Editorials: Hacking the vote | Rick Holmes/MetroWest Daily News

Many questions hang over the 2012 election. What will the unemployment rate be, and will it hurt Barack Obama’s prospects? How will Mitt Romney hold up in one-on-one debates? How will both candidates bridge the enthusiasm gaps in their parties’ bases? Who’ll control Congress? Will Scott Brown or Elizabeth Warren carry the day in Massachusetts? Here’s one Democrats are asking: Will new state actions requiring photo IDs for voters, purging voter rolls and restricting voter registration drives hurt their candidates? And here’s one almost no one wants to think about: Will the private companies who build and handle voting machines steal the election?

North Carolina: Lawmakers further gut election spending as November looms | Facing South

Five months away from Election Day with marquee races for president, governor and dozens of other offices, North Carolina legislators have again voted to slash the battleground state’s election budget — a move that will cause N.C. to forfeit $4 million in federal funds and which election watchdogs fear could make voting more chaotic this fall. The budget just passed by Republican lawmakers includes $102,000 in cuts to the N.C. State Board of Elections, which oversees the state’s voting systems. That’s on top of a $660,000 slashing of the Board’s budget in 2011 for a critical state agency whose core operating budget for running elections had been just under $3.5 million a year. That means that the state election board will have less money to train poll workers, maintain voting machines and other measures to keep elections running smoothly. It also triggers a more damaging blow to election funding: By failing to maintain a level of core election spending outlined by the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, it will also cause North Carolina to forfeit $4 million in federal funds to improve voting systems in the state.

South Carolina: Bromell Tinubu: Lift ban on recalibrating voting machines | GoUpstate.com

A candidate recently certified as the Democratic nominee in South Carolina’s new 7th congressional district wants to halt a lawsuit seeking to order her into a run-off. Gloria Bromell Tinubu said in papers filed Monday with the state Supreme Court that a temporary restraining order keeping election officials from recalibrating voting machines should be lifted. Two voters who support one of Bromell Tinubu’s Democratic opponents, Preston Brittain, have sued to try to force the two candidates into a run-off. State election officials certified Bromell Tinubu’s victory last week.

Editorials: Challenging the market power of one voting machine maker | Sean Flaherty/Iowa City Press Citizen

I am co-chairman of Iowans for Voting Integrity, a nonpartisan citizen group that works for voting systems worthy of the public trust. We have worked for six years for two reforms that both we and many of the world’s leading computer technologists consider essential to fair elections: First, we believe that all computer voting systems must provide a reliable paper record of every ballot cast, and Second, we believe that following every election, election officials should routinely conduct a manual tally of a sample of cast ballots to check against electronic tallies. This column revisits an issue well-known both to the small community of advocates and technology experts who work on electronic voting issues and to an untold number of conspiracy theorists around the nation, but largely unknown outside those communities. This issue is the centralized marked power of the nation’s leading vendor of election equipment and services, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), and the opacity of ES&S’s ownership. I’d like to share some highly judicious and disturbing comments about ES&S that I heard June 7 at a reading at Prairie Lights by University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones. Along with his co-author Barbara Simons, Jones recently published an important book, “Broken Ballots.” The reading was livestreamed on the Internet, and and audio archive should be available soon.

National: Indianapolis Meeting Compares Voting Machine Standards | Indiana Public Media

State election officials from more than a dozen states are in Indianapolis to compare notes on voting machines. The controversy over “hanging chads” in the Florida presidential vote prompted Congress in 2002 to order the states to make the transition to optical-scan and touch-screen voting machines. But Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson insists Indiana is one of the few states with the technical expertise to assess whether competing models meet state standards. Still, Hoosier officials will hear presentations from many states in an effort to determine best practices, Lawson says.

Oklahoma: State makes election administration changes | NewsOK.com

The troubled April 3 special election in Tulsa’s House District 71 has led state and local officials to change procedures, software and training to makes sure all voters and candidates have confidence the process. On election night, Democrat Dan Arthrell was declared the unofficial winner by three votes. But a subsequent recount led to Republican Katie Henke being certified the winner by one vote. Only hours after the recount ended, Tulsa County election officials discovered two unsecured ballots for Arthrell still sitting in an election machine. They later said that evidence suggested that on two other occasions people were allowed to vote twice because of mistakes by precinct officials. Ultimately, the Oklahoma Supreme Court found it impossible to determine who won the election and invalidated the vote.

