With the primary elections approaching, six states have lawsuits pendng to end the purchase and use of computerized electronic voting machines. Voter Action filed Thursday against Colorado (and nine counties). There were similar lawsuits in California and Arizona this spring and New Mexico last year. Others targeted computerized electronic voting in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Six of these states will be using some touch screen voting machines.
Claims being made are the machines are vulnerable to software tampering, don’t keep a recountable printed record, may miscount, switch/not record votes, and add phantom votes.
continued
In California, where a primary is Tuesday, after a March lawsuit, several counties switched to printed ballots that will be counted with optical scanners. Six of the eight states will have some electronic balloting, which records votes by touch screens. In addition, Texas and Illinois had problems with electronic voting machines during their primary elections.
According to Electronic Data Services (EDS),one-third of the USA’s 3,114 counties use some type of electronic systems. Half the counties use optical scanners which read dots or mark that voters pencil in on ballots. Parts of New York and Connecticutt use lever type voting machines and some smaller communities use hand-counted paper ballots.
There has been no litigation specifically claiming the intentional manipulation of electronic voting, however, according to Black Box Voting, a Finnish expert found security flaws for a Diebold Election Systems model.
Although electronic voting was used for over five years, it was not widespread until after 2002, when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). HAVA required states to replace old voting methods such as punch cards as the results of the 2000 election in Florida are questionable. Congress gave states over than $300 million to replace older voting systems.
Although the funding was allocated, it was not used in Ohio.
As written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.(138)
As more questions re: the 2004 elections have been raised,
we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office — which means, in effect, that we have been deprived our faith in democracy itself.
Despite this, Paul DiGregorio of the federal Election Assistance Commission admits there are glitches but claims the system “can be trusted” if safeguards are in place. Although, nothing is stated to what those safeguards are.
Diebold, says the vulnerability is theoretical and will be fixed this year.
Oher defenders of electonic voting claim that problems occur because of hasty set-up before elections or poor training of poll workers. R. Doug Lewis of the Election Center, a group of state and local election officials,
“Certainly none of the allegations of security breaches on the equipment have ever been demonstrated to be true.”
If Lewis is referring to a court of law in his statement he is technically correct.
For now.
available in orange at MLW and at ePM
The allegations have never been disproving either, which is the real problem. Elections don’t have to be only free of taint and fair. They also have to appear free of taint and fair–and to many citizens, they aren’t. So whose fault is that, Mr. Lewis?
Good diary, recommended.
Actually, I have been paying more attention to health care and Part D, until I read the RFK Jr. article. But, it seems to me that you can’t have one without the other…
Now that I think of it, I see some interesting parallels between the two, but that is another article.
And on another note, it never ceases to amaze me what I find out by accident/when looking for something else!
And on another note, it never ceases to amaze me what I find out by accident/when looking for something else!
The beauty of the Internet in general and blogs in particular. Back when shortwave listening was my main hobby I used to know this guy who had his regimen planned out — listening to this station for this long, then tune to this other station and listen, and so forth. I took the complete opposite approach. I seldom had a set agenda and usually just tuned around until I found something interesting. The diversity of the programming I heard was breathtaking. I never understood why anyone would want to be so regimented.
It amazes me…there is just so much info out there and I love to read…
I don’t have a set agenda either. I just surf around until I find something. And something else and on and on…
It’s primary day and California isn’t fully prepared. Following the litigation in Alameda County, CA — including all the Berkeley and Oakland Democrats — the county, lacking the proper machines, could not borrow nearly the number of scanners needed. Consequently, the results for some tight races — especially for Democratic gubernatorial candidate — will be delayed probably a day.
Diebold’s CEO, Wally O’Dell (the one committed to helping Ohio deliver votes for President Bush) resigned last December for “personal reasons.” The company found trouble under his leadership.
There’s no excuse for the manufacturers not to have developed inexpensive retrofitting by now. If California can easily run lotteries worth many millions of dollars, it should easily run elections worth millions of votes.
Thanks for this diary, StreetKid.
Thanks for the link! Get the feeling that I am getting started on another project–lol.