'Daily Voting News' For February 24, 2007

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org Princeton's Professor Ed Felten said this in regards to the Sarasota Co. Florida voting machine report, "Experience teaches that systems that are insecure tend to be unreliable as well - they tend to go wrong on their own even if nobody is attacking them. Code that is laced with buffer overruns, array out-of-bounds errors, integer overflow errors, and the like tends to be flaky. Sporadic undervotes are the kind of behavior you would expect to see from a flaky voting technology. The study claims to have ruled out reliability problems as a cause of the undervotes, but their evidence on this point is weak, and I think the jury is still out on whether voting machine malfunctions could be a significant cause of the undervotes." The town of Putney, Vermont may be about ready to accept a free optical-scan machine from the state. They will no longer count their votes the traditional way; hand counting. Gone will be the crowd of counters sharing pizza and enjoying the community spirit. Putney is not alone as 75 of the state's 246 municipalities have already made the decision to change over to optical-scan. ...

CA: Riverside County - Critics feed Riverside County review panel examples of voting system issues LINK

CA: San Joaquin County - Questions linger for electronic voting machines LINK

FL: 'Paper trail' printer jams can gum up vote recounts LINK

FL: Sarasota County - Ed Felten - Sarasota Voting Machines Insecure LINK

FL: Sarasota County - Jennings Says Florida's Audit of Election 'Flawed, Incomplete' LINK

FL: Sarasota County - Panel Cites Voter Error, Not Software, in Loss of Votes LINK

FL: Sarasota County - Missing votes in Sarasota not caused by machines LINK

FL: Sarasota County - Jennings has another loss at voting machines LINK

FL: Sarasota County - State audit concludes Sarasota election fair LINK

IA: Paper trail for votes LINK

ID: Ada County will do away with punch-card ballots, move to optical-scan system LINK

MN: Houston County - Mound Prairie to vote on election changes LINK

NY: Spitzer must protect New York voters with disabilities LINK

NY: 'Paper' tigers issue warnings - Greens lead fight to scrap electronic voting machines LINK

OH: Cuyahoga County - A Report from the Public Monitor of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections LINK

VT: Putney mulls buying electronic vote-counting machine LINK

WY: Electronic voting study requested LINK

**"Daily Voting News" is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in "Daily Voting News" may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or OpEdNews.Com**