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Election Counting Accuracy

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  1. Statewide Election Results Verification (Adams)
      Provides a glossary for "audits of precincts," "verification of statewide results," "logic and accuracy test," and "recount." 04-06

  2. Verification of Results
Multimedia
  1. Whistleblower Steve Heller's Story (YouTube.com)
      Provides the story of Steve Heller, a person caught revealing dishonest activity by Diebold, manufacturer of election equipment. 07-08

News
  1. -02-17-09 Humboldt County Transparency Project (Times-Standard)
      "The Humboldt Transparency Project is now up and running, albeit in an infant form, allowing anyone with Internet access the chance to log on and recount each and every ballot cast in the June election in any way they see fit." 02-09

  2. -08-25-08 Programming Error Found in Nationally Used Voting Machines (Washington Post)
      "A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges."

      "The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold." 08-08

  3. -09-05-09 Editorial: New Monopoly on Vote Counting Is Bad for Democracy (OpEdNews.com)
      "The monopoly is but a part of the troubling equation. Consider the Government Accountability Office's (GOA) stunted investigation of Sarasota's 2006 District 13 with its 18,000 missing votes. While the investigation fizzled with inconclusive results and investigative paths not taken, the initial findings of the investigation revealed an end-to-end ES&S election process lacking good business practices and void of independent checks and balances. ES&S virtually owns the election process. ES&S manufactures the machines, produces test data, defines the testing process, counts the votes, determines the winner, and declares the election valid." 09-09

  4. -11-06-08 Something Fishy in Alaska? (BradBlog.com)
      "In Alaska, more people voted for George W. Bush in 2004 than for Sarah Palin on Tuesday despite an identical 61-36 margin of victory. Yes. Only four years ago 54,304 Alaskans got off their sofas and voted for Bush, but decided to sit home and not vote for Palin in 2008."

      "In turn, I have to ignore the 30,520 Alaskans who felt progressive enough in 2004 to vote for John Kerry, but weren’t inspired enough to get out and vote for Barack Obama."

      "Pre-election polls had both Mark Begich-D and Ethan Berkowitz-D solidly beating incumbents Senator Ted Stevens and Congressman Don Young by at least 6-10 points."

      "Stevens is currently ahead of Begich by 3,353 votes with 49,000 ballots left to count. While Berkowitz is behind Young by 16,887 votes; a 51-43 margin. Are we to believe Don Young came from an 8 point average polling deficit to win by 8 points-a whopping 16 point turnaround???" 11-08

  5. -11-21-07 Top Voting Machine Company Sued (FogCityJournal.com)
      "City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed suit against the City's voting systems vendor today, charging Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software, Inc. with a panoply of wrongdoing that includes fraud, breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation and multiple violations of California's Elections Code, False Claims Act and Unfair Competition Law. In a 23-page civil complaint filed in San Francisco Superior Court this morning, Herrera detailed a months-long pattern of misrepresentations and voting system problems by ES&S that caused California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to impose stringent conditions on the City's use of the company's voting machines to conduct its municipal election earlier this month. Because of those restrictions, San Francisco election officials were forced to tabulate ballots centrally; to remake thousands of ballots by hand; and to borrow equipment from another county. City elections officials were unable to release election results from the polling places on election night as is the ordinary practice, and do not expect to announce final results for San Francisco's municipal election until Dec. 4, 2007 -- fully four weeks after Election Day." 11-07

  6. Methods for Marking and Counting Ballots in the USA (NoLeakyBuckets.org)
      "I have found that many well-meaning actions by citizens and by legislators, defined rules, laws, and procedures which created problems because their scope included circumstances not perceived by the writers. To attempt to minimize that situation, I finally have accomplished this long-standing task -- an attempt to specify and list every known method of casting ballots in the US, and every known method of counting ballots (votes) in the US." 08-07

Papers
  1. -05-12-06 New Threats to Voting Security Uncovered (New York Times)
      "With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem."

      " 'It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system,' said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who is an examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania, where the primary is to take place on Tuesday." 06-06

  2. -06-27-06 Study: 80% of Voting Machines Are Vulnerable (USA Today)
      "Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election 'pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections,' a report out Tuesday concludes."

      "There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities." 06-06

  3. -06-27-06 Vote-Switching Software Found in 2006 (VotersUnite.org)
      Provides instances where the voting machines recorded votes incorrectly, organized by date. 06-06

  4. -06-27-06 Vote-Switching Software by State (VotersUnite.org)
      Provides instances where the voting machines recorded votes incorrectly. 06-06

  5. -07-01-08 Editorial: An Argument for Lever Machines (OPEDNews.com)
      "In my analysis, the lever machine deserves recognition as one of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius, a fact that is reflected in their continued competitiveness against recent voting technologies in every accepted performance measure. With as many as 28,000 parts, their mechanisms reflect an agonizingly difficult period of development, spanning more than twenty years (1888-1919) in which interlocking mechanisms had to be developed that were capable of dealing with the enormous complexity and variety of American elections. The result was a machine that captures in its immutable mechanical operations the voting rules that the American people, in their wisdom, developed in order to capture the will of the people." 06-08

  6. -08-20-08 Editorial: Election Machine Vendors Do Not Warranty Their Products (WheresthePaper.org)
      "By their own admission in the words of their signed contracts with government agencies, voting machine vendors “disclaim” or refuse to stand behind their products, attempting to create what laypeople would probably call an 'as is and with all faults' type of sale contract." 06-08

  7. -Editorial: The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away (Scoop Independent News - Thom Hartmann)
      "Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates around the country really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles, but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading machines showed them winning."

      "But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it." 06-06

  8. -Editorial: New Court Filing Shows Vulnerability of Ohio's 2004 Election Results (Truth-out.org)
      "A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush."

      "Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, [IT security expert Stephen] Spoonamore declared: " 'The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control.' " 07-11

  9. -Editorial: No-Confidence Vote Earned by Machines (Atlanta-Journal Constitution - Bob Barr)
      "A recent, 150-page report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School concluded that because there are no comprehensive standards for electronic voting machines, and given the demonstrated potential problems inherent in such devices, all states ought to take certain steps to enhance security and minimize opportunity for fraud , including:

      • Automatic and routine audits, with voter-verified paper records, in every election.

      • Random selection of voting machines on election days for testing and examination for possible software attacks or viruses.

      • Banning of wireless components in all voting machines." 08-06

  10. Documentation of Vote-Switching Software by Vendors (VotersUnite.org)
      Provides records of errors starting in 2006. 06-06

  11. Machine Errors Caught by Hand Counts (VotersUnite.org)
      Shows a map of the U.S. with 51 documented cases of machine error, caught by hand counts of ballots, in 2006 elections. 06-06

  12. Stewart v. Blackwell Decision on Ohio Voting Machines (USCourts.gov)
      The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit REVERSED the decision of United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio at Akron. "The [District] court stated that: 'When coupled with the previously referenced de minimis affects of the punch card ballots, these facts do not allow this Court to conclude that an 'actual' denial of the right to vote on account of race occurs.' "Finally, the court concluded that 'the operation of different voting systems by different counties within the same state does not amount to a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.' ”

      "Relying heavily on Justice Souter’s dissenting opinion in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 134 (2000) (Souter, J., dissenting), the district court concluded that states may freely use a variety of different voting technologies without running afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. Further, the court concluded that the defendants have a rational basis for continuing to utilize punch card technology in that it is cost effective and there are security concerns with electronic technology." 04-06

       


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