Articles on Electronic Voting
Broward city elections may be delayed over Oliphant problems
[Election Administrator]
Kempf reprimanded last fall [Election Administrator]
Broward official fears chaotic elections office will torpedo primary
Chaotic, close: Reno-McBride race undecided as poll problems anger voters
Here we go again: Confusion reigns in sequel to 2000 election
Long delays leave some black voters angry and suspicious
Voting Machines Cause Problems in
Touch-screen voting machines don’t solve
Miami-Dade votes still turning up two days after primary
Broward recheck finds about 200 untallied votes
Computer Voting:
When Humans are The Moth in the Machine
Election reform deal would send billions to states
Bill casts out old voting machines
Voting Machines Can't Help Disabled
[TX] County tries to prevent more ballot problems
Bush to Sign Voting Revamp Bill
New voting tools make
Will high-tech save or sink future elections?
Technology: Behind the balloting on election day
Glitches Hit High-Tech Voting Systems
Glitch bedevils Tarrant vote tally
VNS Unable to Deliver Exit Polls
High-Tech Voting Going Smoothly
Watch the Vote on VoteWatch
Broward vote total short by 104,000 in reporting glitch
Chip glitch hands victory to wrong candidate
2,180
Cost of Broward elections to rise by $1 million or more
A Vote for Less Tech at the Polls
****************************
Broward city elections may be delayed over Oliphant problems
By Scott Wyman
Sun-Sentinel
Posted
His warning of a looming catastrophe came as Oliphant's
tenuous grip on power loosened even further. The mayors of
"It is apparent to most everybody that this office is
in shambles and is not able to function," said Scott, whose stand is
significant because he is a confidant of Gov. Jeb Bush. Only Bush can oust
Oliphant, and Scott said he would tell the governor of his feelings.
Bush's spokeswoman, Elizabeth Hirst, said his office
continues to monitor the situation in Broward County and that he would likely
wait until prosecutors conclude their investigation of voting irregularities
and mismanagement before deciding if he should take further action.
Oliphant, meanwhile, gave the county an 84-page report that
she depicted as her plan for the February primaries in
The report was largely a step-by-step outline of how to
conduct an election, but contained no assurances that her office has the
capability to do it. It also contained her latest request for money: $191,676
for February election expenses that she didn't include in her annual budget.
Oliphant could not be reached Monday for comment.
County commissioners will discuss the election plan when
they meet today, but one measure that cities wanted to ensure a successful vote
fell through Monday. Joe Cotter, the election administrator Oliphant brought in
to run the November vote, and Election Systems & Software rejected the
Broward League of Cities' request that they serve as consultants to
troubleshoot Oliphant's planning.
ES&S, the maker of Broward's new voting machines, said
it was uncertain how it could help the cities since Oliphant is in charge of the
election process. Cotter, who resigned last month alleging Oliphant had
interfered with his work, said he feared he would become a lightning rod for
controversy if he got involved.
"It is not my intention to serve in any role which
might exacerbate the situation or be detrimental to the overall success of
these elections," he wrote in a letter to the League of Cities.
Oliphant and the cities have been seeking county help to run
the elections, but that became increasingly unlikely given Desjarlais' comments
to commissioners about the capabilities of her office. In addition to Cotter's
departure, Oliphant has fired her intergovernmental affairs liaison, lost her
lawyer and office manger, and put her computer technician in charge of election
planning.
The county would enter uncharted legal territory in any
effort to postpone the elections. State election officials said Bush does have
the power to do so in an emergency, as happened when Hurricane Andrew hit, but
they added the legal issues would be complex because each city charter would
have to be consulted as well.
Oliphant's legal problems also worsened Monday. County attorneys
said they are researching whether Oliphant can be held personally liable for
the $1 million deficit she ran up last year.
The accountants preparing the annual audit of her office
finances asked the county for advice on how to report the deficit, whether as a
liability against her office or as the responsibility of the
State law bans deficit spending and requires constitutional
officers like Oliphant to consult with the
Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Naugle's and Davie Mayor Harry
Venis' stands come after Weston Mayor Eric Hersh urged the
"I wish she would resign," said Naugle, who has
been close to Oliphant since they attended
Venis said Oliphant missed opportunities to repair the mess
she has created. "Every day, we can't be reading in the newspaper about a
fiasco at the Supervisor of Elections Office," he said. "In the best
interest of the residents of
Other public officials remain more circumspect.
Hollywood Mayor Mara Giulianti said she supports major
reform in Oliphant's office by changing it from an elected to an appointed
position, but declined to call on her to step down. Pompano Beach Mayor Bill
Griffin said he feared Oliphant's resignation at this time could cause more
problems because it would come so close to the elections.
Lauderhill Mayor Richard Kaplan, Sunrise Mayor Steve Feren,
Pembroke Pines Mayor Alex Fekete, Plantation Mayor Rae Carole Armstrong and
Miramar Mayor Lori Moseley declined to take a stand on whether Oliphant should
go. Tamarac Mayor Joe Schreiber and Lauderdale Lakes Mayor Samuel Brown
defended her.
"Everybody is getting on the negative bandwagon seeking
her scalp," Brown said. "Somebody should tone it down and give her the
help she's been requesting to help out those cities."
Scott Wyman can be reached at swyman@sun-sentinel.com or
954-356-4511.
Staff writers Lisa Huriash, Jeremy Milarsky, Sallie James, Kevin Smith, Milton Carrero, Christy McKerney, Toni Marshall, Joe Kollin and Susannah Bryan contributed to this report.
******************************
Kempf reprimanded last fall
By John Zebrowski
Seattle Times staff reporter
Three months before she was fired for the near-collapse of
last year’s general election, the former
In a letter written last October, her former boss admonished
Julie Anne Kempf for creating an environment of “mistrust, apprehension,
favoritism and occasional fear” in her office.
“Your interaction with subordinates and colleagues has
contributed rather than resolved this feeling,” wrote Kempf’s former boss Bob
Roegner, the manager of
In particular, the letter accused Kempf of rewarding some
employees while punishing others, regardless of performance. In one instance,
Roegner said, Kempf worked to undermine the authority of another supervisor.
The letter was made public by the county yesterday.
Kempf was fired on New Year’s Eve for her actions during the
general election, when nearly a half million absentee ballots were mailed so close
to Election Day some residents lost their right to vote. Roegner charged Kempf
with lying to him, the public and county officials, jeopardizing the election
and trying to undermine his authority.
Kempf denies both the charges in the October letter and
accusations that she mishandled the election. She accuses Roegner of trying to
push her out as superintendent of elections by digging up grievances that were
old and unfounded.
Her claims come in a letter dated Oct. 10, in the middle of
the period when elections workers were making mistakes in getting absentee
ballots designed so they could be printed and mailed to voters.
But county officials said they didn’t receive the letter
from Kempf until Dec. 16, one week after Roegner testified about the election
before the Metropolitan King County Council, and after he had informed her he
intended to fire her. Kempf insists she mailed the letter in October.
In the letter, Kempf claims there was a general feeling
among staff that sooner or later an election would fail — and the blame would
be put on individuals rather than the state of the office.
“I admit that I am increasingly afraid that the scapegoat
will be me,” she wrote.
Kempf has until Monday to appeal her dismissal, which her
attorney said she will do.
John Zebrowski: 206-464-8292 or jzebrowski@seattletimes.com.
********************
Sun-Sentinel
Broward official fears chaotic elections office will torpedo primary
By Scott Wyman and Buddy Nevins
Even as election officials sought to reassure voters that next week’s primary will go smoothly despite turmoil over new polling places and inaccurate registration cards, the leader of the Broward County Commission charged the area is careening toward another election disaster.
Commission Chairwoman Lori Parrish, who serves on the three-member Canvassing Board that certifies the election results, said Thursday that the process has been too rife with problems to run properly on Tuesday.
She lost her last bit of faith when she learned that the
mayor of
“I have no confidence we can have an error-free election,” Parrish said. “We have a new supervisor of elections, new voting equipment and new precinct locations. I just have to hope that it isn’t a formula for disaster. I’m worried and concerned.”
Broward’s embattled supervisor of elections, Miriam Oliphant, faced another major blow in her election planning Thursday when the state Division of Elections said she misinterpreted state law on how to organize her polling precincts.
The Republican Party complained she would not guarantee that each precinct will be staffed by Republican and Democratic poll workers. She thought only that the overall makeup of the 5,000 workers had to reflect the community, but the state sided with the GOP.
The opinion could open the primary to a legal challenge unless Oliphant shuffles poll workers around between today and Tuesday to ensure a balance at each of the 809 precincts. Her spokesman said Oliphant was reviewing the letter late Thursday.
Republican leaders said they are exploring their options if Oliphant does not relent and said they will definitely head to court if the issue is not addressed by the November general election.
Despite that,
“Everyone just needs to take a couple deep breaths,” he said. “I think similar problems have occurred in other places, but for whatever reason, here it’s been more confrontational. People don’t realize how complicated it is to put on an election.”
Tuesday will mark the first major election since
Voters have complained about new polling places and inaccurate registration cards, and the concerns are continuing to mount.
Sunrise Mayor Steve Feren was stunned when he voted absentee last week and received a ballot that contained the legislative race for state Sen. Mandy Dawson. Feren, who lives about six miles outside her district, immediately questioned poll workers about the ballot.
Feren said a poll worker agreed he had been given the wrong ballot and then set up the right one on his voting machine. But Feren said he is concerned other voters are less astute about which legislative, congressional, school board and county and city commission districts they live in and would go ahead and vote if given the wrong ballot.
“It’s going to be ugly,” he said.
Similar problems were seen in this week’s testing of the new voting machinery by the Canvassing Board. The board determined the machines work properly, but two of the five errors that occurred while testing 100 machines happened because poll workers chose the wrong ballot.
Parrish attempted to raise questions about the possibility of similar mistakes, but lawyers told the board that it could only assess whether the machines work properly. Poll worker training, they said, was Oliphant’s responsibility.
Oliphant denied that Feren could have received the wrong ballot. She said the errors in this week’s testing were tracked and corrected quickly.
Voters attempting to vote early as Feren did are facing long
waits even though Oliphant urged people to take advantage of
The problem is that even though Broward is a heavily Democratic county, Oliphant set aside three machines at each office for early voting — one for Republicans, one for Democrats, and one for people of other parties or no party affiliation.
Aleida Waldman, of Coconut Creek, said it took her almost an hour to vote even though there were only two people in line in front of her. “It was a mess. They didn’t know what they were doing,” Waldman said.
Oliphant blamed the long waits on the
Oliphant urged voters who have questions or find problems with their new registration cards to call her office or check her Web site. Both options, though, continue to be problem-plagued themselves.
Voters report being unable to get through to the supervisor's office on the phone.
“I have been dialing them for a week, several different
numbers. Every number I call is busy, busy, busy,” said Ruth Cohen of the Palm
Aire condominium complex in
Cristina Pudwell lives in
Oliphant blames the phone problems on crank callers clogging her phones.
She also said inaccurate information on her Web site has been fixed, but a spot check Thursday afternoon of complaints reported to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of precinct changes and inaccurate registration information showed those details still listed.
And voters can’t expect the traditional sample ballot that many use to sort out who they will vote for before going to the polls.
Oliphant’s predecessor, Jane Carroll, mailed out a sample ballot, but Oliphant dropped it in a cost-cutting move. She decided the money could be better spent on demonstrating the new voting machines and sending educational material to voters.
“I didn’t know who to vote for. It took me much longer,” said Myron Ross, who voted as part of the early voting program. “I can only imagine what will happen Election Day.”
Staff Writer Christy McKerney contributed to this report.
Scott Wyman can be reached at swyman@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4511.
*******************************
Main Herald
Chaotic, close: Reno-McBride race undecided as poll problems anger voters
BY LESLEY CLARK, TYLER BRIDGES AND BETH REINHARD
Bill McBride appeared close early today to pulling an upset victory over Janet Reno for the Democratic nomination for governor, although rampant polling snags in Reno's South Florida stronghold left the final tally in doubt.
Returns from across the state showed McBride ahead with a small
lead -- but his margin was dwindling as results delayed by Election Day mishaps
trickled in from
By
If the margin of victory between McBride and
''The returns are still coming in,'' a hopeful
McBride, the Democratic Party establishment's favored son,
awaited the results in a
''I feel like throwing up,'' said McBride's campaign manager, Robin Rorapaugh.
McBride, on the verge of a political upset, told supporters early this morning that he expected to win, but that the results may not be known for several more hours.
''The only person more nervous than me right now is Jeb Bush,'' he said to loud cheers. ``If we win this thing, we'll slingshot out.''
The real show had been billed as the general election to challenge Gov. Jeb Bush, but Reno versus McBride assumed increased urgency in recent weeks as union cash and support from the party establishment propelled McBride in opinion polls to within two points of Reno's once seemingly insurmountable lead.
Miami state Sen. Daryl Jones, running a distant third in the race, may have eroded support from Reno and was showing better returns than strategists had predicted.
`ALL OPTIONS'
The mishaps at the polls in
Her campaign began laying the foundation for a legal challenge, given the chaos at the polls.
''We are leaving all options on the table until we see the full implications of today's screw-ups,'' campaign manager Mo Elleithee said.
