Internet Voting Pilot in Washington, More HAVA audit shocks, Tenn near finish line

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Internet Voting Pilot in Washington, More HAVA audit shocks, Tennessee nears paper ballot finish line

October 12, 2009
Larimer County Colorado voting by mail in Nov...Colorado allows all mail elections in odd years...Fulton County GA Elections backroom debacle -

“There is no practical way to know how many Fulton County voters,who requested absentee ballots, ultimately did not vote," Attorney Norman Underwood ...

Audit questions thousands spent by the Palm Beach County elections office...Lawsuit filed for Aspen Colorado's May ballots...5,000 absentee ballot applications rejected in Cuyahoga Co Ohio...Tennessee officials preparing for voting machine transition!...Internet voting pilot in Franklin Co Washington:

"Lenhart hopes the project will show lawmakers that online voting is the wave of the future, and that they'll change the law that requires paper ballots."

A Call to Protect Indian Voting Rights...How the Afghan Election Was Rigged...Big thanks to readers who sent in news clippings...
All this and more below...

CO. Aspen's Marks sues for release of city's May ballots
...Marks filed a lawsuit Thursday, against Aspen City Clerk Kathryn Koch, asking a judge to order the city show cause for its reason to withhold photographic ballot images from the election. If the city can't show cause, Marks' complaint demands that she be allowed to inspect the ballot images.
also seeks a temporary restraining order and injunctive relief to stop the city from destroying records from the election. Her suit claims the city plans to destroy the records no later than Nov. 5 — exactly six months after the May 5 contest.
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20091010/NEWS/910109997/1077&ParentProfile=1058

CO. Referendum 2A — Aspen Instant Runoff Voting
Aspen voters will vote this fall on how they'd like to vote in the future.
...the Aspen City Council this past summer agreed to put an advisory question on the November ballot that asks residents whether IRV should be scrapped or kept in place.
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20091011/ASPENWEEKLY/910099985/1077&ParentProfile=1058

CO. Ballots to hit mail this week
Larimer County. CO mail-in election
Doyle said voters should be careful to sign the backs of their ballot envelopes before returning them. They also should make sure to put the proper amount of postage on the return envelope.
"Elections by mail also have proved to be a boon for the U.S. Postal Service, spokesman Al DeSarro said."
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20091012/LOVELAND01/91012005

CO. Weld County, CO moves to all mail-in election (first time since early 90s) For the first time since the early 1990s, Weld County will conduct an election exclusively by mail beginning when ballots are sent out this week.
State law allows counties to conduct odd-year elections exclusively through the mail, Weld County Clerk and Recorder Steve Moreno said...
“All eligible voters in the database will receive a ballot,”
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20091012/NEWS/910089980/1008/NONE&parentprofile=1001

CT. Connecticut Legislative Hearing on Changes to Public Funding Law
October 12th, 2009. On October 22, Thursday, the Connecticut legislature will hold an informational hearing on to discuss whether the public funding law should be amended, to eliminate or reduce the parts of the law that discriminate against minor party and independent candidates.
http://www.ballot-access.org/2009/10/12/connecticut-legislative-hearing-on-changes-to-public-funding-law/

FL. Audit questions thousands spent by the Palm Beach County elections office in '07-'08. October 10, 2009. WEST PALM BEACH — As Palm Beach County's top elections official, Arthur Anderson spent big: $40,450 for children's books, $10,000 for a Haitian cultural festival, $3,697 for jar openers bearing his name and thousands more for computer equipment that has never been found.
Now, the former supervisor of elections' spending may force the county to pay more than $58,000 to settle questions over the use of federal money.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/treasurecoast/content/local_news/epaper/2009/10/10/a1a_anderson_1011.html

FL. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho says 2010 vote is priority
Oct 12. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho is putting his space needs on hold now that a proposal to move his office into the old Circuit City appears to be dead...."Election results weren't coming in as fast as in previous elections, and Sancho couldn't personally monitor returns because he was stuck at his main office."
http://www.tallahassee.com/article/20091012/NEWS01/910120308/1010

GA. Audit: Fulton's handling of 2008 election did not comply with state law Oct 12, 2009 - Fulton County’s handling of last year’s election did not comply with state law and was a “back room debacle,”
http://www.ajc.com/news/north-fulton/audit-fulton-s-handling-158945.html?cxtype=rss_news_128746

NJ moves to no-fault absentee voting ("vote by mail")
http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/state/new_
jersey/20091012_ap_njtakesplungeintovotebymailballoting.html
or use this tiny url http://tinyurl.com/nj-vote-by-mail

OH. Cuyahoga residents omitting necessary information from absentee ballot applications
October 09, 2009, Cuyahoga County Elections Director Jane Platten said last week that up to 5,000 absentee ballot applications for the fall election have been invalidated because voters failed to include necessary information on the forms.
And, she said, an unknown number of people are waiting at home for fall ballots that won't be delivered. She said these people believe absentee applications filled out for September primaries automatically gives them a general election absentee ballot.
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/10/cuyahoga_residents_omitting_ne.html

TN. State Division Of Elections Hosts Meeting On Optical Scan Voting
A group of election officials from across Tennessee held detailed discussions this week about how to properly conduct elections using paper ballots, state officials said...Committee members also had detailed discussions about the proper chain of custody for ballots before, during and after elections
http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_160632.asp

