Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News Wednesday April 26

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Going Postal
With vote by mail, Oregon has higher voter turnout and spends less money running elections.
By Robert Kuttner
Issue Date: 05.04.06

The first time you hear about Oregon’s approach to voting, the idea sounds almost un-American. In 1998, the state that gave us assisted suicide decided to run all of its elections by mail: no voting booths, no frantic Election Day get-out-the-vote efforts, no dueling poll-watchers -- and no trooping off to the local firehouse to mingle with neighbors, take one last look at leaflets, and cast your ballot.

Why would anyone want to move to such a system? Doesn’t it kill one of the few remaining civic rituals that bind us together as a people? Doesn’t it spoil the idea of a defined campaign period that ends with everyone casting a ballot on a single day? The full story is told in this special report.

But the more deeply you explore the Oregon system, the better it looks. It costs less than half the traditional polling-place system, and has turnout 10.5 percentage points above the U.S. average. At least two weeks before Election Day, every registered Oregon voter gets a ballot courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service. The voter can take the full period, or less, to come to a decision. Then the voter places the ballot into a special envelope and mails it off to one of 36 county tabulation centers. The ballots must be signed and the signature must match the one on the registration card, so that theft and fraud are essentially nonexistent.

The system invites a better-informed electorate. It signals to voters that they can take more than two weeks to study the issues, discuss them at the kitchen table, and think hard about how to vote. Nobody has to leave work, find baby sitters, or brave bad weather or long lines at the polls on Election Day. Traditionalists (or those too cheap to buy a stamp) can still walk their ballot to counting headquarters.

more at:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11416

The Oregon Voting Revolution
How a vote-by-mail experiment transformed the democratic process.
By Don Hamilton
Issue Date: 05.04.06

Oregon’s vote-by-mail system came of age on a cold, drizzly night in January 1996. It was the night of the special election to replace the disgraced Bob Packwood in the U.S. Senate with Gordon Smith, the charismatic Republican vegetable farmer from eastern Oregon, facing Ron Wyden, the wonkish Democratic congressman from Portland. It was a classic match up of the two men who, as it turned out, would both represent Oregon in the Senate for the next decade after Smith won the state’s other seat in November 1996.

This night, famously, was the first Senate election conducted entirely by mail. Oregon’s vote-by-mail experiment, which started quietly in 1981 with local races, was facing its biggest test yet. It finally reached prime time.

By most measures, this was going to be Smith’s night. The polls looked good and they had momentum, so his campaign blew up balloons, hired a band, and drew several hundred supporters to the ornate third-floor ballroom at the Governor Hotel in downtown Portland. The stakes were high. A Smith win could spark a national Republican trend in 1996, perhaps even portend a GOP upset of Bill Clinton in the fall. They were ready to party.

But when the votes came in, Wyden won. The Republicans were stunned and wanted to blame vote by mail for the loss. “Lots of Republicans went nuts thinking it had somehow been stolen by vote by mail,” said Dan Lavey, a top Smith strategist.

Nobody could quite figure out if mail voting favored one party over another but that didn’t stop both major parties from trying in the months and years ahead. At one point, Democrats opposed vote by mail because they thought it favored Republicans; later Republicans were sure it favored Democrats. The uncertainty delayed full implementation of mail voting until November 1998, when, through a citizen initiative, Oregon made mail voting the only method for voting in all elections. No more voting booths, polling places, or waiting in line.

more at:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11417

A Technology Too Far
Internet Voting?
By Phil Keisling
Issue Date: 05.04.06

Touch-screen, computerized ballots -- officially known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems -- are not a way station to a glorious, all-Internet future for American democracy. They’re a technology cul-de-sac.

An election system should be accessible, simple, and efficient. But it must also be as secure, risk-free, and confidence-inducing as possible. Reacting to the Florida 2000 election debacle, Congress, through the Help America Vote Act, gave states nearly $3 billion to update their election systems. Great idea. But paper ballots generally -- chads or no -- were deemed suspect. The future of elections, we were told, lay in sophisticated software and user-friendly touchscreens.