The campaign launched more than 200,000 phone calls to
seniors and blacks after the governor -- following her request -- extended
polling hours statewide by two hours to give more time to people who had been
unable to vote because of glitches. Seven sound trucks lumbered through a
dreary rain in black neighborhoods in the two counties, pitching
Unlike
A nervous McBride, who has campaigned for two weeks buoyed by recent polls and attacks from the Bush campaign that he believes underscore his message that he is a more formidable opponent, watched the returns from in the company of friends, advisors and his two children.
''If I were the governor and I saw this many people hanging
around the campaign at
Reno's quirky campaign took her from the dance floor of a glam South Beach nightclub to the cab of a red Ford pickup, trekking from Pensacola to South Florida, but counting mostly on Broward County's massive condo communities and Miami-Dade County's black neighborhoods to lift her to victory.
McBride, a former managing partner at Holland & Knight, one of the largest firms in the country, garnered support from the party establishment, racking up union endorsements and cash, billing himself as the moderate Democrat who could best oust Bush.
Though the campaign began as a cakewalk for
A year ago, the woman who spawned a Saturday Night Live
spoof was a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. Early polls showed the
former
But the Democratic Party establishment, wary of
McBride, too, showed tenacity, staying in the race while more popular and better known Democrats, former U.S. Rep. Pete Peterson and U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, among them, bowed out in the face of Reno's overwhelming edge.
It began to pay off for him when he successfully secured the
backing of key state legislators, party activists and, most importantly,
high-profile labor endorsements, including the influential Florida Education
Association, which considered the unknown lawyer more ''electable'' than
The endorsements boosted McBride's political legitimacy, provided him with a burst of favorable publicity and, most significantly, pumped union dollars into his campaign, along with an army of grass-roots activists.
Though she garnered celebrity endorsements -- touring condos
with Martin Sheen and confidently booking a post-primary, mid-September Elton
John fundraiser and concert --
McBride, who outraised her $4.2 million to $2.6 million, waged an air war, flying to far campaign events but appearing repeatedly on television.
McBride, too, was initially aided by the man he had hoped to oust in November. The Republican Party of Florida launched a series of anti-McBride ads that McBride partisans said signaled the GOP's unease about facing McBride.
The ads might have began working in Bush's favor, as McBride's campaign began calling Democrats over the weekend, saying that the attacks on McBride's performance as managing partner were unfounded. They also forced the McBride campaign to spend far more on TV and radio than it had planned in the campaign's final days.
***************************
Here we go again: Confusion reigns in sequel to 2000 election
BY MARTIN MERZER, JONI JAMES AND ALFONSO CHARDY
Two years and $125 million after the 2000 presidential
election fiasco, a plague of inexperienced poll workers and malfunctioning
machines again enraged and disenfranchised thousands of
Election officials were compelled to extend voting hours
statewide. But even that aroused chaos Tuesday night in
Some poll workers in Broward abandoned their posts at
Then, early this morning, Broward election officials revealed that results from 140 precincts were still coming into the elections center. At several regional vote tabulation centers, faulty equipment prevented sending the information to election headquarters.
Several statewide contests were still too close to call, and the Broward returns could prove decisive.
Similar problems were reported this morning in Miami-Dade,
where returns from an unknown number of precincts never made it to election
headquarters. Police were dispatched to those precincts, and final results were
not expected until
Tabulation problems also occurred in
And so, the day ended much as it began -- in confusion.
''I'm livid,'' said Hope Cunningham, unable to vote in
Most voters elsewhere in the state cast ballots without difficulty, but it was a different story for many people in Miami-Dade and Broward.
Scores of precincts failed to open on time, and many limped along with only a fraction of their new touch-screen machines working.
The apparent reasons: inadequately trained poll workers and machines that may have been broken or were extraordinarily difficult to reset.
DADE TROUBLES
A measure of the tumult:
Shortly after
At
By
By
Perhaps more ominously, some
Others were handed improper documents by poll workers and had to argue for the chance to participate in their party's primary. Still others found that the precinct addresses listed on their new voting cards were incomplete or simply wrong.
In some ways, the problems exceeded those of two years ago, when virtually every precinct at least managed to open on time.
''I frankly think, what in the hell have they been doing for two years?'' said Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith, who announced the two-hour statewide voting extension.
The flood of complaints from
Some hardy, if unhappy, voters seemed determined to wait as long as necessary.
At
In Broward, where new Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant's grasp of her duties was questioned even before the election, the number of troubled precincts was difficult to obtain, but there appeared to be plenty of them.
At Sunrise Lakes Phase I in
''I've never seen anything like this,'' said Sid Liss, an
elections clerk who had trouble getting the machines to work. ``I've been here
since
''You tell Mrs. Oliphant she'd better leave for
Though most
The causes seemed to boil down to two familiar categories: poll workers and machinery.
Many
''How could this happen after what happened in 2000?'' said Lori Sugg, turned away from a polling place in Pembroke Pines after the precinct clerk, assistant clerk, registration book and machine activation devices were all missing in inaction. ``I don't understand.''
Election officials in Miami-Dade and Broward blamed most of the trouble on human error.
Gisela Salas, an assistant Miami-Dade supervisor of elections, said many poll workers simply failed to turn on the machines properly.
Each device must be booted up with an activator cartridge that must remain in the machine for six minutes. Many workers apparently pulled out those cartridges too soon, crashing the machines.
''A lot of the poll workers were not patient,'' Salas said.
Michael Limas, chief operating officer for Election Systems & Software, which made the machines, claimed that his equipment was blameless.
''When our technicians have gone to polling places, they haven't been repairing machines,'' he said. ``They've had to start the machines over for people.''
He said the failure to properly use the activator cartridges was like ``putting a floppy disk in your computer to copy a large file and popping it out before it's finished.''
David Leahy, Miami-Dade's elections supervisor, said ES&S had 64 technicians on duty in the county to handle problems.
Asked if that was enough technical support, Leahy smiled and said: ``Not given the problems we had. We didn't anticipate having these many problems.''
Even
The result: Bush declared ''a state of emergency'' allowing him to suspend state law and order the polls to remain open two extra hours.
In the
In tiny
Glitches were reported in other parts of the state, but
those problems seemed minor in relation to those that flared in
BUSH ANGERED
So, in the end, after $125 million was spent by the state
and counties on new touch-screen machines and other electoral changes,
''There has been ample time to prepare for this election,'' said a clearly angry Bush. ``There is no excuse for not having precinct workers in a precinct for voting. There is no excuse for not turning on the machines. It is shameful.''
Said U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek, a
``It seems that, no matter how many assurances we get of
safeguards and improvements, voting in
In Broward, even before the election, Oliphant had been criticized for confusion that surrounded the recruiting of poll workers, the selection of polling places, the duplicate mailing of voting cards to some residents and other apparent missteps.
To many, Oliphant seemed overwhelmed by her job -- and the events of the day did little to reverse that impression.
''What do I think about her efforts?'' said voter Ilene Sager. ``I think they're nonexistent. What ability? I don't see that she has any ability.''
Oliphant remained out of public view through much of the
day, but she surfaced at
``We got last-minute cancellations from our clerks.''
CHANGES PROMISED
Oliphant vowed to redesign her system of assigning poll workers in time for the Nov. 5 general election. A former member of the Broward School Board, she gave herself a grade ''B'' for Tuesday's work.
''Once we got the polls open, things started going smoothly,'' she said.
Not really. Some election workers said Oliphant's office never notified them of the voting extension.
One legal expert said Tuesday's poll problems could lead to legal action, especially by candidates who lost close races or by disgruntled voters.
''We should start hearing the rumblings on Wednesday
morning,'' said
The new machines and other changes were made necessary by
that ''hanging chad'' debacle, which called into question the integrity of
On Tuesday, 60 percent of the state voted on new equipment. And about one of every three voters in Miami-Dade and Broward voted at a new location this year.
Many elections supervisors had predicted some confusion, but nothing like this.
In
Without precinct clerks, registration books and activators, the place was chaotic.
''Nobody is more upset than we are,'' said Jacquelyn Simone, a first-time poll worker. ``We all went to our class, and it looked like everything was going to go smoothly.''
It did not.
**********************
Long delays leave some black voters angry and suspicious
After computer foul-ups, leaders see echoes of 2000
BY ANDREA ROBINSON
arobinson@herald.com
The snafus -- which some leaders predicted last week -- caused an angry state NAACP President Adora Obi Nweze to call for the removal of some county elections supervisors, in particular Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor David Leahy.
''Somebody else needs to be put into that job,'' Nweze said
late Tuesday. ``People ought to have had an opportunity to vote, both black and
white. They haven't had that opportunity in
State Sen. Kendrick Meek, who canvassed North Dade polls earlier in the day, said Leahy should resign and County Manager Steve Shiver should ``get someone who can run the elections. . . . What happened is unconscionable.''
State and national black leaders said it was too early to tell if blacks were disproportionately disenfranchised, but they charged that neither the state nor the counties had ensured voters that their rights were safe.
WORST CASE
The worst was seen at Precinct 507 in
There are 1,200 registered voters in the precinct, which is 90 percent Democrat and 95 percent black.
Many walked away angry and suspicious after their first attempt to vote failed.
''Voting in Miami-Dade reminds me of being in a third-world country,'' said retired teacher Wilhelmenia Jennings, 85, who came to vote with her 92-year-old sister, Witlean Butler. Both were turned away.
Emotions in black neighborhoods were high early Tuesday.
Gospel radio station WMBM 1490-AM was flooded with alerts from Broward and
Miami-Dade voters shortly after the
By
''One of [the poll workers] said the batteries were put in wrong. That's no excuse,'' Range said. ``I expected that things would go relatively smoothly. I expected a glitch or two but not a precinct down for several hours with no relief in sight.''
Criticism also poured in from the NAACP and the People for
the
''This doesn't have to happen,'' said Vicki Beasely, a
lawyer who has monitored elections in
EARLY INDICATION
As early as last week, black community leaders had predicted problems would crop up, after U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek was turned away from casting an absentee ballot because of a computer malfunction at a Miami library branch. Some would-be voters left in frustration, but Meek called Leahy, who verified her information with poll workers so she could vote.
On Tuesday, Meek criticized Miami-Dade's process.
``I had hoped that the problems I had experienced . . . when I went to vote -- inoperable computers and backup systems that fail -- had been corrected, but the mess that has been reported this morning in dozens of Dade precincts shows that Dade's voting system is just as broken as ever.''
The incident involving Meek occured on the same day that the state settled a federal voting rights lawsuit. That lawsuit, filed by the NAACP and four other civil rights groups, alleged top elections officials, the departments of Children & Families and Motor Vehicles and Highway Safety and seven counties -- including Miami-Dade, Broward and Duval -- had disenfranchised scores of black voters during the Nov. 7, 2000, election that put George W. Bush into the White House.
The state agreed -- among other things -- to develop uniform, statewide poll worker training and voter education standards.
Staff writers Luisa Yanez, Jennifer Maloney and Erika Bolstad contributed to this report.
**************************
Voting Machines Cause Problems in
By Colleen Jenkins
Wednesday,
Returns in one of the most closely watched and hotly
contested elections in the nation were muddled last night when poorly trained
election workers in
The leading candidates in the 8th Congressional District
emerged shortly before
Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan acknowledged there were "some shakedown problems."
"We had problems opening up the polling places and
closing the polling places and getting the [computer] cartridges to the Board
of Elections,"
County officials said poll workers had to shut down each poll site, tabulate the precinct results on a paper printout and then drive the printout and memory cards from each unit to the county's election headquarters.
"That takes time," said
Harris acknowledged that the county needed to do more training of its precinct workers before November to improve their performance.
Joe Torre, a state elections board project manager, said
cars were lined up outside
"It's a slow process," he said. "It's brand new to them. Why wouldn't they release [the results] as soon as they start to get them?"
The other three counties juggling the new process had better results. In Prince George's County, the machines worked smoothly, said Charles Deegan, the Republican member of the county board of elections. At each of 204 polling places, election judges collected the totals from each machine into a single "accumulator" and then transmitted the totals via modem to election board headquarters in Upper Marlboro.
The first results were available at 8:21 p.m. – 21 minutes after the polls closed.
"Hey, if Prince George's can do it, anybody can do it," Deegan said.
Montgomery appeared to suffer, he said, because the county asked election judges to drive the memory cards from each polling place to a central location.
"In a county of that size, or in Prince George's, it's just not feasible," Deegan said. "We're 725 square miles, 204 precincts. It's a big county."
Deegan said some of Prince George's 2,100 voting machines were first used in a special election to replace a deceased county councilman earlier this year. General training for election judges across the county began in the middle of June.
The machines also worked well in rural Allegany County, where poll judges pulled memory cards from each of 202 machines and drove them into Cumberland from 36 polling places, said elections administrator Kitty Davis.
Allegany didn't try to use modems or to accumulate totals on a single machine in each polling place because "we wanted baby steps," Davis said. "The machines have a lot more bells and whistles, but we did not fully utilize them because we wanted our judges and the public to get comfortable with the new process."
In Dorchester County, election officials were finished tabulating results from the county's 38 precincts by 9:30 p.m. Some election judges had to drive an hour to bring their memory cards to the county election board, said election director Donna E. Rahe.
