Sancho warns Florida is not ready for the Jan. 29th presidential primary. [View All]

[madfloridian]

From Pushing Rope blog, stuff we already knew but which was covered more today in the media here.

Ion Sancho Warns of Problems With Voting Databases

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho became a national hero for those whom supported reforms of voting machines. Sancho is a registered Republican that refused to use Diebold because deficiencies in the machine's memory card. Florida Sec. of State Sue Cobb threatened Sancho with legal action and created a rule requiring Election official to notify voting machine companies when their products are tested. Other state-approved voting venders refused to sell machines to Sancho.

To make matters worse, Diebold refused to sell new machines. Sancho couldn't get voting machines as Cobb was ordering to get machines. Cobb refused to listens to complaints that the Diebold machines could be hacked. Sancho believed Cobb and voting machine companies were punishing him.

Diebold donated $100,000 in soft money Republicans in 2000. Jeb Bush was extremely resistant to voting reform. Former Attorney General Charlie Crist subpoenaed voting vender was Sancho able to get new machines.

Sancho warns Florida is not ready for the Jan. 29th presidential primary.

More on that issue:

In Leon County alone, there are 16,646 people whose address is listed in the state database in Duluth, Georgia. One of those is the mother of Janet Olin, the assistant supervisor of elections for Leon County, who lives in Tallahassee and, Sancho said: "has never set a foot in Duluth, Georgia.''

Since the federal Help America Vote Act required the state to take over the voter registration database in January 2006, the state has hired 22 data entry clerks to replace hundreds of people in Florida's 67 counties who were doing the same job, Sancho said. "The more errors you put in each element of your database, you are guaranteeing you're getting bad data out.''

Sancho said preliminary data shows that at least 14,000 voters, 10 percent of all those who have attempted to register to vote in the last year, could go to the polls and find they're name's not there, he said. Their registration is "in limbo...It's going to have the effect on Election Day of mass confusion and chaos.'

He said he doesn't know what is causing it, but "it's troubling that incorrect information is being attached to voters records because we don't know what other information is being attached.''

People in Florida should know by now to listen to this man. But when you have Republicans controlling the voting mechanisms....that's what you get. FUBAR