For purveyors of expensive, new-fangled election machinery, it was a marketing godsend. For many election officials, federally funded DREs offered an intoxicating vision of elections too precise to be controversial.

Today, this once-bright vision of paperless voting is unraveling. In 2002 and 2004, vexing problems in state after state ran the gamut from lost and miscounted ballots to malfunctioning machines. Diebold, a major DRE manufacturer, inadvertently published its programmers’ source code, betraying not only a serious security breech, but laughably easy-to-hack code.

The 2006 cycle is bringing more bad news for DRE apologists. New Mexico recently enacted legislation requiring all-paper elections -- forcing many counties to mothball DREs purchased but not fully paid for. Governor Bill Richardson noted, “Some believe that computer touch-screen machines are the future of electoral systems, but the technology simply fails to pass the test of reliability. As anyone who uses one can attest, computers break down, get viruses, lose information, and corrupt data.”

more at:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11420

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2592699

This is a great article!

Published on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 by the Chicago Sun-Times
Big Easy Voting Was Much Too Hard
by Jesse Jackson

Against the odds, New Orleans and Katrina survivors went to the polls last week to elect the mayor and other officials who will guide the reconstruction of the city.

The current mayor, Ray Nagin, placed first, and will face a runoff against leading challenger Mitch Landrieu on May 20. Newspapers hailed the election as demonstrating the grit of the people of New Orleans. But this election was marked by voting wrongs, not voting rights.

This election was held under protest in flagrant violation of the Voting Rights Act. The votes that were tallied were less significant than the voters who were disenfranchised. Voter turnout was 20 percent lower than the mayoral election of four years ago. Just 106,000 out of 296,000 eligible voters voted.

The reason isn't that the residents don't care. People in neighborhoods across New Orleans enthusiastically surged to the polls and demonstrated their deep concern for the future of their city. But two-thirds of New Orleanians are scattered around the nation, in more than 45 states. These people did not choose to leave New Orleans. They were rendered homeless by Katrina and displaced by FEMA, which arranged for them to find temporary shelter in different states.

Having relocated the survivors of Katrina, FEMA and the Bush administration were responsible for protecting the voting rights of the displaced -- and for ensuring that they could participate in choosing the leaders who will have such a large say in their futures. Instead, FEMA and the administration failed Katrina's survivors once more -- as did state officials.

more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-28.htm

Posted on Wed, Apr. 26, 2006

Summit vote system to debut
ES&S has extra memory cards on hand; elections board uncomfortable
By Lisa A. Abraham
Beacon Journal staff writer










Lisa A. Abraham can be reached at 330-996-3737 or labraham@thebeaconjournal.com

http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/living/community/14430759.htm

Pa. lawmakers want voting-device break
Deadline nears, counties have fears. Money may have to be returned.
Wednesday, April 26, 206
By BILL CAHIR
The Express-Times







http://www.nj.com/news/expresstimes/pa/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1146024808230060.xml&coll=2&thispage=2

The mystery oval
PORTER COUNTY: 80,000 election ballots have incorrect directions, must be reprinted

BY MATTHEW VAN DUSEN
mvandusen@nwitimes.com



http://www.thetimesonline.com/articles/2006/04/25/news/porter_county/6d4d52d58e4f7ad28625715a007b43a6.txt

New Allegheny County voting machines criticized in court hearing
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
By Paula Reed Ward, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette





http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06116/685055-85.stm

Expert warns of voting chaos
By Jason Cato
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, April 26, 2006





Jason Cato can be reached at jcato@tribweb.com or 412-320-7840.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion//s_447485.html

Election Blues

The right to vote remains displaced from New Orleans.

In what was billed as "the most important election in the history of New Orleans," only 36 percent of those registered voted in the recent city elections. Turnout was heavy and high in the mostly prosperous and white areas of Uptown, where little damage occurred, and exceptionally low in the heavily damaged and mostly black areas of the New Orleans East, Gentilly and the Ninth Ward - where some precincts reported as few as 15% voter participation.

The state refusal to set up satellite voting for those displaced outside the state resulted in exactly the disenfranchisement predicted.