"Everything worked out just great," she said. "I'm very pleased with my chief judges and judges and the community."
Campaign workers waited in frustration for Montgomery's delayed results.
"I wish the Montgomery board of elections would tell us what they know," said Jonathan Cohen, 45, of Bethesda, at Chris Van Hollen's campaign party. "I've got kids at home with the babysitter and the babysitter has school tomorrow."
The late-night troubles in Montgomery followed a day alreayd rife with technological snags and confusion across the four counties showcasing the new touch-screen machines that Maryland officials plan to take statewide by 2006.
Early morning glitches frustrated some voters and marred the launch of the new touch-screen voting machines in four Maryland counties yesterday, but by late in the day, poll workers and voters gave mostly positive reviews of the system.
"I like it better," said Bernice Williams, who is in her seventies, as she voted at Leisure World of Maryland, a retirement community in Silver Spring. "It's faster. We won't have any hanging chads. It's the 21st century."
Instead of stepping into a curtained voting booth with punch cards or lever machines, voters in the four counties that had the most antiquated systems encountered machines that resemble automated tellers. Voters received a card encoded for their precinct and political party that they inserted into a machine to display a ballot, and touched a computer screen to make selections.
The four counties and the state split the $15?million cost of the new system for their sites. The machines are the Maryland General Assembly's response to the Florida vote-count controversy that delayed results from the 2000 presidential election for weeks. But the initial rough spots perturbed some voters.
Melba DeLope, 52, a cosmetologist in Silver Spring, had voted only for a gubernatorial candidate before her white, plastic voting card popped out of the machine. Perplexed and rushing to get to work, DeLope turned in the card unfinished.
"I feel like I was cheated," she said.
Margaret Dolan, 51, experienced a similar problem in Silver Spring about 6 p.m. Her Republican ballot let her vote only for the school board race, and when she reported the error to an election judge, she said he responded "that was just too bad."
"I was really annoyed because I had spent a good part of the day going over the ballot deciding who to vote for," she said.
Electrical problems halted voting for about 15 minutes at precincts in Chevy Chase and Silver Spring, said local poll workers. Some machines in Montgomery and Prince George's didn't work as soon as they were turned on.
Torre said the machines have a backup battery that should prevent votes from being lost.
Election officials tried to introduce the new AccuVote-TS system, manufactured by Global/Diebold Election Systems, in advance at events such as festivals.
Their preparation helped familiarize hundreds of voters with the new technology, but it didn't prevent complaints. Some election workers said there weren't enough machines to meet demand., although each county had twice as many of the new machines as they had of the old. Montgomery and Prince George's counties, the state's largest jurisdictions, each had more than 2,000 new machines.
Voting procedures and human error seemed to cause more trouble than the machines, officials and voters said. At Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, voters said poll workers had trouble turning on the machines and finding the cards that needed to be programmed.
It was 20 minutes before the first voter could be processed.
"It was like watching amateur hour," said Marcus Smith, a Bethesda resident who voted at the high school. "I got the impression they were slowly figuring out how it worked., but it looked like a real mess this morning."
Many senior citizens at the Leisure World poll site wandered from table to table, unsure of where to go. They were supposed to pick up a registration card from one set of election judges, get a ballot encoded at another table and then wait to be escorted to an open voting machine. But some residents said they had not bargained on the more elaborate process.
"Once you get to the machine and get it started, it's duck soup . . . but it's getting to the machine and getting it activated that's the holdup," said Joan Barry, a senior citizen and Democratic precinct vice chairwoman.
Some election workers in Allegany and Dorchester counties initially had trouble encoding cards, election officials said. But technical support people patrolled the 329 machines at the sites and quickly fixed problems, said Allegany election director Catherine O. Davis.
"We've learned a few things," Davis said. "In dealing with our judges, perhaps we weren't clear enough. . . . We're coming from 1950s technology."
"I liked the new system," said Larcenia Cromwell of Prince George's County. "It is very important that we come out today and vote."
The procedural mishaps somewhat overshadowed the new system's advantages. The machines featured large, clear print – in English and Spanish in Montgomery and Prince George's – and a safeguard against people voting for more candidates than allowed. They also featured an audio ballot, giving the illiterate and the blind their first opportunity to vote unassisted, officials said.
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Government Computer News
Touch-screen voting machines don’t solve Florida problems
By Trudy Walsh
September 12, 2002
It was déjà vu all over again. In a scenario reminiscent of the November 2000 elections, confusion and equipment malfunctions in Florida’s primary yesterday prompted Gov. Jeb Bush to keep the state’s polling places open two hours beyond their regularly scheduled closing times.
Bush said he was issuing the order because of “substantial delays in the opening of certain polling places in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.” Bush also attributed the delays to the “major technological and procedural changes” mandated by the revision of the state’s election code.
The state had spent what Bush called a significant sum of money on new voting machines and training.
Bruce Eldridge, assistant supervisor of technical services for the Broward County Elections Office, did not see the delays as purely a result of voting machinery gone awry. “Technology is not the answer,” Eldridge said. “Elections are a people-oriented process. I think the technology failed us in several instances, but the major problems were human factors.”
“I don’t know yet the exact incidence of equipment failure,” Eldridge said. “Once our tech teams have been out to the precincts to evaluate the failures, I’ll have an answer.”
Part of the problem was that some poll workers did not show up for duty, Eldridge said.
“You know how the stock market has what they call a ‘triple witching hour,’ where many events happen at once? Well, that’s what happened this year in Florida,” he said. Yesterday was the first statewide use of new election rules and procedures, new equipment, and new precincts. “We were really being stretched,” he said.
Broward County used iVotronic touch-screen voting machines from Election Systems and Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb. The company’s Web site says the equipment makes “election day operations and voting easy and straightforward.”
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Sun-Sentinel
Miami-Dade votes still turning up two days after primary
By ALEX VEIGA
Associated Press
Posted September 13 2002, 12:24 PM EDT
MIAMI -- Few answers have been given to explain why more than 1,800 votes in Miami-Dade County were only found two days after Florida's primary election.
The votes were found when election officials reviewed four precincts with unusually low voter turnout Thursday. Many of those additional votes would likely go to Janet Reno, who won Miami-Dade by more than a 3-1 margin in the Democratic gubernatorial primary but trailed Bill McBride statewide.
The votes have not yet been submitted to the state as part of Miami-Dade's vote total from Tuesday's primary.
McBride's unofficial victory margin was 8,196 votes, according to the state, while Reno needed a difference of 6,751 votes or less to qualify for an automatic machine recount.
Reno would need to cut McBride's margin by 1,445 votes to trigger the recount. The additional ballots from the four precincts would probably reduce the difference by several hundred votes, based on the margin of Reno's victory in Miami-Dade.
Reno will not concede the race because of balloting problems in her home county.
One of the four precincts was at Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church in Liberty City, with 1,633 registered voters. The first count showed 87 votes cast there, but the review found more than 610 votes.
``The first four (precincts) were just off the chart,'' said David Leahy, Miami-Dade's elections chief. ``This is an indicator that the system did not work as it was designed to.''
Leahy believes that in some cases poll workers failed to close down the touchscreen voting machines properly, leading the votes on those machines not to be collected Tuesday. But he added that it is possible some of the polling stations' low vote numbers are correct, reflecting delays and technical glitches that kept some machines from being used part of the day.
Dorothy Walton, precinct clerk at Pilgrim Rest church, said she wasn't told the proper closing procedures for the machines.
``I didn't know either that when they set them up, they didn't hook them all together,'' said Walton.
In her precinct, seven out of the 12 machines were working. But just two were linked, so results were only collected from those machines, she said.
Jaqui Colyer, a Democratic candidate for state Representative, also complained of voting problems in the precinct, which is in the district she ran in.
When elections officials first told her that less than 90 people voted in the precinct, she said she started calling her supporters. When she had talked to about 100 who said they voted for her, she became suspicious.
But when officials announced Thursday they had found 610 votes, she became incensed.
``Were they under the bed?'' she asked. ``If they can lose 600 votes in that precinct, how many more did they lose?''
She also complained that long lines at the polls sent home many potential voters.
One supporter told her: ``I had to go to work. I love you Jaqui, but I don't love you enough to make a lifetime job out of voting.''
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The Miami Herald
Broward recheck finds about 200 untallied votes
BY ERIKA BOLSTAD
September 13, 2002
Broward County election workers double-checking the machines used in Tuesday's primary found an estimated 200 votes that weren't counted Tuesday.
Of those votes, election workers said 137 were cast by voters in the 32X precinct in Pembroke Pines, where Supervisor of Elections Miriam Oliphant personally delivered the needed equipment to start the touch-screen machines around 11 a.m. Tuesday.
The precinct was among 247 that Janet Reno's gubernatorial campaign had asked the county to review either because turnout was unexpectedly low or because no votes were recorded. It's unclear how many of the ''found'' votes in Broward will be tallied for Reno.
Broward election officials refused to be more specific about the number of precincts reviewed or the number of votes discovered. They said they won't release that information until Tuesday, when they will retabulate all results for the county's three-member canvassing board.
''We won't release any data or any information until the process they're going through is complete,'' said Rick Riley, a spokesman for Oliphant.
CHECKING TAPES
The process is not likely to finish until today. Broward officials found the additional votes when they checked for irregularities while reviewing close-out tapes for all 769 precincts.
Election workers checked the tapes for the number of machines that were closed out at each polling place. If that number didn't match the number of machines delivered to the precinct or they noticed other irregularities, election workers flagged the precinct for additional scrutiny.
The process flagged more than 10 percent of the county's precincts for further review, said Bruce Eldridge, assistant supervisor of technical services.
''The problem in Miami really caused us to look deeper into this,'' Eldridge said.
WRONG CARTRIDGE
Election workers then retrieved the plastic shoe box-size containers that hold the cartridges used in the questionable precincts. In many cases, they found that poll workers failed to use a master cartridge to start the machines in the morning and shut them down at night.
Instead, workers used the ''slave'' cartridges which were to be used to activate machines for individual voters.
In those cases where the wrong cartridge was used to shut down machines and tally the final vote, votes had to be retrieved from the hard drives of the machines they were cast on.
All but a handful of those machines were retrieved Saturday and Sunday. Some machines were unavailable because they were locked up in schools and other polling places.
Typically, election equipment isn't picked up immediately after the election. The touch-screen machines are stored in hard plastic cases until they're retrieved by a trucking company the county hires to pick up the equipment.
Election officials would not say how many Broward precincts were reviewed over the weekend or how many machines had to be retrieved from polling places.
Unlike in Miami-Dade -- where election officials were forthcoming about the votes they retrieved throughout the day -- Broward's review process was largely secretive.
Oliphant's deputy supervisor, former Miami city clerk Walter Foeman, would answer few questions. Her spokesman, Riley, did not appear at the warehouse, either.
INFORMATION SCARCE
The only information came when reporters pressed workers as they left the main counting room in the warehouse. Workers were equally tight-lipped with monitors from Bill McBride's campaign and the state Republican Party.
On Sunday, some election workers were sent home midafternoon, but about 15 remained until they shut down for the evening at 5:30 p.m. No one is being paid overtime, one employee said. Instead, they are expected to take compensatory time after the election for the long hours they've put in the past several weeks.
''Too many hands, too many jobs, all the same job,'' said one worker, throwing up her hands in frustration as she walked through the warehouse Sunday afternoon. ``I've been in this organization 15 years, and I've never seen such a fiasco.''
Although Oliphant's employees toiled over the weekend, the embattled elections supervisor never visited the warehouse where about 24 people -- including her top lieutenants -- worked Saturday and Sunday.
Herald Capital Bureau chief Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.
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Federal Computer Week
Florida woes cast vote for caution
BY William Matthews
Sept. 13, 2002
The Florida voting fiasco of 2000 prompted the state to banish punch card ballots and their pesky paper chads, and buy $32 million worth of electronic voting machines.
The Florida voting fiasco of 2002 might prompt state officials to reassess their opinion of paper.
"There's a good lesson in Florida," said Stephen Ansolabehere, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. "Put a backup in place -- a paper ballot in case there is a problem."
On Sept. 10, thousands of Florida voters arrived at polling places to find new machines that wouldn't start, offered the wrong ballots, recorded the wrong votes or wouldn't record votes at all.
But the problems were more often blamed on human error and lack of training than on technology failures. So Florida's latest election troubles probably won't deter other states from switching to e-voting, election experts said.
"A lot of problems we heard about were poll workers being confused and unable to deal" with the new equipment, said Ansolabehere, a member of a voting technology project run by MIT and the California Institute of Technology. "Imagine a computer support staff that is all volunteer and mainly older people," he said.
Poll workers, particularly those in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, were stymied by troubles as ordinary as a nonworking electrical socket and tasks as arcane as inserting the correct definition card containing precinct data into touch-screen voting machines.
Hundreds of voters were turned away from Miami-Dade polling places because poll workers could not get electronic voting machines to boot up.
It was mostly a training problem, said Doug Lewis, director of the Election Center, a Houston-based organization of state and local election officials. "My hunch is that the poll workers did not realize that it's not just a matter of turning the machines on." Depending on the type of machine, touch screens must be warmed up, precinct data must be loaded and vote recording devices must be inserted before voting can begin.
