2009/11/13: MIT: Cryptographic voting debuts
A new system for ensuring accurate election tallies, which MIT researchers helped to develop, passed its first real-world test last Tuesday.
2009/11/13: PhysOrg: Cryptographic voting debuts
In last week's municipal election in Takoma Park, Maryland, voters voted by exposing three-digit numerical codes printed on their ballots in invisible ink. By later verifying the codes online, they could help minimize the possibility of election fraud. Photo: Alex Rivest
Last week, in Takoma Park, Md., a new cryptographic voting system that could ensure accurate vote counts was used for the first time in a real election. MIT’s Ron Rivest, the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, helped develop the system and says he’s quite pleased with how the technology worked. Takoma Park’s city clerk, Jessie Carpenter, agrees that the trial "went very well."
2009/10/18: SwissInfo: E-voting makes slow but sure progress -- The momentum is growing for e-voting
Ever since canton Basel City decided to opt for online voting, momentum has been growing to enable the Swiss abroad to have their say electronically.
Sixteen cantons want to make e-voting possible, but the path to implementation is complex and time-consuming because of Switzerland's federal structure.
"It will be decades before internet voting becomes nationwide and at all levels. E-voting cannot be compared with e-banking," Hans-Urs Wili, head of a federal electronic voting project, told swissinfo.ch.
"Federalism leads to a mosaic -- a patchwork of idiosyncratic and differing arrangements."
Switzerland has 26 cantons and 2,614 communes. Every canton and commune is essentially sovereign when it comes to organising elections and referendums
2009/04/10: Salina: 'Vote flipping' was not unexpected
The electronic voting machines that recorded votes to the wrong candidates in Salina on Tuesday are of a type that has a history of erratic behavior. In fact, the state of Kansas was warned in October 2008 that the problem might occur.
2009/01/30: CincinEnquirer: Only one voter fraud case found
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said he had allegations last fall of widespread voter fraud -- allegations a special prosecutor reported Tuesday were wrong, noting the only voter fraud found was from a Connecticut man who told on himself.
"Ultimately," Special Prosecutor Michael O’Neill wrote in a report, "the investigators discovered ‘get-out-the-vote’ practices, sponsored by community organizations, which took full advantage of this unique absentee-voting period, but no evidence these practices violated Ohio law."
"Told ya so," Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party as well as chairman of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, said with glee of O’Neill’s report.
2008/12/25: WaPo: State Files Claim Against Texas Firm -- Company Should Repay Money Spent to Fix Machines, Md. Says
Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler filed a claim against Premier Election Solutions to recover $8.5 million spent by the state to fix problems with the company's touch-screen voting machines.
The claim against Texas-based Premier, formerly Diebold, alleges that state elections officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address a host of security flaws in the machines from 2003 through the November election.
Many of the problems could have compromised the integrity of the election had they not been fixed, officials said. Now the state wants its money back.
2008/10/01: News8: 'Static' Blamed for D.C.'s Extra Votes Snafu
New measures are being taken to make sure irregularities in September's D.C. Primary vote don't happen in November. Officials at the D.C. Board of Elections say they now know what caused 1,500 extra votes to appear in the count.
326 people voted at the Reeves Center precinct on primary election day in September. Their votes were captured on a computer cartridge, but the Board of Elections says when it put the cartridge into the citywide computer to be counted, 1,500 write in votes appeared from nowhere. The board completed its investigation of what might have happened and blames static electricity.
2008/01/12: NYT:TheCaucus: Candidates Push for a N.H. Recount
[Lifted from the comments -het]
The media needs to deal with this because the odds must be astronomical against this happening:
"Analysts at the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) have confirmed that based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of state web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you
look at votes tabulated by op-scan v. votes tabulated by hand:
Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%
Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%
The percentages appear to be swapped. That seems highly unusual, to say the least."
When I was first reading about this the other day, I thought it had to be fraud. Now, I wonder if the optical scan votes were ever counted. Maybe New Hampshire just picked up the tabulation of the hand counted votes and reversed the
names for Clinton and Obama. What else could possibly explain it????
2008/01/11: BBC: Asian voters in US 'got raw deal'
Many Asian American voters faced discrimination from voting officials during 2006 mid-term elections in the US, a civil rights group has alleged.
The report is based on a multilingual exit poll conducted among 4,700 Asian American voters in 25 US cities.
It documents alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act and Help America Vote Act and cases of "anti-Asian attitude".
