Monday, Sept. 21, 2009

The Sale Of Diebold's Election Business Has Alarmed Civic Watchdogs

To some election law experts, dire warnings by vocal activists that faulty voting machines are threatening democracy tend to ring false.

After all, questionable machines are only one of the many problems plaguing an election system that's outmoded, decentralized and chronically underfunded. The best machines in the world won't help if local election officials can't hire and train enough poll workers and clean up their error-riddled voter registration lists.read more >>

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The high court’s role on the Voting Rights Act

Op-ed

The Hill
By Jack Bass and Armand Derfner
06/10/09

As the Supreme Court nears the end of its term, the perceived reality is that Justice Anthony Kennedy holds the key vote in its most important case, whether the court will override the will of Congress in its 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act.read more >>

June 2, 2009

ST. PAUL — A lawyer for Norm Coleman, the Republican who is fighting a recount battle with Al Franken, a Democrat, for a Senate seat, faced sharply skeptical questioning on Monday from justices of the Minnesota Supreme Court in a crucial hearing on the case.

Mr. Coleman, who served one term before the November election, is challenging the rulings of a state recount board and a lower court, which declared Mr. Franken the winner of the race by hundreds of votes.read more >>

For most of the country, Election Day was an historical event, signaling a significant change to our country's political character. But, as NY1's Susan Jhun explains in the following report, for disabled voters who have had trouble voting in the past, Election Day was just more of the same.

Disabled voter T.K. Small describes his experience at the polls on Election Day as "somewhere between dreadful and horrible."read more >>

When problems occur in elections, it's often not until after the polls close that information about them begins to trickle out.

This is the period when officials are scanning and counting mail-in ballots, completing tabulations, determining which elections may require a recount, and beginning their canvassing to certify the election results.read more >>

Many of the states that allowed early voting this year experienced few delays on Election Day, and now federal election officials, lawmakers and voting experts say people in every state should have the same privilege.

There is also increasing support for broadly expanding voter registration rolls, possibly by having the federal government require the states to make registration automatic for all eligible voters. Supporters say universal registration could reduce registration fraud and the confusion at the polls that results when voters are purged from the rolls.read more >>

November 4, 2008

After the embarrassing irregularities of the 2000 vote — hanging chads, anyone? — Congress resolved to ensure that they wouldn't happen again and spent $2 billion on new-generation voting machines. read more >>

I'm receiving e-mail from a number of readers who have not received absentee ballots they requested or who mailed in their ballots but had the ballot returned to them by the postal service.
A reader has pointed me to this site for overseas voters, which discusses back-up ballots for those who requested an absentee ballot but did not receive one. The rules vary state by state but in some locations you can actually fax your back-up ballot to election officials.
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Democrats and Unaffiliated Gain; Republicans Lose
EDITORS, NEWSPERSONS AND READERS: PLEASE READ NOTE 3. IT EXPLAINS WHY THE FIGURES IN THIS RELEASE ARE HEADED BY THE WORD “ESTIMATED,” AND WHY INCREASES AND DECREASES IN REGISTRATION FOR INDIVIDUAL STATES ARE NOT QUANTIFIED BEYOND THE WORDS “LARGE” AND “SMALL” IT IS HOPED THAT AFTER THIRTY-TWO AND A HALF YEARS OF DOING THIS, THESE ESTIMATES MIGHT BE CONSIDERED RELIABLE. THIS REPORT IS AVAILABLE IN A DOWNLOADABLE COPY AT

http://www.american.edu/media/electionexperts.read more >>

By Amy Goodman

Election Day approaches, and with it a test of our election system’s integrity. Who will be allowed to vote; who will be barred? Who will get paper ballots; who will use electronic voting machines? Will polls be open long enough to accommodate what is expected to be a historic turnout?read more >>

(CNN) -- Eight years after Florida's hanging chads exasperated voters and helped usher in sweeping changes in voting technology, many election observers remain concerned about the accuracy of the electronic voting systems most Americans will use November 4.