In addition to new voting machines, Florida poll workers had to cope with new election laws, new policies and procedures and new ballot designs, Lewis said. "When you've got that many changes, you're asking for chaos."
Florida wasn't the only state troubled by new technology.
In Montgomery County, Md., when the new electronic system balked, poll workers drove computer memory cards -- and results tabulated on paper -- to the election headquarters, said Robert Ritchie, director of the Maryland-based Center for Voting and Democracy.
Similar troubles were reported in North Carolina.
Ritchie attributes the troubles to multiple sources: Voting machine vendors are overextended and cannot provide adequate support. States and localities are suffering from the economic recession and lack money for training. And a House and Senate deadlock over election reform legislation keeps $3 billion unavailable to the states, he said.
But not everybody had problems with electronic voting, Lewis noted.
While the two counties struggled, 65 other Florida counties conducted relatively trouble-free elections, he said. And voters generally like the new machines. "There are all kinds of really positive comments from voters," Lewis said.
Two types of machines dominate electronic voting -- touch screens and optical scanners. Touch screens feature greater flexibility, making it easier to offer foreign language ballots and accessibility features for people with disabilities, Ritchie said.
But optical scanner machines offer the security of a paper ballot that can be counted by hand if the technology fails, Ansolabehere said.
Florida's troubles probably will make election officials more circumspect about the equipment they buy, but the switch to electronic voting machines will go on, experts agreed. California, for one, is under court order to replace its punch card machines, and New York is pondering touch screens, Ansolabehere said.
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Los Angeles Times
Computer Voting: Florida's System Highlights Glitches
September 16 2002
Gosh, everyone is so surprised at the latest Florida election fiasco ("Florida Vote Foul-Up Puts Reform Onus on Congress," Sept. 12). For hundreds of years, little pieces of paper with holes punched in them have had a pretty good record of providing pretty accurate results in thousands of polling places in thousands of elections. No system being perfect, "design flaws" may have caused problems in a handful of locations over the centuries. And yes, we all know of one possible biggie in that department--out of billions of "beta tests" of paper ballots.
But if anyone thinks that going high-tech is going to prevent or lessen this type of glitch, that person has never had a computer crash in the middle of a sentence, called a company for information only to be told the system is down, had a computer file lost in cyberspace or spent two lovely hours with tech support. Did people really think that having computers at polling places would solve the problems? Will California rethink the plan on spending hundreds of millions of dollars to follow Florida's latest lead?
David Goodwin
Los Angeles
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Spectrum Online
When Humans are The Moth in the Machine
October 2, 2002
Last month, in an attempt to banish the ghosts of elections past, the state of Florida rolled out tens of millions of dollars' worth of shiny new electronic voting equipment.
But rather than the exorcism that officials were hoping for, they got a séance. Instead of hanging chads and incomprehensible ballots, voters got touch-screen-based systems that crashed and froze.
A humiliating indictment of electronic voting? Not really. For while it did raise some of the big issues surrounding electronic voting—security and auditability [see "A Better Ballot Box?"]—the main culprit in Florida was old-fashioned human folly. The episode confirmed once again that common sense is never common, particularly when it comes to the procurement and deployment of new technology by government entities great and small.
Any IT manager worth her Porsche will tell you that putting a new networked electronic system of any sort and size into play requires systems management. Lots of it. Unlike rusty old polling booths, electronic voting systems can't simply be dragged into high school gymnasiums and put to work. They have to be thoroughly tested and monitored, debugged, and optimized—in short, professionally supported. The people who supervise their use have to be trained, and trained well, preferably more than a few hours before the voting begins. Whose idea was it that largely untrained, volunteer poll workers would suddenly be able to troubleshoot these sophisticated electronic devices on the fly? Was everyone involved unfamiliar with the terms "systems failure" and "operator error"?
There has also been some whining about the manufacturers' refusal to allow their machines and software to be scrutinized. To which we reply: whine away. But the next time you put nice, big, fat government contracts out for electronic voting systems, don't give those contracts to manufacturers who do substandard work and don't meet your project specifications, who refuse to allow adequate inspections of their machines and installation procedures, and who don't provide adequate tech support. And don't buy stuff in a mad rush just so you can say that you did, hoping to ward off, in this case, the blizzard of bad publicity that would have surrounded any decision to stick with the infamous butterfly ballots and bent punch cards.
A decade ago, when people began to imagine in earnest how electronic information devices would impact the election process, most of the speculation was optimistic. People foresaw the beginning of digital democracy, of a re-engaged citizenry (particularly in the United States) for whom civic responsibility and political discourse would take on renewed importance. Everyone, not just the stalwart few, would vote on matters of local and national significance. Such hopes should not be abandoned because some officials in Florida made bad decisions about technology deployment.
When the smoke clears, we might even be grateful that these election follies have reminded us yet again about a systems-management truism: people can be as big a bug as any software glitch when it comes to getting a new technology to work properly.
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Government Computer News
Election reform deal would send billions to states
By Wilson P. Dizard III
October 8, 2002
A long-awaited compromise over election reform procedures appears to have formed in a Congressional conference committee, and $3.8 billion in federal funds for new election technology could be on its way to states soon.
The legislation to overhaul election procedures, known as the Help America Vote Act (HR 3295), has been stalled for months as Senate Democrats and House Republicans sought a compromise over its antifraud provisions and other sections.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), chairmen of the conference committee, announced Friday that the panel had agreed on the outlines of a compromise. Conference committee staff members were compiling the details of the compromise this afternoon.
The outline of the compromise includes:
More than $3.7 billion in direct aid to states to improve federal election processes
Creation of an Election Assistance Commission to issue voluntary guidelines for voting systems
Antifraud provisions requiring positive identification and accurate voter lists
Provisional balloting procedures to allow voting while disputes are resolved
Improved voting access for the disabled, including more than $100 million in physical access grants
New voting procedures for military and overseas voters
Criminal penalties for vote fraud.
The original election reform bills passed each chamber by wide margins. The two lawmakers praised the compromise as bipartisan and bicameral.
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Federal Computer Week
Bill casts out old voting machines
BY William Matthews
Oct. 22, 2002
Each state is guaranteed at least $5 million to buy new voting machines and improve voting procedures, and some will receive considerably more from a $3.9 billion election reform bill Congress passed before members went home to run for re-election.
The law targets punch card and lever voting machines for elimination, earmarking $325 million for "buying out" those machines over the next three years. Problem-plagued punch cards, with their troublesome chads, were at the center of the disputed 2000 presidential election.
"This legislation will help America move beyond the days of hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and illegal purges of voters and accusations of voter fraud," said Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), who sponsored the bill in the Senate.
Another $325 million is intended to improve election administration, and at least that much is expected to be doled out to states for developing computerized statewide databases to improve the accuracy of voter registration rolls.
The registration systems are expected to be able to compare voter registration data against other government databases, such as state driver's license databases, Social Security data and other electronic identification information, said Doug Lewis, director of the Texas-based Election Center, an association for election officials.
The computerized registration systems, which are to be in place in 2006, should substantially improve the integrity of voter rolls by keeping legitimate voters on the rolls, removing ineligible or deceased voters and making it possible to instantly check identifications, Lewis said.
By providing funding for new voting equipment and better registration systems, Congress hopes "to make certain votes are counted properly and to make voter fraud more difficult," said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) Lugar was instrumental in including the provision for computerized voter registration systems in the bill.
Lawmakers set aside another $100 million to be used by states to ensure that at least one voting machine per precinct can be used by people with disabilities. That probably means buying electronic touch screen voting machines, which for now are the most accessible type, Lewis said.
The election reform law allots $20 million for developing new voting technology and $10 million for testing it. And it calls for more education for voters, poll workers and election officials. Lewis said some money should be spent to study how people learn so that more effective brief training courses can be developed for voters and poll workers.
But the bulk of the $3.9 billion will probably be spent on new voting machines, Lewis said. "There's no question the nation has too much antiquated voting equipment."
The bill awaits President Bush to sign it into law.
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Washington Post
Voting Machines Can't Help Disabled
Lack of Staff Leaves New Technology Unusable for Now
By David Nakamura
Thursday, October 24, 2002; Page DZ03
Advocates for the disabled had hoped to unveil high-tech machines in the general election to make voting easier for District residents who are blind or have limited hand dexterity. But that will have to wait.
The 150 machines, costing $1.2 million, are in place. Volunteers needed to operate the equipment are not.
Several advocacy groups were supposed to recruit the volunteers under a court settlement this year of a lawsuit brought by the groups against the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics. The suit alleged that the city's current balloting system requires many disabled people to have assistance in the voting booth, denying them the right to cast ballots in private.
The city bought the machines, about 30 of which were used in demonstrations during the September primary elections. The machines were demonstrated more widely -- at all 140 polling places -- for the general election Nov. 5, but the advocacy groups could not find enough volunteers to run them, officials said.
So the machines will sit dormant this year. They are scheduled to be used for actual voting in the presidential primary of May 2004.
"We weren't able to reach as many people as we'd hoped," said Linda Royster, executive director of the Disability Rights Council of Greater Washington. "We're unable to pull together enough volunteers to make the demos worthwhile. The board will not assist or provide us with the people. To be fair, it's not malicious on their part. They just don't have the people."
Under the court settlement, which affects more than 16,000 District voters, the city was not required to recruit volunteers or train them for a demonstration next month, city officials said.
However, the city will be responsible for recruiting and training in 2004. Board of Elections spokesman Bill O'Field said city officials will try to demonstrate and publicize the new machines before the 2004 primaries.
Using them, voters who can see but cannot read or write English will receive audio instructions and make selections by touching a screen on a desktop-size computer that can handle as many as five languages. Sight-impaired voters or those with limited hand movement will receive audio instructions and make their selections by pushing a button on a separate electronic box attached to the computer.
Royster said her organization and the American Association of People With Disabilities, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, could not offer a stipend to volunteers this November. In contrast, the city will pay poll workers a $100 daily stipend.
"Oh, how I wish," Royster said. "We are a very small nonprofit. We don't have that kind of money."
Board of Elections officials said they will pay workers a stipend to operate the new machines in 2004 but cannot afford a demonstration next month.
"We have always been on the same page," said Kenneth McGhie, general counsel to the elections board. "We wanted further [voter] participation. To that extent, [the new machines] are what we both wanted. The only thing we ever disagreed on was the timing. The timing was a problem because we do not have enough money."
Royster said that both nonprofit organizations asked members to volunteer but that many people said they were too busy. She said she does not foresee a problem getting the machines running by the 2004 primary.
The District will be the nation's only jurisdiction to use both the optical-scan voting and computerized systems. The city replaced its punch-card system with optical-scan balloting last year.
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Dallas Morning News
[TX] County tries to prevent more ballot problems
Working to reduce the margin for early-voting error
Controversy over touch-screen machines still a partisan wedge
By ED HOUSEWRIGHT Staff Writer
Published October 24, 2002
Dallas County elections officials implemented safeguards Wednesday to address complaints that some ballots cast in early voting this week weren't being counted accurately.
The changes occurred amid escalating bickering between county Democratic and Republican leaders. The two sides met for more than four hours Wednesday - along with officials from the elections department and the voting machine company - and traded accusations of partisan strong-arming.
Bruce Sherbet, county elections administrator, said he didn't think any votes had been lost or miscounted.
Eighteen of more than 400 electronic voting machines were pulled out of service after early voting began Monday. Some voters complained that they selected one candidate but that the touch-screen machine marked a different candidate.
Mr. Sherbet said signs were placed in all 24 early-voting locations Wednesday urging voters to double-check the electronic ballots to make sure they accurately reflected their choices.
In addition, election judges will test each of the more than 400 voting machines before the polls open each day, and more checks are being done throughout each day, Mr. Sherbet said.
Finally, extra election workers have been hired to assist voters who might worry that their votes aren't being properly counted.
"The complaints dropped off pretty dramatically today," Susan Hays, chairwoman of the Dallas County Democratic Party, said Wednesday. "That tells me some of the procedures Sherbet put into place are really working."
Republican leaders accused Democrats of exaggerating the problems with the machines to discourage early voting and help their candidates. Early voting continues through Nov. 1. Early-voting totals won't be released until after the Nov. 5 election.
Democrats said that more than 60 voters complained this week that they tried to select a Democratic candidate, but that their vote registered a Republican candidate. Some Republicans also have complained that the machines incorrectly cast their votes beside a Democratic candidate, Democratic leaders said.
Republican leaders, however, said they were skeptical of the Democrats' assertions. Only one voter has complained to Republican headquarters that a vote wasn't registered as intended, said Nate Crain, chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party.
"We have full confidence in the early-voting system," he said.
Democratic Party leaders said more changes are necessary, though. They said they may ask a judge Thursday for permission to test the accuracy of the ballot machines.
On Tuesday, Democrats asked a state district judge to halt early voting. But they withdrew the request and said they would meet Wednesday with Republicans, elections officials and officials from Election Systems & Software, the Nebraska company that makes the touch screen ballots.
Mr. Sherbet said problems were reported in seven to 10 polling places, although Democrats said the number could be as high as 16. He said technicians were able to "recalibrate 15 of the 18 machines taken out of service and return them to use. The other three were replaced, he said.