2008/01/01: Newsday: States Question Electronic Vote Machines
With the presidential race in full swing, Colorado and other states have found critical flaws in the accuracy and security of their electronic voting machines, forcing officials to scramble to return to the paper ballots they abandoned after the
Florida debacle of 2000. In December alone, top election officials in Ohio and Colorado declared that widely used voting equipment is unfit for elections.
2007/06/22: BBC: E-vote 'threat' to UK democracy
British democracy could be undermined by moves to use electronic voting in elections, warns a report.
The risks involved in swapping paper ballots for touch screens far outweigh any benefits they may have, says the Open Rights Group report.
It based its conclusions on reports from observers who watched e-voting trials in May's local elections.
The group called for a halt to e-voting until it is reliable, easy to oversee and has proven its integrity.
2007/03/29: CCTimes: E-voting demise could be near
California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could banish ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state.
For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with "red teams" of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes.
The proposals are the first step toward fulfilling a promise that Secretary of State Debra Bowen made during her 2006 election campaign to perform a "top-to-bottom" review of all voting machinery used in California.
County elections officials balked at the proposed standards in a letter Monday to Bowen and hinted broadly at the same
conclusion reached by several computer scientists: If enforced rigidly, the standards could send many voting machines, especially touch-screens, back for major upgrades.
Local elections officials argued that there isn't enough time to fix any deficiencies before the February 2008 presidential primary.
2007/01/04: NYT: U.S. Bars Lab From Testing Electronic Voting
A laboratory that has tested most of the nation?s electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new
machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.
The company, Ciber Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colo., has also come under fire from analysts hired by New York State over
its plans to test new voting machines for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to replace its aging lever devices.
2006/10/05: SlashDot: Dutch Blackbox Voting Pwned
In a just-published report ..., the Dutch we-don't-trust-voting-computers foundation ... details how it converted a Nedap voting machine, of a type used in Holland and France, to steal a
pre-determined percentage of votes and reassign them to another party.
2006/10/05: SlashDot: Dutch Blackbox Voting Pwned
In a just-published report ..., the Dutch we-don't-trust-voting-computers foundation ... details how it converted a Nedap voting machine, of a type used in Holland and France, to steal a
pre-determined percentage of votes and reassign them to another party.
2005/09/18: THP: A Diebold Insider Speaks Out
Because here's the deal: Your Electoral System in America -- theoretically the world's greatest democracy -- has been sold to the Corporate Interests of the very good friends of the Neo-Republican Party in America. It's gone. It's been sold. Your
Republican and Democratic elected leaders watched it happen. Gave their approval. And you let them do it. And now...your democracy is no longer in your hands.
2004/10/18: CWorld: E-vote at Risk
Despite vendor assurances, researchers remain concerned about the security and reliability of electronic voting systems.
2004/06/10: FCW: Ohio votes yes on e-voting
Ohio state officials have certified touch-screen voting machines from AccuPoll Inc. for use in the state. AccuPoll's machines create a voter-verified paper record.
2004/03/09: Yahoo: 7,000 Orange County Voters Were Given Bad Ballots
Poll workers struggling with a new electronic voting system in last week's election gave thousands of Orange County voters the wrong ballots, according to a Times
analysis of election records. In 21 precincts where the problem was most acute, there were more ballots cast than registered voters.
2003/08/28: CPD: Voting machine controversy
The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
2008/11/19: OLJ: Election protection in Ohio (and America) isn’t over
As the sun sets on Bush 2, it is clear that a very thin line of electoral protection preserved Barack Obama’s victory in Ohio -- and the nation.
And it’s no accident the vote count battle for a Columbus-area congressional seat still rages.
The GOP’s 2008 electoral strategy again emphasized massive voter disenfranchisement and rigging the electronic vote count. The twin tactics very nearly gave Ohio to McCain/Palin, and threatened to set precedents capable of winning them the national election.
Prior to the 2004 vote, Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell stripped some 308,000 Ohio citizens from the registration rolls in heavily Democratic districts. This mass disenfranchisement alone may have accounted for the 118,000-plus official margin that gave George W. Bush a second term in the White House.
After the 2004 vote, Blackwell disenfranchised another 170,000 voters in heavily Democratic Franklin County (Columbus).
2008/09/30: RawStory: Republican IT consultant subpoenaed in case alleging tampering with 2004 election
A high-level Republican consultant has been subpoenaed in a case regarding alleged tampering with the 2004 election.
Michael L. Connell was served with a subpoena in Ohio on Sept. 22 in a case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, is a website designer and IT professional who created a website for Ohio’s secretary of state that presented the results of the 2004 election in real time as they were tabulated.