Touch-screen machines can occasionally fail or register votes for unintended candidates. Optical-scan systems can have trouble reading paper ballots that are too long or marked with the wrong ink. At least one study suggests that electronic voting machines can be easily hacked.read more >>

In elections news, voter rights activists in Pennsylvania have won a major court victory to safeguard against faulty electronic voting machines. A federal judge has ordered state election officials to provide emergency paper ballots if half or more electronic voting machines become inoperable at any polling site in the state. The lawsuit was filed after Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State ordered counties to provide emergency paper ballots only if every electronic voting machine breaks down.read more >>

If the presidential race in Florida is as close as it was in 2000 there may be new reason for concern.

The state announced a new “no match” list this week that included over 12,000 names of newly registered voters whose identities cannot be verified, and who therefore will likely be ineligible to vote. While that’s just a fraction of the 438,000 new voters registered here since September 8, the fact that a disproportionate number of them are African-Americans, Hispanics, and Democrats, has watchdog groups crying foul.read more >>

Escalating rage over the role of ACORN in registering presumably Democratic voters threatens to undermine the political legitimacy of a Barack Obama victory Nov. 4. And perhaps that's the point. But if John McCain were well ahead in the polls, the left would undoubtedly be shouting about electoral-system failures to de-legitimize a GOP win. It is too late to tone down the rhetoric for 2008, but if we want to end these sorts of attacks, there's only one solution: States must become more serious about how they administer elections.read more >>

As the 2008 presidential election heads into its final week, the current president threw a political wild card on the table late Friday, when he asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the status of 200,000 Ohio voters.

George W. Bush's request, if honored, could be politically explosive. It would remind voters of the Department of Justice's partisan abuses of power in the scandal surrounding the firing of seven U.S. attorneys in 2006 who did not deliver 'voter fraud' convictions.read more >>

In election news, a series of voting disputes in key swing states remain unresolved with just eight days to go before the presidential election. In Colorado, more than 11,000 voters in Denver have not received absentee ballots because of a mistake made by the company Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia was supposed to have delivered 21,000 ballots to a Denver mail processing facility on October 16, but the company only delivered about half of the requested ballots.

MIAMI -- Unprecedented numbers of early voters in Florida and other southern states are prompting election officials to add equipment, extend schedules and hand out water and chairs to make people comfortable as they wait for hours at polling places.

About 150,000 people cast ballots in Florida on Monday and Tuesday, the first two days of early voting.

''It doesn't matter if there's lines,'' 81-year-old Doris Vance, a Barack Obama supporter in Pompano Beach, Fla., said Wednesday. ''I knew there would be lines, but I don't mind it. The weather is good.''read more >>

In two weeks, the American voting system will be stressed as never before with record voter registration and expected large turnouts. But the greatest pressure will fall on 11 battleground states whose stars are aligned for an election debacle: tight races coupled with radical changes in their voting systems, according to electionline.org, a nonpartisan project of the Pew Center on the States that studies election reform. read more >>

Senator Barack Obama’s announcement on Sunday of his record-shattering $150 million fund-raising total for September underscored just how much his campaign has upended standards for raising money in presidential campaigns.

His campaign has now raised more than $600 million, almost equaling what all the candidates from both major parties collected in private donations in 2004.read more >>

Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
TALLAHASSEE — Overwhelmed county elections officials are getting a lot more work - from the state Division of Elections.
So many voter registration applications are flowing into Tallahassee that state officials can't handle them all. They want local supervisors to help process the applications, according to a memo by Division of Elections chief Donald Palmer on Wednesday.
The request for help came less than two weeks before Florida's voter registration books close on Oct. 6.read more >>

2008 Primary in Review from Electionline.org analyzes the dramatically increased number of voters that taxed the election system more than any administrative problem.

For link to report, click here.

Faced with a surge in voter registrations leading up to Nov. 4, election officials across the country are bracing for long lines, equipment failures and confusion over polling procedures that could cost thousands the chance to cast a ballot.read more >>