- In Colorado, Holly Lowder resigned from her post as elections director two months before one of the biggest elections in Colorado history. She held that job since 2006. Colorado Ethics Watch had been pursuing documents from the state regarding Lowder's ties to John Paulsen whose company installed voter databases in more than 30 counties and recently got two contracts worth almost $184,000 with the secretary of state's office for data work related to the current election season. It turns out Lowder and Paulsen were living together.
- In Virginia, students who are registering to vote for the first time are facing ambiguous new state rules about whether a campus address is sufficient for voter registration purposes. Two weeks ago, in Montgomery County, where Virginia Tech is located, the county election director said students who register to vote in Virginia could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax returns -- which the Internal Revenue Service later said was incorrect -- and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents' car and health insurance. Student voting advocates said those remarks were intended to suppress student voting.
There seems to be one reported incidence of the Democrats playing games to suppress Republican voter registration. This September in Ohio the McCain-Palin campaign sent out an absentee ballot request form to approximately one million Republican voters. The form had an unnecessary box where the voter needed to check that he or she was a legitimate voter. The Democratic Secretary of State is reading the law to say that if that box is not checked the voter is not allowed to vote. She has offered to contact people who did not fill out the box but the Republicans find that unacceptable and her reading of the law as too narrow.
This is all adding up to a concerted campaign by McCain-Palin to undermine the progress Obama-Biden have made in registering voters. How many hundreds of thousands of voters will be intimidated by these actions, challenged on Election Day or prevented from voting? Will the Republicans be able to de-register voters faster than the Democrats register them?
Voting Machines that are Insecure and Unreliable
This summer there has been a rash of stories acknowledging the faulty nature of electronic voting machines confirming research done since 2003 showing electronic voting cannot be trusted due to the potential for security breach and malfunction.
This summer the Electronic voting machine manufacturer Premier Elections Solutions (formerly Diebold) warned government officials of a critical programming error that can drop votes before they are tallied. Premier’s disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003. Premier Election Solutions also confirmed that a software glitch in its proprietary systems caused 1,000 votes not to be counted in an Ohio election this March. These problems could have affected election results in 34 states in recent years.
It is not only the Diebold electronic voting system that has problems – they all do. A security review of the Sequoia voting system this summer found serious security and other flaws. Sequoia, along with ES&S voting systems, are the subject of a new paper, and video issued by the Computer Security Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The paper clarifies that security is lacking in both Sequoia and ES&S voting systems: “the electronic voting systems that we have reviewed are neither secure nor well-designed.”
The Computer Security Group paper also discusses the failure of the certification process which does not and cannot adequately secure a software driven voting system. The failure of certification is also examined by a report this month issued by the GAO which describes numerous instances of problems with voting machines. In addition to these problems being acknowledged or discovered there have also been a series of voting failures within the last two years demonstrating that the dysfunction of voting machines is not theoretical, but real. Below are some examples:
- Most recently on September 9th the nation’s capitol saw a meltdown, D.C. election officials blamed a defective computer memory cartridge for producing what appeared to be thousands of write-in votes that officials say did not exist. In the Republican at-large race, 1,560 write-ins at 9:50 p.m. dwindled to 18 by 12:16 a.m. Thousands of votes were added to individual candidates, inflating vote totals. At 9:50 p.m. 8,246 ballots were recorded in the at-large Republican primary, but that shrank to 3,735 by 12:16 a.m. The numbers were so bizarre that the malfunction was caught and corrected. But how it happened remains something of a mystery. Sequoia Voting Systems, says that its database and software functioned just fine, and pointed to static electricity or other possibilities.
- In Palm Beach a recount this September 1 found 3,400 fewer votes than the original count. Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson is unable to explain the new totals, the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board is showing veteran jurist Richard Wennet leading by just 60 votes. Three weeks after the election the race is still unresolved and last week after looking for missing ballots, the Canvassing Board now has more ballots than were originally counted.
- In Arkansas during an election this spring 45 votes cast in one race were added to the totals of an entirely different race that wasn’t even on the same ballot.
- Last year, Volusia County Florida was forced to replace over 300 memory cards on their voting machines due to manufacturing defects.
- Last year, Lawrence County Ohio had one race where the voting machines flipped the results between two candidates due to a programming error.
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