WA. Online voting makes progress in Franklin County
Diana Garza Killian, Franklin County elections administrator, sits near a computer monitor showing a sample screen for an online voting pilot project they will use for the first time in November. Voters will mark ballots electronically, print them out and then submit them in the traditional manner. Officials say it’s a first step toward online voting.
"Lenhart hopes the project will show lawmakers that online voting is the wave of the future, and that they'll change the law that requires paper ballots."
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/northwest/story/910238.html

National

A call for Obama officials to improve Native voting rights
Oct 12, 2009 WASHINGTON – Voter rights advocates are calling on the Obama administration’s Justice Department to improve the system for Native Americans.
The calls have grown louder since the release of a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, which concludes that American Indians continue to face discriminatory policies and actions that deny them their constitutional right to vote.
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/home/content/63850477.html

International

How the Afghan Election Was Rigged
Time Magazine Aug. 20, 2009.
No one will ever know how Afghans voted in their country's presidential elections on. Seven weeks after the polling, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is still trying to separate fraudulent tallies from ballots. In some provinces, many more votes were counted than were cast. E.U. election monitors characterize 1.5 million votes as suspect, which would include up to one-third of the votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it is impossible to untangle.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1929210,00.html

WaPost - Letter to Editor
The Afghans Control Their Elections
EDMOND MULET - UN Assistant Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations
"Afghan authorities took this into consideration and decided not to open some 400 polling centers, because those were deemed to be in areas that were too insecure. On Election Day another 300 polling centers did not open."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/11/AR2009101101551.html
<[[note: that is over 15% polls were not open>]]

UN-led Electoral Complaint Commission member resigns for protesting foreign countries' interference into Afghan elections
"The top UN Special envoy to Afghanistan Kai Eide on Sunday said there was "widespread fraud" in the elections and rejected the claim that UN involved in concealing the final result. ... Afghan Independent Election Commission finished recounting of some 358 boxes, randomly out of over 3,000 suspicious boxes, on Friday and sent the result to ECC, while the final result is expected to be announced in few next days."
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/12/content_12218653.htm

WSJ
Opposition Grows to Iraqi Election Plan
Lawmakers to Decide on 'Closed List' Ballot for January Poll Showing Candidates' Affiliations, Rather Than Individual Names
"An open list is better for us because we want to choose whom we want,"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125530390999479163.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLTopStories

Internet Voting in Estonia
As of October 12. 60,150 people have voted over the Internet in local elections and there are still two more days of Internet voting.
http://electionupdates.caltech.edu/?p=2920

Computer Technologists' statement on internet voting
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5867

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[customerserviceguy]

1. From what I read on the Washington story

it's just a matter of using a machine to print a ballot, not to actually record the vote. The voter gets to verify who was voted for before handing in the ballot. Which, of course, will be counted by a machine, just the same as the ballots with the number 2 pencils.

I actually worked for a half day for the Grays County Auditor's office in counting 2004 votes for governor. The mechanical means of producing a ballot makes them foolproof in counting votes from people who cannot figure out (or are physically unable) to wield a pencil properly.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

2. yes, you are right although they hope it will lead to full blown internet voting and eliminate paper

How is it that the key points of the article - that the goal is to use this to "prove"
that internet voting itself is a good idea, and that officials want to eliminate paper ballots?

This is what you call a trojan horse, and sadly, this trojan horse has a sign on
its side saying exactly what it is.

And EveryoneCounts, the internet voting company, is right there.

[customerserviceguy]

3. Well, I know I'm in the minority here

but if we can trust a billion banking transactions a day to electronic processing, and everybody in the healthcare debate from the President on down is saying that we can have cost savings by simply processing every medical transaction on a computer, then I think that we have at least two areas where computers can be trusted.

It's only a matter of time before we can have the same level of confidence in a process that only happens a couple of times per year. To me, it's much more secure than the mail-in voting that is done in many jurisdictions, including the entire state of Oregon.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

5. banking transactions have accounts, elections do not, and

and I hope you will google "computer crimes" or "computer criminals" and see how teenage prodigy hackers have made sport of hacking govt computer systems.

And our county govts are not set up to handle these types of transactions.

We don't have "accounts" for our votes.

We have secret ballots - but with internet voting we would not.

[Fly by night]

4. Unfortunately, Tennessee is far away from the finish line

We're a lot closer to the pivotal battle-lines, though. We have an anti-democracy Secretary of State and his DRE-enamored GOP/RICO party operatives here doing and saying anything to delay and/or dismantle the TN Voter Confidence Act (TVCA). The fact that this opscan training is going forward (on opscan systems, BTW, that themselves would not meet the requirements of the TVCA) is more psych-ops in an elaborate labyrinth to maintain control of our election "results".

TN Republicans are rightfully fearful that a true count of the votes will expose the fact that they've been diddling our machines here for a while (certainly more than a decade).

Appreciate ER/DU continuing to cover our TN battleground. When we get close to something resembling a real and lasting pro-democracy finish-line, we'll let you know. In the meantime ...

If we never stop fighting, we cannot lose.