Virginia: Paper ballots return to Alexandria | The Washington Post

When Alexandria voters turn up at the polls Tuesday, many are going to confront old-school technology — paper ballots. Thanks to activists who objected to electronic voting machines because they did not provide a paper trail and because they feared hacking, the Virginia General Assembly in 2007 banned local governments from buying touch-screen machines when it came time to replace existing electronic systems. Now that time has come. Voters will be using a new eScan system, which requires voters to mark their paper ballots with blue or black ink in the polling booth and then line up to scan the ballots themselves into a machine. The votes will be recorded electronically.

New York: Problems with voting machine ruled Cattaraugus-Little Valley proposition invalid | The Salamanca Press

A problem with a voting machine, most likely human error, has caused a proposition at the Cattaraugus-Little Valley Central School District to be ruled invalid. The vote on Proposition No. 2, which asked voters to cast a ballot for the purchase of additional school buses, had been declared “passed” unofficially by the school district on May 15, the night of the votes. However, official results were not released for two days because school officials spotted an error. As previously reported, school officials ruled the proposition invalid when the official results were announced. “The night of the vote, when we tabulated everything, there were actually more votes cast for that proposition than there were voters who went in the door, signed the book and went into the machines,” said district superintendent Jon Peterson. “So we knew there was some error in the numbers.”

Wisconsin: Milwaukee calls in extra poll workers amid heavy turnout | JSOnline

Heavy turnout in Milwaukee led the city Election Commission to call out the reserves Tuesday. Extra poll workers were sent to polling places at Becher Terrace, Bradley Tech High School, Keenan Health Center, Morse Middle School, Rufus King International School Middle Years Campus and Cass Street, 53rd Street, Grantosa and Parkview schools, said Sue Edman, the election commission’s executive director. The backup workers were needed to handle long lines, partly because a significant number of new voters were registering at the polls, Edman said. “We knew things would be busy, but we didn’t know how busy,” Edman said. In some cases, poll workers were shifted from less-crowded polling places to busier ones, Edman said. In other cases, she used poll workers who had agreed to be on call or city administrators who had volunteered to help out, she said.

Texas: Republicans and Democrats use different voting machines in Williamson County primaries | statesman.com

A split between Williamson County Democrats and Republicans during primary voting has been behind slow election night returns in the past, but they weren’t at fault Tuesday. A Democratic poll worker forgot to take a memory card out of a voting machine in Florence, authorities said, delaying final results until about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday. Officials had already counted the rest of the votes from Democrats and Republicans by 10:15 p.m., said Rick Barron, the Williamson County election administrator. Because of differing opinions on voting security, Republicans and Democrats use separate voting machines in the primary, and that can slow down the counting process, Barron said. The different methods and some equipment glitches slowed down results in the 2010 primary, he said, and could delay results in the future.

California: Riverside County’s voting machines being used for spare parts | The Desert Sun

The roughly 3,700 electronic voting machines owned by Riverside County are locked in a warehouse, being scavenged for parts, with no plans to sell the multimillion-dollar equipment that was rendered idle by the stroke of a pen more than five years ago, a county official confirmed Wednesday. In August 2007, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified e-voting units in use in counties throughout the state following a series of security tests that revealed vulnerabilities in the machines that could leave them open to computer hack attacks. At the time, Riverside County’s Sequoia AVC Edge voting machines had been used in elections going back to 2000. County supervisors universally lauded e-voting, calling the practice a great time-saver with less risk for the type of errors that came to light in Florida following the 2000 presidential election. Members of election integrity group Save-R-Vote of Temecula Valley, a staunch opponent of e-voting, forecasted Bowen’s decision, with the head of the organization, Tom Courbat, recommending that the county sell its Sequoia units for pennies on the dollar to cut its losses. He was ignored.

United Kingdom: Politicians fail to attend electronic vote count demonstration in Belfast | BBC

Northern Ireland’s chief electoral officer has said he is disappointed that more politicians did not turn up for a demonstration of how electronic vote counting works. Only two MPs, a few local councillors and not a single MLA attended the event at Belfast City Hall on Thursday. Politicians were critical of counting times in the assembly and local government elections last May. Consultations with the parties on the new system are currently underway. But only two MPs, a handful of local councillors and not a single MLA were at Belfast City Hall for an e-counting demonstration – even though several indicated they would be there.

