governments nationwide. Its clients include Hamilton County, Ohio, which administers elections in Cincinnati. Hart InterCivic also has in its DNA just enough traces of Bain & Co. and Mitt Romney campaign donors to trigger serious angst in the liberal blogosphere about the fate of Ohio’s must-have 18 electoral votes.

Virginia: Fairfax Democrats warn of voting machine problems | The Washington Post

Fairfax Democrats issued a warning Thursday about reports that touch-screen voting machines were malfunctioning during early voting, switching ballot selections to the opposing candidate. Jessica Tripp and Penelope Nunez move a table at Arlington Art Center, a polling center, in preparation for Super Tuesday. (Melina Mara – The Washington Post) Fairfax County elections officials said they were aware of two instances in which voters claimed the machines had changed their votes. But officials expressed confidence that both were cases of user error.

Ohio: Romney-linked voting machine company to count votes in Ohio | Salon.com

Voting machine provider Hart Intercivic will be counting the votes in various counties in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Colorado and elsewhere throughout the country come Nov. 6 — even though it has extensive corporate ties to the Mitt Romney camp, and even though a study commissioned by the state of Ohio has labeled its voting system a “failure” when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections. Reports of Hart Intercivic’s ties to Romney first surfaced in late September, in a blog post by Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis in the Free Press, an Ohio website that reported that a key investor in Hart was HIG Capital, seven of whose directors were former employees of Bain & Co., a consulting company of which Mitt Romney was once CEO. (Romney left the company in 1984 to co-found a spinoff company, Bain Capital.) HIG Capital announced its investment in Hart on July 6, 2011, just one month after Romney formally announced the launch of his presidential campaign.

National: Report sees decline in voting glitches … but vote-by-mail sparks concern | NBC

The good news about voting technology is that the upgrades put into place since the controversial 2000 presidential election have made ballot tallies twice as accurate as they were — but the bad news is that the rise of early vote-by-mail systems could erode those gains. That’s the assessment from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, which has been monitoring voting technology and election administration nationwide for nearly a dozen years — ever since the “hanging-chad” debacle of the Bush vs. Gore election. Coming less than three weeks before this year’s Election Day, the project’s latest report includes some recommendations that could improve the election process in as little as two years. But first, project co-director Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at MIT, wants to celebrate the good news. “Voter registration is gradually getting better,” he told me. “Voting machines are clearly better. This is a voting-technology feel-good story. We’re getting the voter registration process into the 20th century, if not the 21st century.”

National: Gains in voting-machine technologies could be cancelled out by errors introduced through mail and Internet voting | phys.org

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.”

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.”

Tennessee: More Problems for Early Voters in Shelby County | WREG.com

Voting problems are already causing a headache for some people on the very first day of early voting. News Channel 3 received calls from voters saying they had to wait nearly an hour for voting machines to be fixed. Andrea Williams waited in line for an hour and a half to cast her ballot.  She says the line was moving pretty fast at Anointed Temple of Praise polling site, but then it stopped, “We asked what`s going on and the young lady came out and said the little ballot that you use to put in to vote stopped working.” The Election Commission says the ballot burner broke causing the machines to reject the cards.  The Commission has technicians floating around town in case something like this happens, and they got to the polling site within an hour to fix the problem.

Indiana: Lake County: No repeat of 2008 election results this year | Post-Tribune

“We have made a substantial change since the primary in 2008 when we had that vote count hold up,” said Steve Shamo, with MicroVote Indiana, the company that provides the county’s election technology. Shamo Tuesday told the Lake County Board of Elections during the test of the 2012 voting machines that the problem in 2008 arose when it came to entering the 15,000 absentee ballots into the computerized system election day. Once workers began entering the absentee ballots for a precinct, they could not access the polling place results for that precinct, even though those results were available, until all the absentee ballots were manually entered causing the delay in reporting.

Oklahoma: New Voting Machine Helps Oklahoma Visually Impaired Cast their Ballot | KOKH

The Oklahoma State Election Board demonstrates how a new voting machine can help visually impaired voters cast their ballot on Election Day. “It is an interface that allows voters with disabilities to vote without assistance while the regular voting is still going on,” said Pam Slater with the Oklahoma State Election Board. The new voting machine uses an audio-tactile interface (ATI) which allows blind voters to listen and scroll through an audio version of the general election ballot to make their choices. “It is very easy to feel around and feel exactly what you need,” said Cathy Tuton who is visually impaired. “It tells you everything you need to know.”

Belgium: Flemish voters back nationalists in local elections | Deutsche Welle

Belgium has been voting in local elections that have taken on added significance in light of the country’s linguistic divide. Flemish nationalists looked set to make strides in pulling away from French-speaking Wallonia. With nearly 80 percent of votes counted late on Sunday, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) had taken a 36 percent share in the port city of Antwerp, Flanders’ largest city. Across Flanders, the N-VA appeared be garnering 20-30 percent of the vote, compared with just 5 percent in municipal polls six years ago.

Belgium: De Wever eyes victory in Antwerp | euronews

Eight million Belgians are voting in local elections today which may mark a sea change in politics if there is an historic shift of power in second city Antwerp, and it is taken by a man who has never held elected office. Bart de Wever leads the nationalist N-VA, and might use the capture of Antwerp, Europe’s second largest port, as a springboard for national power, and Flemish secession from Belgium.

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.