At the time, Ohio’s Secretary of State, Kenneth J. Blackwell, was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio.
Connell is refusing to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections, lawyers say.
2007/04/22: TFP: The GOP's cyber election hit squad
Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?
2007/01/18: ABJ: Prosecutor says presidential recount rigged in Ohio county
Three elections workers in the state's most populous county conspired to avoid a more thorough recount of ballots in the 2004 presidential election, a prosecutor told jurors during opening statements Thursday.
"The evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless," Prosecutor Kevin Baxter said. "They did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months" on the recount, he said.
2006/12/29: HeraldTrib: Judge rules against Jennings, Democrats to seat Buchanan
Tallahassee -- A judge ruled Friday that congressional aspirant Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines at the center of a disputed Southwest Florida congressional race.
Circuit Judge William Gary ruled that Jennings' arguments about the possibility of lost votes were "conjecture," and didn't warrant overriding the trade secrets of the voting machine company.
2006/11/15: Yahoo: House member wants e-voting paper trail
Citing the disputed vote in a Florida congressional district, a Democratic lawmaker on Wednesday urged Congress to approve his measure requiring a paper trail for electronic voting.
Rep. Rush Holt, sponsor of the bill, said the inaccuracy of electronic touch-screen voting machines "poses a direct threat to the integrity of our electoral system." The New Jersey congressman argued the Florida district, in
which more than 18,000 votes have gone uncounted, has exposed the system's flaws.
2008/10/30: CNN: Voting machines could bring Election Day glitches
U.S. election watchdogs are concerned about the accuracy of electronic voting - About half of voters will use optical-scan systems; one-third will use touch screens -
Several states report incidents where touch-screen machines registered wrong votes - Electronic-voting system advocates say their equipment is secure and accurate
2008/10/22: CCurrents: The Theft Component
[...] The Republicans have gone to extraordinary lengths to steal the last two elections. It is truly breathtaking just how badly compromised America's election process has become. What has been perhaps even more astounding has been the American and Canadian media's lack of willingness to engage this story. Is this election beyond the reach of theft? One would like to think so. It is after all in the interest of the entire world that America begin to recover its democracy, and the integrity of the vote is as good a place as any to start. But.....
2008/10/20: BBerg: Obama Assembles U.S.'s `Largest Law Firm' to Monitor Election
Barack Obama and John McCain have a litigation game plan to accompany their election strategy.
Both candidates have armies of volunteers to ring doorbells and get voters to the polls. They are also forming squadrons of lawyers who are filing challenges and preparing in case Election Day doesn't settle the contest for the White House.
Legal battles unfolding in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin provide fresh evidence of the potential fights to come over ballot access in an election marked by unprecedented spending to increase the number of voters in strategically important states.
2008/10/13: Guardian(UK): The Republican voter fraud hoax
Barack Obama and the Democrats are stealing the election. Massive voter fraud is being carried out, even as we speak, by their henchmen, known by the innocuous sounding Association for Community Organisations for Reform Now, or Acorn. Clever bastards.
The only problem? Despite the screaming wall-to-wall coverage of "Democratic voter fraud in 11 swing states" as seen on Fox News and even the once-respectable CNN, none of it's true. None of it.
[...] The only actual crime here is that Acorn managed to register some 1.3m low-income (read: Democratic-leaning) voters over the past two years. The rest is, pretty much, just made up.
2008/10/09: NYT: States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.
Still, because Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year, according to state election officials, any heightened screening of new applications may affect their party’s supporters disproportionately.
2008/09/18: CNN: Report: Voting problems in several swing states
New report finds voting problems in states up for grabs this year - Report says 10 states are at risk, including Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin - Problems listed include lack of voting machines and registration glitches
2008/05/08: Cryptome: Indiana's Incredible Shrinking Voter List
In April 2008 when Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita announced the release of "record high" voter registration rolls, with
4.3 million voters set to vote in the Tuesday May 6 primary, he didn't mention that a whopping 1,134,427 voter registrations have been cancelled
2007/04/19: McClatchy: Campaign against alleged voter fraud fuels political tempest
For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.
The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws.
Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.
2007/07/31: IPSNews: Brains Behind Dirty Campaigns Go Global
Consulting firms notorious for orchestrating aggressive attacks on opponents in electoral campaigns, especially in Mexico and the United States, have been much in demand in Latin America in recent years
2005/05/20: BBC: Watchdog against all-postal vote
The UK elections watchdog has said all-postal votes should be ruled out in future leaving the polling station as the "foundation of our voting system".