Arkansas: Faulkner County Election Commission certifies election, deals with voting problems | TheCabin.net

The Faulkner County Election Commission on Tuesday certified results from the preferential primary election held one week earlier, but not before the newest commissioner pleaded for more transparency from the commission and the county clerk’s office. Chris Carnahan of Conway, the commission’s newest member, said he was informed the day after the election that about 500 votes were not initially counted. He later learned that the number was 759. The uncounted votes were discovered after officials dealt with a computer error. The votes were added to candidates’ totals before election results were certified. The 759 votes did not change the outcome of any primary race. “It is troubling that I was not informed about this,” said Carnahan, who served as executive director of the Arkansas Republican Party from 1999-2001. “I think that all three election commissioners should be notified as soon as possible.”

Arkansas: Review finds 759 votes not counted on Election night in Faulkner County | TheCabin.net

Hundreds of votes were not counted during the initial stages of last week’s preferential primary election, possibly because of equipment problems, according to the Faulkner County Election Commission. The commission will meet at 3 p.m. Tuesday to review all final results and certify last Tuesday’s election, which included nonpartisan judicial races. Commissioners also are expected to review election procedures and address any reports of alleged irregularities or software that was utilized. An equipment flaw reportedly resulted in 759 votes not being read off ballots. The votes were ultimately found and tabulated, but election officials said the votes did not affect the outcome of any race that was decided before the lost votes were tabulated.

Alaska: Anchorage Assembly Certifies Election Recount, Denies Public Testimony | alaskapublic.org

The Anchorage Assembly certified the recount of the April 3rd Municipal Election Tuesday evening. Several Assembly members pushed for public comment on the certification, but the chair denied it. KSKA’s Daysha Eaton was there and filed this report. The Chair of the Election Recount Board, Denise Stephens presented a report of their work to the Assembly. She explained that 13 of the 15 precincts the Board reviewed closely matched with a few of the precincts off by 1 or 2. At Precinct 840, Service High School, the Board could not find 8 ballots for voters that had signed the register. One possible explanation is that these 8 voters left the precinct without voting after having signed the precinct register. Precinct 660 had a similar result with 6 signatures more than corresponding ballots. The recount resulted in no change in the outcome of the election. Stephens noted that the Election Board did investigate the voting machines.The April 3rd Municipal Election was fraught with problems. An Election Commission report blamed the Clerk’s Office for not distributing enough ballots. More than half of the precincts ran out of ballots.  Assembly members Harriet Drummond requested public comment on the certification.

Alaska: Anchorage Election Recount Results Show Confusion at Polls | alaskapublic.org

An Election Recount Board has released the results of a hand recount of the votes cast in 15 precincts during the Anchorage Municipal Election. The Board spent the past couple of weeks checking paper ballots against voting machine results and voter registries. The 12-person Election Recount Board met at City Hall Monday morning to sign off on their report. They found that most precincts were only off by one or two ballots. But Precinct 840 had 205 signatures more than ballots. Municipal Attorney Dennis Wheeler was on hand to explain. “The voters apparently signed the voter register but also signed the question register and had their ballots placed in question envelopes. And we think we have them all accounted for with the exception of eight.  It may be, we have some evidence of this, but it may be that those eight persons could not wait in line any longer. And, although they had signed the register, they left without actually casting a ballot, which is why you have more people who have signed than ballots cast,” Wheeler said.

South Carolina: Chaotic primary season nears conclusion | The Times and Democrat

The 2012 South Carolina election cycle already promises to be memorable even before candidates hit the starting gate.
A S.C. Supreme Court decision that chopped about 200 candidates from the June 12 primary ballots started an avalanche of actions that threatened to postpone the primaries. State Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said the election will proceed as planned. “All county election commissions should proceed with the printing of absentee ballots, preparation of voting machines, mailing of absentee ballots and the opening of the in-office absentee machines,” Whitmire said. “The SEC and (county election commissions) are under no court order directing us to delay any election activities. We cannot delay these activities to see what a court may do. “Some counties were asking whether they should ‘wait and see’ on the outcomes of the various lawsuits before printing and/or issuing ballots. The answer is that we can’t do that.”