While Iraqis who had not lived in Iraq in years were helped to vote in the US by our government, people forced out of state by Katrina for seven months were not allowed to vote where they are temporarily living. This has national implications. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that in the 2002 US Senate seat runoff between incumbent Democrat Mary Landrieu and Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell, the Orleans factor made the difference for Landrieu. The senator won Orleans by 78,900 votes, compared with her statewide lead of 42,012. In the 2003 gubernatorial runoff between Democrat Kathleen Blanco and Republican Bobby Jindal, Blanco won statewide by 54,874 votes. She won by a margin of 49,741 votes in New Orleans.

Worse, the systematic exclusion of the displaced gives fuel to those who do not want the poor to return and helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low turnout in poor neighborhoods where the displaced could not drive back in to vote can now be taken as an indication of lack of interest and an excuse to further silence their voices. As the Washington Post noted: "How many people turned out to vote in each precinct was being viewed as an indicator of which neighborhoods are likely to be rebuilt; in many abandoned neighborhoods, people fear that residents who have left for good would not vote, revealing their lack of interest in the neighborhood and the city. Turnout could offer clues to the future racial makeup of the city."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042606B.shtml

Lawmaker’s son sentenced for slashing tires
Omokunde, 3 Democratic campaign workers vandalized 100 GOP cars in ’04
Updated: 1:43 p.m. ET April 26, 2006


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12498215/from/RSS/

and then there's this...

Son of Senate president offered plea deal in assault case
Monday, April 3, 2006 10:48 AM CDT



:wtf:
www.azdailysun.com/articles/2006/04/03/news/local/20060403_local_news_7.txt:wtf:

By STEVE LAWRENCE, Associated Press Writer
Last Updated 5:54 am PDT Wednesday, April 26, 2006




http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/14247679p-15065223c.html

Election Commission expected to approve voting software
ASHLEY M. HEHER
Associated Press

INDIANAPOLIS - The Indiana Election Commission will meet Friday to grant a likely last-minute approval of software created by MicroVote General Corp., which supplies election equipment to more than half the state's counties.

<snip>

In a memo sent to county clerks this week, the co-directors of the Indiana Election Division said they planned to recommend that the election commission sign off on MicroVote's Infinity equipment.

Company President Jim Ries said Tuesday that MicroVote submitted documentation of a data escrow account to the state - the final step needed to receive certification for the software.

<snip>

The commission scheduled an emergency meeting to discuss whether to certify MicroVote's software for Friday afternoon.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Wesley Joe or Michael Malbin
April 26, 2006 (202) 969-8890

New CFI Analysis of House Candidates' Fifteen-Month Fundraising Reports

DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES FINANCIALLY POISED TO CONTEST FOR A HOUSE MAJORITY

As Many as 55 GOP Seats Could Be Endangered
by a National Democratic Tide

See below for links to tables of financial summaries (incumbent, challenger and open seat by party) with historical comparisons (Tables 1-3) and tables presenting competitive candidate details with financial averages by party (Tables 4-5).


Democratic candidates are mobilizing the resources necessary to challenge the Republicans' 15-seat margin of control of the House of Representatives, according to a Campaign Finance Institute analysis of first-quarter financial reports filed with the Federal Election Commission in April.1 The number of currently competitive races is still fairly modest (42 seats, 30 of which are now held by Republicans). While the odds do not favor a net shift of 15 seats within so small a playing field, the chances would increase if there were a tide of public sentiment affecting public perceptions of the major parties or partisan turnout.

If such a tide emerges, Democratic challengers have made sufficiently strong starts to put 25 additional GOP seats potentially in play. This increases the total number of Republican seats potentially at risk to 55. The equivalent number of Democratic seats in this tier comes to 12 (beyond the 12 already identified above as competitive). But no one at this stage is talking about a 2006 partisan tide for the Republicans. National congressional preference polls in April do suggest that a Democratic surge is possible, but six months is a long time in politics.