National: New Election System Promises to Help Catch Voting-Machine Problems | Wired

When voting system activists in the U.S. managed to get many paperless electronic voting machines replaced a few years ago with optical-scan machines that use paper ballots, some believed elections would become more transparent and verifiable. But a spate of problems with optical-scan machines used in elections across the country have shown that the systems are just as much at risk of dropping ballots and votes as touchscreen voting machines, either due to intentional manipulation or unintentional human error. A new election system promises to resolve that issue by giving election officials the ability to independently and swiftly audit the performance of their optical-scan machines. Called Clear Ballot, the system is patterned in part after an auditing system that was used in California in 2008. It uses high-speed commercial scanners made by Fujitsu, as well as software developed by the Clear Ballot team, which includes a former developer who worked under Ray Ozzie to create Lotus Notes.

Florida: Palm Beach County’s 2012 Ballot Debacle | CBS Miami

Al Paglia yearned to hear that he had won the Wellington, Florida city council election. “It was ecstasy I had 50 people at my house at 11:00 at night it finally came across the TV screen.” Paglia recalled. “On the election website Al Paglia upsets incumbent – it was wonderful.” The supposed win took place earlier this year in March. Even in the world of politics – his honeymoon was shorter than anyone could have imagined. Just days after being declared the victor in a city councilman race, he got a call saying he was indeed… a loser. It was Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections, Susan Bucher, and her team who discovered the mistake. In two races, winners including Paglia were announced and certified… when they were actually the losers.   Bucher said Palm Beach’s optical scan election system had – unbeknownst to anyone-mixed up the race results. As a result, the wrong winners and losers were called.   When asked by CBS4 Investigative reporter, Michele Gillen, what is was like to declare the wrong winners? Bucher said, “It humiliating. It was awful. It was never our intent.” Bucher is one of several election supervisors we’ve met, who are taking aim at Florida’s audit process — the review of the paper ballots– only a sampling is done, and only after elections are certified.

Arizona: Pima County readies its aged counting devices for election | azstarnet

The optical scanners that will be used to count Pima County votes in November’s general election were bought in the 1990s, when the technology was already old. “It’s like flying around in an old DC-7,” said Charles Geoffrion, chairman of the county’s Election Integrity Commission. He was referring to a 1950-60s’ era propeller airplane. The machines are being disassembled, cleaned and tested. Worn-out parts are being replaced with parts the county acquired by tracing the scanner supply chain. The original manufacturer no longer supplies them. Pima County Elections Department Director Brad Nelson hopes to buy new equipment next year, but he anticipates that the current scanners will be adequate for this election.

Rhode Island: Supreme Court denies manual recount in Pawtucket House race | The Providence Journal

The Rhode Island Supreme Court has denied challenger Carlos Tobon’s bid for a manual recount of the Pawtucket House race he lost by one-vote, after four ballot counts produced four different results. In a 3-to-2 decision Friday, the high court said the state Board of Elections had already provided to Tobon – who lost to longtime state Rep. William San Bento 544 to 543 – all of the relief the law requires, including a “manual re-feeding of ballots” into the voting machines and “a manual recount of those ballots rejected by the machine.” Read the decision: Carlos Tobon v. Rhode Island Board of Elections et al. No. 2012-289-M.P. (Order).pdf

Louisiana: New, smaller districts create voting machine shortage in Louisiana | The Advertiser

When local governments developed new election districts after the 2010 Census, they drew so many small precincts that it forced the state to purchase additional voting machines and limit the number of machines at each precinct. Secretary of State Tom Schedler said Wednesday that local governments went overboard. “We have precincts with one voter,” Schedler told a joint meeting of the House and Senate Governmental Affairs committees. “Several have three or four.” In Lincoln Parish, local officials increased the number of voting precincts from 42 to 102. “There’s no way the population doubled,” Schedler said. “It’s just out of control,” said Sen. Mike Walsworth, R-West Monroe, reacting to Schedler’s report.

Oklahoma: School for the Blind tests new voting machines | MuskogeePhoenix.com

Oklahoma voters with visual impairments will be able to cast ballots independently and privately this year for the first time in a presidential election. The state’s new voting machines incorporate an audio aid that guides blind voters through the various ballot choices. Once selections have been made, the audio device summarizes the selections made and provides voters an opportunity to change their choices before the ballot is cast. Jane Thomas, a social worker at the Oklahoma School for the Blind, said students who participated Wednesday in a mock election encountered “some glitches.” But for the most part, Thomas said the technology incorporated this year with the state’s new voting machines is “wonderful.”

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.

Editorials: Beware Electronic Voting | Bob Barr/Town Hall

To paraphrase 15th Century Dutch Philospher Erasmus’ well-known characterization of women — “technology, can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” Ever since the debacle that was the vote counting in Florida a dozen years ago, virtually every jurisdiction in the country has moved away from some form of manual voting machine to embrace the technology of electronic voting (“e-voting” for short). Yet, as states and local elections offices have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to institute e-voting, little attention has been paid the potential dangers inherent in this form of vote counting. Indeed, even as many Republican voters and legislators decry the possibility of voting abuse posed by suspected voter fraud and have ousted for voter ID mandates, the specter of lost votes posed by e-voting continues to go largely unnoticed or deliberately ignored. However, as noted in a recent editorial in USA Today by Philip Meyer, professor emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, electronic voting machines have the very real “potential to steal your vote.” The problem identified by Meyer is magnified this election cycle, given the high likelihood of another exceptionally tight presidential race.