South Carolina: Disputed special election still on in Atlantic Beach Tuesday | TheSunNews.com

Although some Atlantic Beach officials have said there will be no special election on Tuesday, Gov. Nikki Haley’s order for the vote still stands, and Horry County and state elections officials are going forward with their plans. The election became necessary after the the Nov. 1 results were challenged and then declared void by the town’s election commission. But when the election commission didn’t set a date for a new election, the governor stepped in and issued the order in March.

South Carolina: No new candidates allowed; primary ballots set | TheState.com

The South Carolina Election Commission told the state Republican Party on Thursday that it effectively can’t put a challenger to Gov. Nikki Haley’s chief legislative opponent back on the June primary ballot. The commission said in an email Thursday the state GOP can’t recertify state Senate candidate Katrina Shealy, two weeks after decertifying her and other contenders. It noted the state Supreme Court set a noon May 4 deadline for the GOP and Democratic parties to submit their lists of candidates who properly filed financial forms, and that ruling must be heeded. Shealy was among some 200 candidates for offices statewide decertified for not filing correctly. “To accept candidates after that would be in violation of that order,” election commission spokesman Chris Whitmire told The Associated Press. “The June primary ballots are set. Ballots have been printed. Voting machines have been prepared, and voters are voting.”

New York: Hamburg Voting Machine Malfunction Problem Solved | wgrz.com

Voters in Hamburg Central School will soon know their school budget vote results now that the problem with a malfunctioning ballot machine has been solved. Erie County Board of Elections Michael Agostino told 2 On Your Side a malfunctioning USB stick drive could not read the final results Tuesday night. The machine was sealed and taken away. Agostino said voting officials took all the paper ballots inserted into the machine Wednesday morning, and re-inserted them into a different machine and used a new stick drive to tally up the results. He went on to say sometimes technology will work well one minute and fail the next.

Ohio: Jefferson County: Election costs on the rise | HeraldStarOnline.com

Jefferson County commissioners Thursday agreed to appropriate more money to the county board of elections to cover increased expenses associated with the upcoming presidential election. Frank Bruzzese, board of elections board member, said presidential elections are always more expensive to conduct, especially this year when every voter will receive an application for an absentee ballot. The commissioners appropriated $605,000 to the board of elections, with the state contributing an additional $17,000 for mapping congressional districts. Bruzzese said the board of elections spent $746,000 four years ago during the presidential election. Commissioners agreed to appropriate an additional $102,000 to the board of elections, bringing the budget total to $722,000. Bruzzese said that should be enough to cover expenses associated with the general election in November.

New York: We told you so: DS200 voting machine screwed up – NY Board of Elections must be more vigilant about testing equipment | NY Daily News

You know those new electronic vote-scanning machines that are supposed to be foolproof in reading and counting every ballot in an election? Well, they’re anything but foolproof. In fact, they can screw up voter tallies to a fare-thee-well even after technicians carefully calibrate and test them. So state and city election officials have discovered, along with the machine’s manufacturer, thanks to insistent prodding by this page. Their learning experience began at a polling place at Public School 65 in the Bronx, where official tallies for 2010 primary and general elections showed that as many as 70% of the voters had cast invalid ballots, disqualifying them. The Brennan Center at NYU Law School brought the obviously impossible discrepancy to the attention of the city Board of Elections. The board responded, in essence, “Who cares?”

National: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again | Marketplace

Elections come and go and many issues change, but one seems to remain: electronic voting. Two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago — the story’s been about the same: the machines don’t seem ready for primetime, but we’re using them anyway. This week, the official verdict came back on some electronic vote-reading machines in the South Bronx that seemed a little fishy in the last congressional election, 2010. Larry Norden is with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and says sometimes the voting machine “was essentially overheating and because it was overheating, it was reading a lot of phantom votes — a vote that the voter didn’t actually cast, but that the machine saw.” The upshot is that in some districts in the Bronx, it turns out more than a third of votes weren’t counted. Things could get really scary in a state that’s gone all electronic, like South Carolina. University of South Carolina computer scientist Duncan Buell is worried for 2012: “I’m not sure there’s any real change from four years ago to now.” Seriously? What’s taking so long?

