IA: Ballot Definition Settings in Pottawattamie Trigger Election Contest

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060624/NEWS05/606240322/1001

Polk recorder to contest election
Tim Brien says he can't accept his primary loss without ensuring that another county's error wasn't duplicated.

BERT DALMER
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

June 24, 2006

Polk County Recorder Tim Brien, a five-term incumbent who was soundly defeated by a political newcomer in June's primary elections, plans to challenge the election results based on the failure of similar voting machines in another Iowa county.

Brien lost his re-election bid to a former colleague, Julie Haggerty, by 3,670 votes. He said he can't accept the numbers without firm assurances that a ballot-counting error in Pottawattamie County did not also happen in Polk County. Brien has suggested recounting ballots by hand, as Pottawattamie County officials did when they discovered that they had improperly programmed their new counting machines.

"I think it's the only way to lay it to rest," Brien said. "It could be totally clean as a whistle. But if I don't ask, I never will find out. I just want to make sure the process worked like it should work."

-snip-

Pottawattamie lays to rest any argument that the machines can't steal millions of votes. In the little county of Pottawattamie hundreds of votes were stolen.

Multiply that by the 13,000, mostly larger voting jurisdictions with e-voting machinery, and you easily can lose millions of stolen votes. Easily.

Lets hear no more of this "It couldn't have happened". It happened. Pottawattamie is proof.

From the Des Moines Register article:

..."The accuracy of emerging voting technology has been questioned across the country for several years, but much of that controversy centers on touch-screen voting that leaves no paper trail to be double-checked at a later date. Mauro's system still uses paper ballots, but counts them electronically. Those ballots are retained for a period of months and can be rechecked by hand.

The same sorts of counters employed by Mauro's office for years were used for the first time in June in Pottawattamie County, without success. Officials there on Friday said that they had failed to program the machines to account for the fact that candidates' names appeared in a different order in different precincts. The ballots are devised in that fashion to prevent a single candidate from getting top billing over opponents. Pottawattamie County elections deputy Gary Herman said anomalies were noticed almost immediately. Electronic results were posted, but with a disclaimer that ballots would be hand-counted the next day.

The results were dramatic. Every winner in Pottawattamie County's nine contested races turned out, in retrospect, to be a loser..."

Both of these elections (Des Moines and Pottawattamie County) used paper ballots. They used machines to scan the paper ballots - but fortunately, a hand count was possible. A hand count was completed in Pottawattamie County and will be completed in Des Moines.

IMO, a bigger threat is posed by systems that do not leave a paper trail.

"It could be totally clean as a whistle. But if I don't ask, I never will find out. I just want to make sure the process worked like it should work."

If only more candidates were capable of saying these words, regardless of their party affiliation.

Let's hope for a BDF expose'.

this is great.

A contest in Arkansas (ES&S) was overturned by a recount.

AR: St. Francis County - Recount In AR Race Reverses Result
http://www.myeyewitnessnews.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=3734B371-B2D5-416C-9A72-D1AF88685953

"Officials in the office of Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver did not return repeated phone messages Friday to say whether other Iowa counties had experienced irregularities with their voting machines

Chet is now our Democratic nominee for Governor. Time to nip this in the bud Chet.