CFI's analysis confirms that 2006 will be an election in which control of the chamber could well be in play. The close contest for majority control will affect every aspect of the electoral and governing process, including the ways in which campaign funds are raised and disbursed. Future CFI analyses will review patterns of fundraising and spending by candidates, parties and outside groups in light of the battle for chamber control.

more at:
http://www.cfinst.org/pr/042606.html

WBNS-TV-DT Channel 10
Columbus, Ohio
Campaign Leaks Social Security Numbers
Apr 25 2006 11:49PM
Reported by Patrick Bell

Millions of Social Security numbers are now in the hands of people who aren't supposed to have them.

It's a big mistake leading straight back to one of the men running for Ohio Governor. The private records were mistakenly released by the Secretary of State's office.

Voter lists are crucial to political parties. They give campaign workers an efficient way to target potential supporters. The lists usually consist of the names of registered voters, their addresses, their party affiliation, and whether that person voted in the last election.

Social security numbers aren't supposed to be revealed.

But they have been because of a mistake by Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's campaign.

"That's the problem with being a public official. Your mistakes have serious consequences," said Catherine Turcer from Ohio Citizen Action, a non-partisan political watchdog group

"This couldn't have come at a worse time for Ken Blackwell," Turcer observed.

The mistake came with Republican gubernatorial primary just a week away.

"All of us, any candidate, any human, is going to make errors. What we as voters need to weigh, 'is there a pattern?'

"And you have to think about a track record that involves releasing any private information that could be used for fraudulent purposes," said Turcer.

This is the second time this year private information has been compromised by Mr. Blackwell's office. In March, a link on the Secretary of State's website revealed
hundreds of Social Security numbers listed on public documents.

http://www.10tv.com/?sec=home&story=10tv/content/pool/200604/1012367418.html

****

Send questions, comments, and critiques to rburgwin@aol.com.

Front Page April 26, 2006
Voting machines break down during election
BY DAN NEWMAN
Staff Writer






http://independent.gmnews.com/news/2006/0426/Front_Page/059.html

http://www.arkansasleader.com/images/leadertopbanner
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
TOP STORY >> Readying of voting machines is lagging
By JOHN HOFHEIMER
Leader staff writer






http://www.arkansasleader.com/2006/04/top-story-readying-of-voting-machines.html

Seven Counties Dismissed From California Voters Lawsuit to Block Use or Purchase of Electronic Voting Machines

Humboldt, Marin, Placer, San Luis Obispo, Trinity, Tulare, and Santa Barbara Counties Opt for Paper Balloting Citing Cost, Accuracy and Security Concerns

SAN FRANCISCO, April 26 /PRNewswire/ -- California Voters marked their latest legal action today by lauding officials in seven California counties for their commitments to use or switch to all paper balloting rather than electronic voting systems. The Counties of Humboldt, Marin, Placer, San Luis Obispo, Trinity, Tulare, and Santa Barbara were dismissed today from the California Voters Lawsuit (Holder v. McPherson), supported by Voter Action, and filed in San Francisco Superior Court last month. The suit seeks to nullify Secretary of State Bruce McPherson's "conditional" certification authorizing purchase of the Diebold TSx electronic voting system -- which has a history of security, verifiability, and disability access problems -- for use in California elections.

"We applaud the counties leading California "back to the future," by selecting verifiable, all paper balloting over electronic voting systems with significant security problems, and the risk of fraud and vote manipulation," said Lowell Finley, Esq., co-director of Voter Action, and co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the California Voters Lawsuit. "These counties appreciate the importance of transparency and verifiability in clean elections. Diebold TSx electronic voting machines contain technology that is easily hacked and nearly impossible to audit or recount, and which is illegal under the California Elections Code."

"These California counties have made the right decision not to use touch-screen systems that put election integrity at risk and fail to accommodate voters with a range of disabilities as required by law," said John Eichhorst, co-counsel for the plaintiffs in the California Voter's Lawsuit, and a partner in the San Francisco law firm, Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin, "No county benefits from risking election funds on expensive electronic voting systems that have acknowledged vulnerability and accessibility problems and fall short of satisfying legal requirements."

"Voters concerned with the integrity of our elections are gaining tremendous traction and we are pleased to be supporting them in California and in similar efforts in New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona and other states," said Holly Jacobson, Co-director of Voter Action.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/04-26-2006/0004348586&EDATE=


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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x425366