"Every election, we have machines that have to be recalibrated," Mr. Sherbet said. "Touch-screens have pluses and minuses.
"We want to be sure no votes are missed."
He emphasized that a voter's choice isn't immediately logged into a machine's memory when he or she selects a candidate in a particular race. The votes aren't counted until the voter reaches the end of the ballot and pushes a red button to indicate that he or she is finished.
There is time for a voter to change a selection if the machine makes a mark beside the wrong candidate, Mr. Sherbet said.
Officials with Electronic Systems & Software, the world's largest manufacturer of voting machines, defended their product Wednesday and said the problems being reported are minor.
"There are safeguards to let us detect this," said Ken Carbullido, senior vice president of software development. "We'd like to assure Dallas County that this is a solid process, and they can trust in the election."
The touch-screen machines have been used in more than 90 Dallas County elections in the past four years.
Isolated problems have occurred similar to the ones that occurred this week, Mr. Sherbet said.
The problem can occur after the machines are moved and locked up each night, he said. Pixels on the machines' screens get misaligned during jostling and do not properly read voters' selections. However, technicians can realign them within minutes, Mr. Sherbet said.
He said he's not inclined to scrap the electronic ballots.
"All large counties are going to electronic voting," Mr. Sherbet said.
The touch-screen system is not used on election days in Dallas County. Voters use a pen to fill in circles by candidates' names on paper ballots.
On Wednesday, the meeting among Democrats, Republicans, elections officials and company representatives broke up at one point amid partisan bickering.
Mike Atwood, executive director of the county Democratic Party, emerged from the closed-door meeting and told a large gathering of reporters that he wanted to demonstrate the problems with a voting machine. But before he could, Dallas County Commissioner Jim Jackson, a longtime Republican, stepped up to reporters and said, "Let me tell you what the truth is."
He said the problems being alleged are isolated and no more than occur in every election. Voters are reporting the problems as they occur and being directed to machines that are working properly, Mr. Jackson said.
"I think you will find that any person with any intelligence can vote accurately in Dallas County," he said.
Later, Mr. Sherbet showed reporters a defective voting machine and demonstrated how it incorrectly registered a vote. When he selected a box beside a candidate's name on the screen, a check mark appeared next to the name of the candidate above that one.
Staff writer Tim Wyatt contributed to this report.
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Associated Press
Bush to Sign Voting Revamp Bill
1 hour, 24 minutes ago
By SANDRA SOBIERAJ, Associated Press Writer
October 29, 2002
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush (news - web sites) is signing legislation to revamp the nation's voting system and protect against the kinds of errors that threw his own election into dispute two years ago.
The White House scheduled a morning bill-signing ceremony for Tuesday, starting Bush's two-day respite from campaigning for GOP House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates in next Tuesday's elections.
Under the Martin Luther King Jr. Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act of 2002, states will receive $3.9 billion in federal money over the next three years to replace outdated punch-card and lever voting machines or improve voter education and poll-worker training.
The new law's protections against voting error will not affect next week's balloting but are scheduled to be mostly implemented in time for the 2004 congressional and presidential vote, which will most likely include Bush's re-election bid.
It was Bush's bitter 2000 Florida recount battle with Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites) — with its confusing "butterfly ballots," half-perforated punch ballots and allegations of voter intimidation — that gave rise to the legislation. Bush's election was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.
The House approved election changes late last year and the Senate followed suit in April, but Republican demands for strong anti-fraud provisions stalled reconciliation of the two versions for months. Lawmakers did not send a final bill to Bush until last Wednesday.
"This has been a long marathon, but the finish line is finally in sight and the winner is the American public," said Senate Rules Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. "This landmark legislation will ensure that everyone not only has the right to vote on Election Day, but that their voice is heard."
Beginning Jan. 1, first-time voters who registered by mail will be required to provide identification when they show up at the polls.
By the 2004 vote, states will be required to provide provisional ballots to voters whose names do not appear on voter rolls. Those provisional ballots would counted once valid registration is verified.
For 2006 balloting, states will be required to maintain computerized, statewide voter registration lists linked to their driver's license databases. States will also be required to have voting machines that allow voters to confirm the way they marked their ballot — and, if necessary, change their votes — before they are finally cast.
Such voting software was tested in one jurisdiction in the 2001 Virginia gubernatorial election. The Century Foundation, which reviewed the results, found that the "lost vote" rate went from between 600-700 votes in the 2000 election to just one vote in 2001, said Tova Andrea Wang, a staffer to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform who later oversaw the foundation's study.
"The bill goes a long way toward addressing a lot of the problems, but the extent to which the bill works relies on what the states do because they are given a lot of discretion," said Wang.
"A new polling machine is fine and great as long as people know how to use it, and there's no specificity in the legislation on poll-worker training and voter education."
Wang and other election experts also worry that discriminatory enforcement of the voter-ID requirements could especially disenfranchise minorities, the poor, immigrants and students. She called the provision "something that may have to be revisited."
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Houston Chronicle
New voting tools make Texas a place to watch
eSlate draws attention of national monitors
By CYNTHIA LEE
October 31, 2002
WASHINGTON -- Wariness over Harris County's new electronic voting system has helped land Texas on a list of states a national group will monitor on Election Day.
The Washington-based Election Reform Information Project said Texas drew its attention because it will be the first time the eSlate electronic device will be used by so many voters.
"A lot of people will be watching to see what happens in Harris County, to see how those machines work ... when a very large jurisdiction switches from a punch-card machine to a much more modern machine," said Dan Seligson, whose nonpartisan group is affiliated with the University of Richmond.
The group said concerns about touch-screen voting machines in Dallas and problems related to the design of the ballot in Bexar County also made Texas a place to watch.
Election administration is changing rapidly across the country as jurisdictions seek to comply with a new law that requires electronic voting technology to be implemented by November 2004. States and municipalities looking to buy new voting machines also will be watching to see how new devices, such as eSlate, perform on Election Day.
Harris County has spent $25 million to buy 8,170 of the eSlate devices, which are about the size of legal pads. Voters turn a knob on the side to highlight their preferred candidates on a screen and push buttons to make their choices.
The new technology has worked fine during early voting, said David Beirne, spokesman for the Harris County elections office. He said the county has taken several steps to prevent any problems Election Day, including making video instruction available at the polling stations, training polling staff and launching an aggressive information outreach campaign.
Former Harris County election administrator Tony Sirvello agreed that systematic steps were taken to phase eSlate in, but he said some problems would be unavoidable.
"Most people in everyday life are so busy ... that they're not conscious of the voting process until it's actually right upon them," he said.
An official at the Houston-based Election Center, a professional organization made up of election administration employees, said a new voting system usually must go through three major elections before the voters get used to it.
"Most of these (old) voting systems last in jurisdictions for 25 or 30 years. By the time you get around to replacing them, you've really got to go through a fairly substantial learning curve," said Doug Lewis.
But he predicted the election in Harris County should go pretty well.
"You might have a hiccup here or there," Lewis said. "But the truth is, elections in America are under a microscope as a result of Election 2000, we're paying far more attention to it than in previous years."
In Dallas, 30 of the 400 touch-screen machines -- an older generation of election technology -- have been pulled from use in early voting after complaints that some machines had not accurately displayed voter selections for candidates.
Safeguards were put in place by election officials when the Dallas County Democratic Party said last week it intended to file a lawsuit over the complaints.
Election administrator Bruce Sherbet said any machine showing the slightest sign of a problem would be taken out of use and that all machines are being checked and recalibrated at least once a day, more than in other elections.
"This election is incredibly close and high-strung down here, more than I've seen in two decades," he said. "So we put in a bunch of different safeguards before voters would be confronted with this."
The Democrats are now appealing a state district court judge's dismissal of a lawsuit that asked that the machines be audited independently.
"We wanted to test those machines before early voting ended just to make sure ballots weren't being miscast," said Susan Hays, the party chairman.
State District Judge Karen Johnson threw out the suit because she said her jurisdiction did not include election procedures, which are under the supervision of the county elections administrator.
In San Antonio, Bexar County officials redesigned the election ballot after both major political parties and the League of United Latin American Citizens filed suit over concerns that the original ballot would make it difficult for those wanting to cast a straight party ticket.
The two-page ballot used during part of the early voting period required straight-party voters to mark both sheets, which deviated from past elections, when the ballot only consisted of a single page.
The Election Reform Information Project also highlighted Florida and Georgia among the 13 states on its list, which was selected based on election reform, close election races, and early voting controversy.
"All eyes will be focused on South Florida. Because of the problems they had in September and because of the state and national attention they've had on fixing those problems, that really is the place to see if reform is working," Seligson said.
Georgia overhauled its voting system after it was discovered that 10 percent of its ballots were being thrown out in the 2000 election. The state will move to a uniform voting system using the same type of voting machine for the first time on Nov. 5.
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MSNBC
Will high-tech save or sink future elections?
Experts, officials weigh the promise and peril of electronic vote systems
By Alan Boyle
Oct. 31 — On a crisp autumn morning in 2012, George got a call from his ballot box. He’d been tinkering with his presidential vote on the Netphone for weeks, and had dropped it in the e-mailbox just the night before. Now the election system’s voicemail was calling him back to verify his vote. A recorded message read off the confirmation numbers, as usual — but this time around, the digits didn’t match. George thought for a moment: Was it just a glitch, or did someone actually do what the crypto company said was impossible? Had his vote been hacked?
TEN YEARS from now, that scenario could represent normalcy or a nightmare, depending on what happens between now and then.
On one hand, boosters see online voting as a shot in the arm for an ailing electorate. A small-scale Internet voting experiment in England’s Swindon district helped boost turnout for May’s local council elections by about 3.5 percent, compared with figures from two years earlier.
“It worked beyond our wildest dreams,” election official Alan Winchcombe said.
On the other hand, the glitches bedeviling present-day electronic voting don’t exactly inspire confidence. Statistics from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project indicate that touch-screen machines have performed about as poorly as the infamous punch-card machines over the past 12 years.
This year, Florida is weathering a wave of criticism over problems with touch-screen systems. In Texas, touch-screens had to be taken offline for repairs during early voting because the displays were miscalibrated.
Would Internet voting add to the potential confusion and fraud? Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr College and founder of Notable Software, is certain it would.
“We’re taking an inherently insecure medium, the Internet, and layering security on top of it,” she said. “It doesn’t work.”
WHY VOTING IS DIFFICULT
Jim Adler, founder, president and chief executive officer of VoteHere, agrees that Internet voting is a huge challenge. That’s why his company developed the online system that was put to the test in Swindon.
“If this was so easy, banks would be doing elections,” he said from VoteHere’s headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. “We wouldn’t be in this business if we thought elections were as easy as bank transactions.”
He’s willing to put his software up against more traditional voting methods, in hopes of snaring a piece of the billions of dollars in federal funds that will be paid out over the next few years for election reform.
“Give me tough requirements,” he said. “Don’t just give me a red light and tell me we’re never going to go there.”
Why is electronic voting so tough?
“All of the things that make us
nervous about doing something by computer are magnified in the voting context,”
said Doug Chapin, director of ElectionLine.org, a nonpartisan research center
in Washington, “because voting is the first decision which leads to all other
decisions. If you believe that democracy is a process, and if there’s any
question about the legitimacy of that process, then it strikes at the
legitimacy of the government as a whole. Just witness all the navel-gazing that
went on in the wake of Bush v. Gore.”
To continue with the banking analogy, it’s OK if the
bank knows how much money you have in your account — but it’s not OK if the
election office knows how you voted. It’s OK to get a statement from the bank
showing your transactions — but it’s not OK to get a piece of paper showing how
you voted. And yet, the voting process should leave a verifiable audit trail —
not only to guard against election fraud and allow for recounts, but also to
ensure that every vote cast is counted.
HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS
Can Internet voting satisfy all those criteria? VoteHere’s Adler insists that it can, using data encryption, digital signatures and advanced cryptographic protocols.
Voters would sign into the balloting system using two sets of numbers that they received in advance, plus a code based on personal information familiar to the voter. Once they’re finished clicking through the ballot, it would be encrypted and a digital signature would be added.
“As soon as you have encrypted and signed a ballot, it’s in its own little safe,” Adler said. The digital signature serves as evidence that the vote is genuine and has not been altered.
The system could be used to cast a ballot at a polling place, over the Internet, over the telephone — or via a gizmo like George’s.
At the office, the ballots would be recorded in their encrypted form, and then they would be “shuffled,” deciphered and tabulated under the eyes of trusted authorities. If someone wanted a recount, the counters could go back to the encrypted vote register and start over again. The voter could also check that his or her vote was tallied correctly by matching up verification codes — just as George did in 2012.
“If you have voter verification, you don’t have to trust the machine,” Adler said. “I don’t care if a computer virus upsets my vote, I’m going to detect it.”
FACING REALITY
During VoteHere’s test in Swindon, nearly 11 percent of the roughly 40,000 voters used the Internet, while about 5 percent voted over the phone.
“One of the political parties was going on, carrying mobile phones (and) saying, ‘If you wanted to vote now, here you go,’” Winchcombe said. That party, the Liberal Democrats, drew the highest number of electronic votes, he said.