New York: Overheated ES&S DS200 automates election, places 60K votes itself | ITworld

The voting machine that cast between 50,000 and 60,000 extra votes for New York gubernatorial candidates in November has a bug that causes it to misread some ballots and add additional votes to others when the machine itself overheats, according to a review by the state Board of Election. All of the so-called “over-votes” were thrown out after election workers reported an unrealistic spike in the number of votes from the machine, from manufacturer Election Systems and Software (ES&S), which apparently overheated during the hour or so the polling location was closed for lunch. In 2010 NYC’s City Board of Elections decided to replace its old lever-driven voting machines, that required voters to flip a lever to register their choices with a newer model from ES&S. Rather than flipping a lever, voters fill in oval spaces on paper ballots, then scan the ballots into the voting machine to register their choices. The machine counts votes automatically; the stored paper ballots remain serve as the source for recounts or backups for lost votes.

New York: Overvotes: Phantoms of the Ballot Box | ReformNY

The New York State Board of Elections, New York City Boards of Elections, and voting machine manufacturer ES&S each released reports yesterday detailing the results of an investigation into the abnormally high numbers of lost votes attributed to “overvoting” in the South Bronx in 2010. The upshot is that a machine defect led to “phantom votes” on at least one machine used in the 2010 election, resulting in some candidates receiving more votes than they should have, and the choices of many more voters being voided when the machines detected both actual and phantom votes in the same contest. Now that the reports on how this happened are out, election officials must make sure that what happened in the Bronx in 2010 does not happen again in the future. Voting machines record overvotes when they detect more than one candidate selected for a contest. In such cases, no vote is recorded for any candidate in the overvoted contest, regardless of the voter’s actual intent. The Brennan Center first uncovered a high number of overvotes in the South Bronx while reviewing documents produced for discovery in a litigation it brought against the State and City. It published its findings in Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes; the report notes that in some election districts up to 40% of the votes cast did not count.

Florida: Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound in Florida | Palm Beach Post

Harri Hursti may be the best-known hacker you’ve never heard of. Largely unknown to the voting public, the Finnish computer programmer gained national notoriety among elections officials in 2005 when he broke into voting equipment in Leon County – at the supervisor of elections’ invitation – just to show it could be done. Hursti has since gone on to examine voting systems for other states. His conclusion: “Some systems are better than others, but none is nearly good enough.” In fact, a decade’s worth of Florida vote counting has been tripped up by technology of all makes and models, despite a state certification process designed to guard against such problems. Nationally, studies of the secret code underpinning election software have uncovered an array of troubles.

New York: Machine Casts Phantom Votes in the Bronx, Invalidating Real Ones: Report | WNYC

Tests on an electronic voting machine that recorded shockingly high numbers of extra votes in the 2010 election show that overheating may have caused upwards of 30 percent of the votes in a South Bronx voting precinct to go uncounted. WNYC first reported on the issue in December 2011, when it was found that tens of thousands of votes in the 2010 elections went uncounted because electronic voting machines counted more than one vote in a race.

North Carolina: Voters Report Frustrating Issues At Some North Carolina Polling Sites | digtriad.com

North Carolina voters went to the polls in large numbers to vote for Amendment One on Tuesday but the primary elections were not without issues. Over the course of the day, voters called and emailed the News 2 Information Center about problems they experienced at the polls. Some voters tell us there were party and ballot mixups at some voting locations. In Forsyth County, for example, our news crews visited the Sedge Garden Recreational Center where a voter told us she asked for a Republican Ballot but was forced to vote unaffiliated. “They told me to go to the computer because I wasn’t registered as a Republican, I was registered as Unaffiliated. So, I said, ‘well, can I have a ballot?’ and they said no you need to go to the computer.'”

West Virginia: Voting machine problems cause election night confusion in Brooke County West Virginia | wtov9.com

Elections officials in Brooke County were counting ballots well into Wednesday morning because of problems with two voting machines. Brooke County Clerk Sylvia Benzo said she lost track of time as poll workers tried to sort through election night confusion. Benzo said there was a problem in one of the Follansbee precincts early on that elections officials knew they would have to remedy. But there was another issue with a voting machine at a Weirton precinct. “I didn’t know about the one with the problem in Weirton until later in the evening, and that one ironed out and we were able to upload that information into our system and that one was OK. But this last machine that had a total of 12 votes left on it, we couldn’t get those off of there,” Benzo said.