Winchcombe said VoteHere monitored the system for signs of fraud and detected “two or three attempts where people were trying to create their own PIN numbers” — but no successful hacks.
Mercuri, however, is skeptical that Internet voting could ever be made secure.
“All of that is completely susceptible to the latest virus attack, the latest denial-of-service attack, sniffers and snoopers,” she said. “There are vendors out there who are trying to mislead the public and election officials into thinking that they have secure cryptography.”
When it comes to remote voting, Mercuri sees nothing that would stand in the way of a voter selling or transferring his or her voting codes to someone else — unless election officials employed an intrusive biometric ID system. She even has her doubts about today’s touch-screen systems: She says such machines should be modified to generate paper ballots, which would be tallied separately to certify the computerized results.
She and other experts say the incentive for fraud or just plain mischief will increase as electronic voting becomes more widespread. Even if new security measures are developed, that would raise new hurdles for voting access, said Caltech Professor Michael Alvarez, a member of the MIT-Caltech voting research team.
“Most Americans aren’t familiar with what a digital certificate is,” he said. “It will require use of a password, and most people forget what their password is.”
Beyond the cybersecurity issue, remote Internet voting raises the same concern about coercion that mail-in absentee voting does, Alvarez said. He said online voting also could accentuate the country’s “digital divide” between high-tech haves and have nots, Alvarez said.
“The folks who don’t have Internet access tend to be elderly,” he noted. “They tend to belong to particular demographic groups. ... Internet voting may run into potential Voting Rights Act problems.”
Proponents of e-voting say that concern could be remedied by placing voting kiosks in government buildings, community centers, libraries and shopping malls. Los Angeles County operated 21 such kiosks for its early voting period this year.
The touch-screen setup, which allowed voters to cast ballots at convenient locations outside their home precincts, was a hit from the very first day. “Some of the locations had people lined up,” said Conny McCormack, the county’s registrar.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Although researchers say the time isn’t yet right for wide-scale Internet voting, they acknowledge that an increasing number of electoral tasks, such as registration and requests for mail-in absentee ballots, will be handled online.
Meanwhile, the small-scale experiments continue. A handful of Americans got a taste of online voting two years ago, in Arizona’s Democratic primary and through an experiment in Internet-based absentee voting for overseas military personnel. Only 84 people voted in the Pentagon’s $6.2 million trial — which worked out to about $74,000 a vote. But Alvarez is gearing up for what he expects will be a bigger federally funded experiment in 2004.
“In the future, we’re probably going to be voting on electronic devices, remotely,” he said. “We’re studying the problem, we’re running experiments and trials. In a decade, we’ll be much closer than we are right now.”
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Computerworld
Technology: Behind the balloting on election day
By LINDA ROSENCRANCE
NOVEMBER 05, 2002
From touch-screen voting machines to online repositories of voting irregularities, technology could be one of the winners on this election day.
Various organizations, as well as cities and towns across the nation, have implemented a variety of technologies designed to ensure that every vote counts.
According to published reports, voters in almost one-fifth of all U.S. counties will be casting ballots on electronic voting machines, either by touching special screens or pushing buttons.
In Cook County, Ill., where paper ballots are still used, officials have implemented vote-recognition technology to make sure all votes are counted correctly. After a person votes, he puts the ballot into an electronic counter that can determine whether the ballot has been properly marked.
With an eye on the evolving nature of voting technology -- and mindful of the problems that occurred during recent primary elections -- private citizens and national organizations have set up Web sites to capture and monitor information about election day voter turnout and potential voting irregularities.
Steven Hertzberg said he and several other politically independent citizens launched www.votewatch.us, a new online service that allows voters to immediately report voting machine errors and other voting irregularities.
The Web site uses discussion board technology from San Francisco-based Ezboard Inc., which also hosts the site, and has a forum where voters can monitor, report on and discuss problems at polling places across the U.S. in real time, Hertzberg said.
One such problem cropped up last month in Texas with the new touch-screen voting machines. Voters in Dallas complained that when they touched the screen for one party's candidate, the box for another candidate was being tallied incorrectly. Voters said that they had voted for Democratic candidates but their votes were registered as being for Republicans. (In Texas, residents were allowed to begin voting on Oct. 19 in an early voting period that ran through Nov. 3.)
Reports today indicated that similar problems were occurring in Georgia. Apparently, although voters were touching the screen for a Republican candidate, the box was incorrectly checked for the Democratic candidate.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is monitoring today's election with a speech-enabled Web site designed to keep tabs on voter turnout and voting irregularities nationwide. VoterLink Data Systems in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., chose speech-recognition technology from Cincinnati's Convergys Corp. as part of its Vote411.net.
The Web site, which will operate from 7 a.m. today until 3 a.m. tomorrow, will take voice information about election-related issues or problems from a toll-free number, (866) VOTE-411, and then post that information to the site to be viewed in real time by the DNC.
"Several high-profile incidents in recent national and local elections demonstrate the need to identify election problems while they're occurring and respond to them before the polls close," Ken Smuckler, president of VoterLink Data Systems, said in a statement. "For us, Convergys was the best choice to help deploy a dependable, interactive solution with the advanced features and reliability the DNC needed to support its poll monitoring activities nationwide."
One tidbit of technology getting less attention this year is the Voter News Service (VNS), which is used by major TV networks and news organizations to collect data on races across the country to help them determine a winner before all votes have been counted.
The VNS -- and the news organizations -- ran into problems two years ago with returns from the state of Florida, first calling that state's electoral votes for Vice President Al Gore and then for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, before declaring that the state was too close to call for either one. The back-and-forth nature of the predictions soured the networks -- and viewers -- on how election returns were reported.
This year, network anchors and new organizations have pledged to rely more on actual vote counts than on projections when declaring winners after the polls close tonight.
Although Florida had problems during its September primary (see story), there were no early reports of serious ballot problems in the sunshine state.
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Associated Press
Glitches Hit High-Tech Voting Systems
Tue Nov 5,11:55 PM ET
By ANICK JESDANUN, Associated Press Writer
Scattered problems, a few serious but most described as hiccups, marred the debut of touchscreens and other high-tech voting machines Tuesday, including in all of Georgia and in Florida's most election-challenged counties.
Worse snags delayed results in two Texas counties where paper ballots were read by older-style machines.
The most serious of the high-tech problems appeared in two Georgia counties where officials said they could result in contested elections and lawsuits. The state has the nation's largest deployment: 22,000 touchscreens.
In southwest Terrell County, ballots in at least three precincts for a time listed the wrong county commission races. In Bryan County near Savannah, a county commission race was omitted from a ballot.
Elsewhere, some machines froze up and others had to be rebooted. Dozens were misprogrammed or not accurately calibrated, and cards voters need to access machines malfunctioned.
"They are locking up, and we have to turn them off and turn them on. The voting is taking a little longer," said Mary Cranford, election superintendent in Georgia's Coweta County.
But those troubles did not look to have the potential to cascade into the meltdown seen during the Sept. 10 primaries in Florida, where Democratic gubernatorial contest results were delayed for a week.
Analysts said better planning and training of poll workers in operating the machines paid off, though some cautioned that the new systems' reliability can't be guaranteed.
"A lot of these products were rushed to market," said Rebecca Mercuri, a Bryn Mawr College computer science professor and expert on election technology.
The addition of more than 200 brings to 510 the number of counties nationwide with electronic voting systems, according to Election Data Services, a Washington, D.C., research company. That's 16 percent of counties representing one in five registered voters.
Analysts expect 75 percent of counties to have such systems within six years, boosted largely by a new $3.9 billion federal law to help states replace outdated equipment.
Election officials were anxious heading into Tuesday, given problems with touchscreens during September primaries in Florida and Maryland. They stepped up poll-worker training to better cope with any machine failures.
"It was definitely an open question on September 10th whether the problem was the machines or the people running them. Now, it's leaning toward the explanation that it was the people," said Dan Seligson, spokesman for Electionline.org, a nonpartisan election-reform group.
In Florida's Miami-Dade County, one of two most troubled during the primaries, machines were misprogrammed at one precinct, meaning voters had to use substitute paper ballots for the first three hours.
Forty to 50 touchscreen machines scattered among more than 5,000 in Broward County had to be taken offline because of incorrectly loaded software or the wrong ballot, officials said.
No troubles were reported in the nation's largest county to go all-electronic: Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Harris' system uses a dial to highlight names rather than a touchscreen.
But in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, a lengthy ballot combined with large turnout during early voting meant final tallies likely wouldn't be available until Wednesday morning, said Cliff Borofsky, county elections administrator.
In Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, officials said a programming error that failed to tally straight party votes could delay results until Wednesday night.
Both counties use optical scanners, the most common U.S. voting system, to read paper ballots.
It's the lack of a paper component in the new touchscreen systems that worry some experts. Mercuri believes they are ultimately unreliable because they lack paper backups for double-checking ballots.
Diebold Election Systems, which supplied machines for Georgia and Maryland, said election officials never asked for such features.
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Dallas Morning News
Glitch bedevils Tarrant vote tally
Several races up in air until today; Bexar, Collin also affected
11/06/2002
By DEBRA DENNIS and LINDA STEWART BALL
FORT WORTH – Major ballot-counting problems in Tarrant and Bexar counties threw dozens of state and local election results into a tizzy Tuesday in the largest multicounty voting mishap in recent memory.
Winners were not expected to be declared until sometime Wednesday.
Election officials said early Wednesday morning that their count would not be completed before 9 a.m.
The Tarrant County problem stemmed from a computer programming glitch that prevented straight party votes from being tallied.
A crushing volume of early voters slowed the count to a turtle's pace in San Antonio's Bexar County.
Gov. Rick Perry, the Republican incumbent, declared victory – but his Democratic rival, Tony Sanchez, said he would not give up until all the votes were counted.
The tight race for lieutenant governor between Democrat John Sharp and Republican David Dewhurst also was up in the air because of the tabulating snag.
By 9 p.m., the secretary of state's office reported significant return numbers from just two of Texas' six most populous counties. Lesser ballot glitches occurred elsewhere, including Collin and Harris counties.
Republican-dominated counties such as Tarrant held the key to certain races that remained too close to call. By midnight Tuesday, officials had counted only a small portion of votes. They expected to work throughout the night with leaders from both parties monitoring the returns.
"They'll want to wait until Tarrant County comes in to see if they have enough votes to put that candidate over the top," said Dr. Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
Found during check
Robert Parten, elections administrator for Tarrant County, said no straight party votes were initially tallied Tuesday because of the programming error. The error, which election officials discovered early Tuesday during a routine check of ballot-counting scanners, caused the computer to read any straight party vote as simply an office and not a ticket.
"So if a person makes a straight party vote, they were just voting for a party and nobody in that party was given a vote, and that's what we have to correct," Mr. Parten said early Tuesday.
In Bexar County, a large number of early votes was expected to delay the final results for the San Antonio area, said Elections Administrator Cliff Borofsky. He said the two-page ballot, combined with about 128,000 early votes, slowed the counting. He said the county expected to get through the early votes between midnight and 2 a.m. Wednesday, then start counting ballots that were cast Tuesday. He said final tallies probably would be done by about 8 a.m. Wednesday.
More than 360,000 votes were expected to have been cast in Tarrant County. But all the votes cast Tuesday, as well as the 17,000 absentee ballots, needed to be recounted. Those ballots were cast using older optical scanning machines, which had the faulty software, Mr. Parten said.
After the problem became apparent, elections officials decided to take the ballots from the polling places to the central downtown Fort Worth office to be recounted. A high-speed scanner that usually reads 400 ballots per minute was slowed to half that pace to make sure it didn't miss anything, Mr. Parten said.
About 130,000 votes were cast in early voting. Mr. Parten said the county's new electronic voting machines had no problems counting early votes that were cast in person. However, different machines were used on Election Day.
Terri Moore, the Democratic candidate for Tarrant County district attorney, railed against the vote-tallying problems, saying that they undermined the election process. She and longtime incumbent Tim Curry faced off in the county's highest-profile race.
"What the hell's going on over there?" she said. "After what happened in Florida, how could this happen? We've been using the same machine for a while, and I'm a little confused and upset that this happened on Election Day. It causes people to be disillusioned with the whole process."
Ms. Moore said her supporters were concerned about the integrity of the county ballots if they're kept watch over by a Republican sheriff.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Parten said ballots would be counted "accurately and as expeditiously as we possibly can."
Tarrant County Democratic Chairman Art Brender said his party was confident that every vote would be counted, and he encouraged voters to continue going to the polls.
'Error in testing'
"This is going to be a delay in returns," Mr. Brender said. "This was not an error in the machines. This was an error in the testing that was done. We have been back there, and representatives of each party have gone through and tested the machines that will make the count. They're all working correctly. They're all calculating the votes correctly."
County Republicans, meanwhile, sent in a team of monitors to watch the count.
"Tarrant County is probably the most Republican county in Texas," said Pat Carlson, the GOP party's local chairwoman. "In 2002, Tarrant County had more Republican ballots cast for George Bush than any other county in the state. We're the crown jewel for the Republican Party, as far as votes go."
Tarrant County, which has 876,576 registered voters, is the state's fourth-largest county.
State Rep. Charlie Geren, a Fort Worth Republican running for his second term in the Texas House, said he was frustrated that he could only sit and watch election returns in other races Tuesday night.
"I guess I'll wake up in the morning and find out how everything came out," Mr. Geren said. "The Tarrant County election administrator did a really bad job. They didn't test the machines until today. They should have tested them well before today. If I were a county commissioner, I would fire him on the spot. Now, there's nothing we can do. I appreciate the fact that they are staying there all night counting votes, but if he was working for me, he wouldn't be working right now."
Staff writers Linda Stewart Ball, Laurie Fox and Jason Trahan and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Associated Press
VNS Unable to Deliver Exit Polls
Wed Nov 6, 4:00 AM ET
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - The debut of Voter News Service's rebuilt system ran into severe problems, as the consortium was unable to deliver exit polls designed to help explain results and struggled to count the vote quickly.
The failures in Tuesday's midterm elections were a major setback for VNS — a consortium consisting of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and The Associated Press. VNS had completely overhauled its system in response to the 2000 election, when television networks twice used its information to make wrong calls in the decisive Florida vote for the presidency.
The exit poll information was intended to help media organizations explain why people voted as they did. But because of technical problems, VNS said it could not guarantee the accuracy of its information and did not release it.
"We're disappointed that VNS wasn't able to provide this material," said Jonathan Wolman, senior vice president of the AP. "Polling place interviews provide an invaluable glimpse at voters' mood and priorities."
The VNS exit poll was of particular importance to broadcasters and 19 newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, that had contracted with the consortium to receive that information to report on Election Day trends.
VNS was able to provide limited information from the exit poll surveys that gave its members guidance in projecting winners for individual races.
As in the past, AP called election winners in a process that involved an analysis of actual vote returns.
VNS' separate vote-counting operation started the evening well, but an automated system overloaded and caused delays, said Ted Savaglio, VNS executive director.
"It's functioning and it's running, but it's not running at peak efficiency," he said late Tuesday night.
At midnight, he said, "We're catching up."
CBS, CNN and NBC complained that vote totals were coming in so slowly that they stopped using the VNS count. Instead, they relied on a backup operation provided by the AP. ABC said it was using both vote counts and had no complaints with this part of the VNS operation.
ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said the network had prepared for the possibility that VNS would not be ready on Election Night. It put the emphasis on "good, old-fashioned reporting" to tell what happens, he said.
Fox, anticipating possible problems with the exit polls, had arranged to conduct Election Day telephone polls of voters in 10 states with key races for Senate or governor, and used some of those findings on the air.
Bill Wheatley, executive vice president of NBC News, said there was still a possibility that the VNS exit poll data would be available in the next few days. Meanwhile, NBC and CBS had conducted their own joint poll of voter attitudes last weekend using the same survey questions as VNS.
"This was a midterm for (VNS), also, literally," said MSNBC editor-in-chief Jerry Nachman. "This was going to be the night for them to troubleshoot and fine-tune the process that everyone expects to be perfect in 2004."
CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson said his network was relying on political reporters across the country to provide texture for its coverage.
"There is a good side to it, which is we'll have a great lesson in civics as people watch real votes being counted," he said.
Angered by the networks' performance in the 2000 election, Congress brought news media organizations to Washington last year to explain their performance and was watching to see if there was a repeat this year.
VNS hired Battelle Memorial Institute, an Ohio-based company, to help build a new system after its members decided against scrapping VNS entirely. VNS had been in touch with Battelle about updating its service even before the 2000 election.
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Washington Post
High-Tech Voting Going Smoothly
By Anick Jesdanun
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, November 5, 2002; 2:47 PM
Although some devices crashed or need to be reprogrammed, touchscreen and other high-tech voting machines experienced few problems Tuesday as they made their full-scale debut in more than 200 counties nationwide.
Anxious to avoid the kind of snags that created Florida's primary mess and lesser troubles in Maryland in September, election officials had spent countless hours training poll workers and educating voters on how the new digital tallying machines work.
The biggest general election debut for touchscreen machines was in Georgia, where some 19,000 were deployed across the state and voters offered good reviews.
One voter, Tracy Yandle of Atlanta, said it was "as easy as using an ATM."
"It's great. I've been voting for a lot more years than I care to say," Joe Penley of Barnesville raved. "It's almost too simple. My 4-year-old granddaughter could do it. It's hard to make errors if you just follow instructions."
Technical problems characterized as minor were reported in three of Georgia's 159 counties, with two machines failing in one.
One touchscreen machine locked up and crashed as Mary Perdue, the wife of Georgia's Republican gubernatorial candidate Sonny Perdue, was casting her ballot. Officials rebooted the computer, and she continued with ease.
Only a few problems, meanwhile, were reported in the Florida counties of Miami-Dade and Broward where difficulties with high-tech machines had thrown the Sept. 10 primary into confusion. Former Attorney General Janet Reno not only lost the Democratic primary for governor on that day. She was also turned away from her suburban Miami polling station when machines weren't ready.
This time was different.
"It was smooth," said Reno. "They were prepared for me this time."
Miami-Dade and Broward election officials had stepped up poll worker training and added hundreds of workers to troubleshoot the machines.
"It was definitely an open question on Sept. 10 whether the problem was the machines or the people running them. Now, it's leaning toward the explanation that it was the people," said Dan Seligson, spokesman for Electionline.org, a nonpartisan election reform research group.
Three touchscreen machines were misprogrammed at one South Miami precinct Tuesday, but Miami-Dade County Manager Steve Shiver said no voters were turned away. Paper ballots were used for three hours while the machines were fixed.
"You're never going to have a flawless opening," he said. "The backup system worked."
For Tuesday's elections, 510 of the nation's counties – or 16 percent – were using electronic voting systems, up from 293 counties in 2000, according to Election Data Services, an independent research company in Washington, D.C.
In Montgomery County, Md., which uses the same machines as Georgia, voting appeared to go smoothly although officials said a programming error caused machines at 30 precincts to display a ballot with a header reading "Democratic."
The header is usually blank, but the glitch wouldn't affect how ballots were cast or tabulated, said Margie Roher, an elections administrator.
Delays in tallying votes occurred in Montgomery County on Sept. 10 when election judges were told to bring memory cards from the machines to election headquarters. In fact, the machines are designed to send in their results by computer modem. Instead of removing just the cards, some judges even hauled entire machines to headquarters. The results of a tight congressional race weren't known until 1 a.m.
Montgomery County officials subsequently hired an additional 1,000 poll workers and equipped most polling stations with modems.
Voting also went well Tuesday in the nation's largest county to go all-electronic: Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Harris' new system uses 5.2-pound machines that look like personal digital assistants on steroids. Voters use a dial to highlight names.
Other states with counties debuting high-tech equipment included Louisiana and Mississippi.
Many counties rushed to replace outdated equipment to avoid a balloting fiasco like the one that besmirched the 2000 presidential vote in Florida. And that meant that machines were deployed more quickly than reasonable, analysts say.
If there were major problems Tuesday, it could foreshadow trouble for 2004, when more states will have high-tech machines thanks to a new $3.9 billion federal law to help states replace outdated equipment.
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Wired News
Watch the Vote on VoteWatch
02:00 AM Nov. 05, 2002 PT
Voters on Tuesday don't have to wait for the pesky media to digest stories of suspicious goings-on at the polls.
A new website called VoteWatch [URL http://www.votewatch.us/] will share voters' concerns in real time (or at least as soon as they can get home and log on).
Frustrated by the media's focus on dangling chads in 2000 while 50,000 voters in Florida were erroneously listed as felons and prevented from voting, Steven Hertzberg has launched VoteWatch as a "repository of voter complaints."
"VoteWatch.US is a new website allowing voters to register concerns about their vote immediately -- an important development, because by the time anybody catches most election errors, it's too late to remedy," said a press release from Hertzberg, who did not respond to interview requests.
The website provides a forum organized by state and topics of discussion. It's designed to allow voters to report issues regarding access to polls, intimidation, questionable vote counting and discrepancies in tabulation.
With so many close races in Tuesday's elections, and with the margin of Senate party control so slim, VoteWatch could act as a watchdog. With Voter.com and Citizens for True Democracy websites now defunct, it certainly fills a void.
Rashad Robinson, field director for the Center for Voting and Democracy, thinks grassroots efforts like VoteWatch are important at a time when citizens are skeptical of the election process.
The media don't always do the best job of uncovering voting problems and sometimes takes too long, he said. By the time issues bubble to the surface, especially when votes are being counted, it may be too late to take action.
"The media is not necessarily a great place to start as a filter, because they're looking for a story and looking for something sexy in many cases," Robinson said.
Although VoteWatch says the people behind the project are politically independent, sites that rely on input directly from the public can present objectivity problems, according to Poynter Institute faculty member Aly Colón.
The "media filter" is often key in revealing hidden biases, he said.
"Depending on the experience of the people involved in these sites, their own perspective, where their funding comes from, who they support, who they are trying to advocate for -- you have to have all that kind of information at hand in order for you to understand the agenda a particular site might have," Colón said.
Robinson agrees it's essential for sites like VoteWatch to remain nonpolitical for the public to consider them a credible source.
"The idea of giving people an opportunity to express concerns and complaints about what's happening at the polls is part of our democracy," Robinson said. "Giving people the opportunity to oversee what happens in their community is part of the process -- especially if it's done in a nonpartisan, nonpolitical way."
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Chip glitch hands victory to wrong candidate
Associated Press
Nov. 7, 2002, 3:08PM
ABILENE - A Scurry County election error reversed the outcomes
in two commissioner races.
A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans. Democrats actually won by wide margins.
The problem was discovered when poll workers became suspicious of the margins of the vote, Scurry County Clerk Joan Bunch said.
A new computer chip was flown to Snyder from Dallas, she said. By Wednesday morning, the votes had been counted twice by hand and once again by scanner with the replacement chip.
Republican Robbie Floyd, 69, who lost to Democrat Jerry House, seemed agape even hours after learning of his defeat Wednesday.
"It was hard to believe that that type of mistake had happened," he said.
Incumbent Democrat Chloanne Lindsey said she had conceded the election to Republican Keith Hackfeld when she received a phone call at 3:45 a.m. notifying her of the discrepancy. Later Wednesday morning, he called to congratulate her.
"I felt bad for my opponent," Lindsey said. "I knew how it felt to lose."
This is one of several articles that can be found at Vote Watch
http://www.votewatch.us/election_2002_findings.htm
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Atlanta Journal Constitution
ELECTION 2002
2,180 Fulton ballots found late
67 memory cards misplaced, but shouldn't change results
By TY TAGAMI and DUANE STANFORD
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writers
November 8, 2002
Fulton County election officials said Thursday that memory cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals.
Fifty-six cards, containing 2,180 ballots, were located Thursday. Eleven memory cards still were missing Thursday evening. If the cards could not be found, the votes would be retrieved from the voting machines, election officials said.
The votes from the missing cards were not included in unofficial totals released by the county Tuesday night and Wednesday, but it appeared unlikely the newly discovered votes could change the announced outcome of any race.
While such a switch could have been embarrassing, county voter registration chief John Sullivan stressed that the process for compiling the final, official vote total ensured that every terminal would be accounted for, so no votes would be overlooked.
"Nothing will be lost," Sullivan said.
The county anticipates concluding the count by 10 a.m. today, when the county board of elections is scheduled to certify the results.
Republican Karen Handel was especially interested in the new count. She started Thursday trailing Democrat Robb Pitts for an at-large seat on the County Commission by 4,595 votes.
"There's a handful of races where it makes a difference, and mine was one of them," Handel said.
But the first batch of 57 misplaced cards increased Pitts' lead by 355 votes.
Of the 11 remaining missing cards, eight came from machines at Precinct 8C at 4191 Northside Drive in Buckhead. About 1,200 voters are assigned to that precinct. One card each was missing from three precincts: EP09, Conley Hills School in East Point; NC06, Country Club of the South in north Fulton; and 11J, Continental Colony Elementary School in southwest Atlanta.
Fulton wasn't the only county that misplaced memory cards on election night. Bibb County in Middle Georgia and Glynn County on the coast each had one card missing after the initial vote count, but the cards were located and counted the next day, said Michael Barnes, the state's assistant elections director.
When DeKalb County election officials went home early Wednesday morning, they were missing 10 cards. They found them later that day sealed in machines in various precincts. DeKalb elections director Linda Latimore said the breakdown came with the terminals that were taken out of service on Election Day because of technical problems. The cards inside weren't collected with the rest.
"We never gave the poll workers instructions on what to do if a machine went dead," Latimore said.
While election officials in all counties routinely release unofficial results on election night, official returns are compiled later. State election officials say the computerized process for compiling those final vote totals includes a warning system that flags with a red arrow any voting machine whose memory card's content has not been transferred to the central database.
In Fulton, some preliminary returns were sent by computer modem from precincts. But poll managers also are required to take all the memory cards to the county election headquarters, where each card is loaded into a computer for the official count.
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Sun-Sentinel
Cost of Broward elections to rise by $1 million or more
By Buddy Nevins
Political Writer
November 8, 2002
Future elections may cost at least $1 million more than elections ever cost before.
The elections will be much more expensive because county officials want to continue using Broward County sheriff's deputies, county employees and possibly School Board employees to ensure they are successful.
Tuesday's election went off with only minor glitches after deputies and 1,500 county employees mounted a colossal effort to ensure the polls opened on time and election results were tabulated properly.
The final price tag isn't in, but the county spent about $2.5 million on the election.
County officials say future elections will need similar help.
"The bar has been raised, and it's tough to back away from the process that produced the success this week," warned County Administrator Roger Desjarlais.
No decision about the future has been made, but Deputy Elections Supervisor Joseph Cotter and his top staff have scheduled a meeting today to begin planning for the 2004 presidential primary and general election.
Their decisions need the approval of the County Commission, which pays for elections.
"Elections of this size are a Herculean effort," Cotter said he will tell his staff. "Because of the sheer number of voters now in Broward and the fact that this system is very labor intensive, we will need help from other quarters at some level."
The elections office has fewer than 70 employees.
Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant agreed with Cotter, saying she would be asking county employees, Broward Sheriff's Office and other government workers to continue to help conduct elections.
County commissioners gave Oliphant about $1.5 million extra in the weeks leading to the election to close a deficit in her $5.3 million annual budget.
Desjarlais estimates the county spent another $1 million on Tuesday's election.
Half went for the salaries of workers away from their regular jobs, and the remainder for costs such as installing phone lines and overtime pay.
The School Board, which provided teachers as poll worker trainers, and the sheriff's office also helped with the election.
Their expenses are not yet tabulated.
Countywide elections cost about $600,000 when the old punch card machines were used.
But the new touch-screen electronic machines, which cost $3,000 each, are more labor intensive. Poll workers must activate the machines, and others must be trained to set them up.
"There is clearly more labor involved than just opening up a case and setting up a punch card machine. The price of elections does go up. The future is more expensive, but one machine can do the work of multiple punch card ballots. Nobody has to exchange a Spanish ballot for an English ballot," said Russ Klenet, spokesman for Elections Systems & Software, the company manufacturing the machines.
County Commission Chairwoman Lori Parrish said the county would be willing to provide future help to the supervisor's office.
"I don't think we would need the effort we had this time," Parrish said. "We faced six weeks to pull it off, and that required an extra effort."
Parrish, Desjarlais and County Commissioner John Rodstrom cautioned Oliphant against dismissing Cotter now that the election is over.
"We would have to rethink our level of participation if he went," Rodstrom said.
Oliphant said she has no intention of firing Cotter, as had been widely rumored at the Broward Government Center. Oliphant, the highest-ranking local black politician, has been under pressure from some black leaders such as U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, to take back the power she ceded to Cotter after the chaotic primary.
"We can do some good and wonderful and productive things," Oliphant said.
Oliphant said she would work to improve communications with Cotter.
"I want to meet with her," Cotter said. "I intend to stay here. I have a two-year contract."
Buddy Nevins can be reached at bnevins@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4571.
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Lawyers get set for fight over ballots
Co. 7th District race has rivals scrambling to bone up on vote law
By Michele Ames, Rocky Mountain News
November 8, 2002
While county clerks scrutinize uncounted ballots, attorneys are scouring the law that will determine which votes will be valid and which won't.
As the hotly contested 7th Congressional District race comes down to the still uncounted provisional ballots, attorneys for Republicans and Democrats are beginning to consider how the new law works.
Already at issue is ensuring that the process for deciding which ballots will count is fair and uniform because the process must happen independently in three counties that make up the 7th District. Also in question is just when challenges to the ballots should be made.
With a possible 6,200 votes that haven't been counted and a narrow margin separating the candidates, everybody knows the stakes are high. That's why the state's top election official, Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson, sent observers to all three counties.
"Our observers are a security blanket for the county clerk and the public," said Lisa Doran, press secretary for Davidson. "The county clerk can look to the observer to make sure they do everything right. We're trying to make sure that if there's any question there's an independent person there."
Both Republican Bob Beauprez and Democrat Mike Feeley have brought in their own security blankets - in the form of attorneys.
While none of the actions of county clerks can be challenged while they're deciding which ballots should qualify, attorneys are already looking to the period after ballots are either accepted or rejected and before they are actually counted as a point where results could first be challenged.
"As you think about it, it makes sense not to have a negotiation over every ballot," said Mark Grueskin, an attorney for Isaacs and Rosenbaum, the firm representing Feeley.
"My guess is that the process isn't just going to jump ahead to the counting process," he said. "I think there is the potential for a remedy if there's an issue."
Clerks have been given guidelines by the Colorado Secretary of State's Office on how they are to determine which ballots should count and which must be disqualified:
• The sworn statement must have been filled out completely by the voter, including all identifying information and a reason for why the individual should be allowed to vote provisionally.
• The identifying information must then be checked to ensure the individual is a registered Colorado voter and that he or she voted in the correct race based on the voter's current address.
• Election officials must "substantially comply" with the checking process. That means they have to check all available databases to confirm voter registration - including those kept by the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles - before throwing out a ballot.
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Houston Chronicle
Bexar County officials to launch inquiry into voting problems
Associated Press
November 12, 2002
SAN ANTONIO -- Bexar County officials planned to launch an inquiry this week into voting problems that delayed the tabulation of General Election results. Officials will also consider the fate of embattled elections administrator Cliff Borofsky.
At least two commissioners have called for Borofsky to be fired because of the sluggish vote counting, which took nearly 30 hours to complete.
Bexar County commissioners and members of the county Elections Commission were scheduled to meet Monday.
"I have been accused of exercising no leadership and no planning, and it's not the case," Borofsky said Monday, vowing to defend the actions he took before the election and during tabulation of the results.
By the time the polls closed at 7 p.m. on Nov. 5, one-third of the 127,595 early voting ballots cast in the election had been counted. Early ballots are usually counted and prepared to report to the public by that hour.
The Elections Commission, made up of the county judge, tax assessor-collector, county clerk and the local chairmen of the Democratic and Republican parties, were scheduled to discuss Borofsky's fate Thursday.
"I'm interested in convincing Commissioners Court and the Elections Commission that there was a pretty significant planning element that went into this election," he said in Tuesday's editions of the San Antonio Express-News. "That we had difficulties because things were planned, but not executed, was not my specific fault."
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Miami Herald
Broward vote total short by 104,000 in reporting glitch
BY EVAN S. BENN AND ELENA CABRAL
ebenn@herald.com
Posted on Thu, Nov. 07, 2002
Broward County's election didn't end as smoothly as it began: A programming error sliced 34,000 votes from reported races on Tuesday, and 70,000 more were deducted from total turnout.
By late Wednesday, election officials insisted that all the votes were accounted for.
They said that the errors had no effect on the outcome of any races, though voter turnout jumped from 35 percent to 45 percent after it was corrected.
And it raised questions about the vote-counting and reporting process for the county's $17.2 million electronic voting system that could not be explained to the satisfaction of the three-member canvassing board until late Wednesday.
Two things went wrong:
• The English-language results of early voting were tabulated as if they come from one precinct. The total exceeded a preset maximum for a single precinct. Thus the 34,000 early votes were not included in the published totals for each race or in the overall turnout number.
• The absentee ballots and Spanish-language early voting results were recorded in each individual race, but because of an operator error in preparing a report those 70,000 were left out of the overall turnout number.
The missing 104,000 led officials to initially report total turnout of only 34 percent. The official corrected number of votes cast was 443,912, the canvassing board announced late Wednesday. A few provisional ballots will be added to that total by 2 p.m. today, when all votes must be sent to the state.
''The initial reports didn't include everything we tabulated,'' Deputy Supervisor Joe Cotter said.
''It was a minor software thing. Once we realized it, we took the proper steps to fix it,'' he said.
Hours after the close of voting on Tuesday, members of the canvassing board took notice of a discrepancy on printed summaries of the vote totals from each race.
The reports showed more votes in the governor's race than the reported total number of ballots cast.
''That was the red flag,'' said Charles Lindsey, an election monitor from the state Division of Elections.
On Wednesday afternoon, the unreported votes came to light publicly, sparking a barrage of questions. The canvassing board was meeting to review absentee and provisional ballots, when its chairman, Administrative Judge Jay Spechler, asked technicians to explain the missing votes.
A minor uproar ensued.
Ed Pozzuoli, a lawyer representing the state Republican Party, complained that the timing of Wednesday's revelation was curious, given that several observers were there to monitor returns in the tight District 97 race between Sandy Halperin and Nan Rich.
''This causes great suspicion, Judge,'' Pozzuoli told Spechler.
Spechler responded that the discrepancy was caught late Tuesday, and was unrelated to any examination of the District 97 race, in which Rich was reported to be leading by fewer than 100 votes at the close of tallying Tuesday. The final report put her ahead by 542 votes.
''We knew there was a mistake, we just didn't know where it was,'' said Norman Ostrau, a deputy county attorney.
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Wired News
A Vote for Less Tech at the Polls
November 19, 2002
In the national debate over upgrading election infrastructure, Peter Neumann is an unlikely defender of the low-tech approach.
As principle scientist at Stanford Research Institute's Computer Science Laboratory < http://www.csl.sri.com/index.htm>, Neumann has spent the last 20 years studying how intrusion detection systems, cryptography and advanced software engineering can improve the reliability and security of computer systems.
But get him talking about how to run an election, and Neumann becomes an outspoken advocate of the paper ballot. He's also a sharp critic of computerized touch-screen voting machines.
"Some of them have lovely human interfaces, but if there's no assurance your vote goes through, it's irrelevant," said Neumann, who is concerned that in the fervor to embrace new voting technology, many jurisdictions will compromise the integrity of the election process.
Two weeks after the most highly computerized federal election in U.S. history, a number of computer scientists continue to raise concerns over security risks created by the widespread adoption of touch-screen voting systems.
Despite reports of smooth performance on Election Day from the major voting machine manufacturers, many experts remain concerned about fixing potential bugs before states spend billions more on touch-screen systems to automate the election process.
While paper ballots, punch cards and lever machines have their problems, a worry among some computer scientists is that the risks presented by touch-screen systems are more insidious because they are harder to detect.
Critics of so-called direct recording electronic, or DRE, voting machines, most of which employ touch screens, are particularly concerned about the lack of a paper trail. Although the most widely used DRE machines can at day's end print out at a record of ballots cast, detractors say this is insufficient.
Because of the potential for memory glitches or even possible tampering, critics such as Neumann advocate printing a paper record that voters can examine immediately after casting their votes.
A second concern is the voting machine companies' proprietary control over the software that runs on their systems. Although companies are required to allow election authorities to inspect their software, the code is not open source and therefore not open to public inspection.
"It would probably be better if the software were open-source code and anyone could check for its integrity," said Stephen Ansolabahere, co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project. Another concern -- albeit purely speculative -- is that software running on individual machines could differ from the code provided by the company.
Voters raised a number of red flags this month, Ansolabahere said, when they claimed that when they pushed the onscreen icon for one candidate's name, they saw another candidate's name as their pick.
"That might be a signal that there are bugs in some of the software programs, but there's no way to check," he said.
But Todd Urosevich, vice president of election product sales for Election Systems & Software, a maker of DRE machines, said opening up the software for all to view poses significant security risks. It might make it easier for unscrupulous types to manipulate code to influence election results.
As for suggestions that voting machine companies provide paper receipts of votes to voters, Urosevich said his company has not been requested to provide this, although it does run a printout at the end of the election.
Election Systems & Software is not opposed to printing out individual ballots, Urosevich said, but the company does have some concerns about the practice. In particular, it raises the question of which record is the official election result: the paper printouts or the data stored in the voting machine? If the two sources provide different results, this would create complications in contested races.
But Rebecca Mercuri, a voting technology expert and computer science professor at Bryn Mawr College, said paper backups are necessary because of computers' propensity to malfunction. This propensity is all the more likely for voting machines, she said, because they are used infrequently and by members of the general public.
"A computer is not intended to be sitting around some dank warehouse not being used except two or three times a year," she said.
Ansolabahere said researchers at the Caltech/MIT Voting Project are still reviewing results from this month's election to determine the relative performance of various voting technologies. Early reviews indicate that the voting process went more smoothly than in the previous congressional election in 1998, he added.
But election observers at VoteWatch, a site set up to collect reports of election irregularities, saw plenty to complain about in this month's election. Findings published on Friday included a long list of computer glitches that may have affected the outcome of races in several states.
Moreover, a study published by Caltech and MIT researchers last year criticized the accuracy of DRE machines. The study found that 3 percent of ballots submitted through DRE machines could not be counted in the 2000 presidential race. Mechanical lever machines, hand-counted paper ballots and optically scanned paper ballots performed better. Only punch card machines performed worse.
Such data didn't prevent counties from buying touch-screen systems in droves. Officials at Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the largest providers of touch-screen machines, estimated that 22.3 million registered voters used DRE systems in the Nov. 5 election. Sequoia expects that number to rise dramatically by 2004.
Neumann says counties should hold off on spending more on touch-screen voting systems until election officials have better means to ensure that votes are both anonymous and accurately counted.
"In the absence of any significant audit trails, you have no knowledge whatsoever as to what goes on inside the systems," he said. "In the pandemonium to get rid of punch cards, it's in effect created a worse problem."
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