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A call for Obama officials to improve Native voting rights

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

indiancountrytoday.com - By Rob Capriccioso - Oct. 12 (News Report) - Voter rights advocates are calling on the Obama administration’s Justice Department to improve the system for Native Americans.

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Sandra Day O'Connor: Stop Electing Judges

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Gene Johnson - Sep. 14 (News Report) - Multimillion-dollar judicial campaigns make it difficult to know whether a judge is deciding a case based on the merits or on concerns about reelection, she said. She noted that the founders of the country believed it crucially important that federal judges have the freedom to make unpopular decisions without worrying about poll numbers. It was only after President Andrew Jackson's election in 1828 that he persuaded states to begin adopting elections for judges.

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Afghan Election Marred by Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, Low Turnout

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Amy Goodman, Jonathan Landay - Aug. 25 (News Report) - In Afghanistan, election authorities are preparing to publish the first partial results from last week’s presidential election, but the small sample of ten percent may do little to resolve a dispute over the outcome. The August 20th election was marred by fraud, intimidation, violence and low turnout in many areas. The Electoral Complaints Commission says it is looking into at least 250 allegations of misconduct.

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FBI Attempts to Block Edmonds Testimony in OH Election Case

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Brad Blog - Aug. 09 (Special Report) - The BRAD BLOG has obtained both the FBI's response to FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' notice of her intention to give a deposition this Saturday in response to a subpoena she received in a case before the Ohio Elections Commission (OEC). We've also been given exclusive access to her attorneys' response in turn, which is to be officially released later this afternoon.

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WPost's 'Select Few' Dine on Health Bill

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Bill Moyers, Michael Winship - Jul. 11 (News Analysis) - What really happens - the serious business of Washington - happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally - and usually only because someone high up stumbles -- do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.

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Iran election: The global view

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - Jun. 18 (Special Report) - As unrest in Iran continues, our correspondents have been weighing in with the local reaction from their countries. Here are links to their reports and some excerpts.

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Protests Continue in Iran; Government Cracks Down on Foreign Media

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By JUAN GONZALEZ, Amy Goodman, Arang Keshavarzian - Jun. 17 (News Report) - Over a hundred university professors have reportedly resigned in protest over the deaths of students. And Iran’s leading dissident cleric, Ayatollah Hossain Ali Montazeri, also called for three days of mourning for the dead. His public letter on the election reads, quote, “No one in his sane mind can accept these results.” Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader met with representatives of all four presidential candidates and called for national unity but didn’t address the question of a new election.

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Politics Done Right: Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

FiveThirtyEight - By Renard Sexton - Jun. 15 (Investigative Report) - Again, as we have mentioned on several occasions, the numbers still do not prove any wrongdoing, as large scale changes in public opinion do happen regularly around the world. However, given the polling data in the run-up to the balloting, and the historical trend away from electoral domination in the first round by one candidate, this very fishy regional data tends to strongly support that which the canceled Mousavi protest was meant to express.

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Voting machine expert criticizes "clueless" industry report

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Ryan Paul - Apr. 20 (News Report) - The Election Technology Council (ETC), a trade group comprised of the most prominent electronic voting machine vendors, has published a paper that argues against mandating source disclosure for electronic voting machine systems. The paper (PDF), which broadly conflates source disclosure and open source software licensing, dubiously contends that enabling public scrutiny of voting technology would lead to compromised security.

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Front lines report from AZ election fraud investigation

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Op Ed News - By Jim March - Apr. 08 (News Report) - Goddard will tell you that he doesn't need to be transparent at all, because this isn't an election-related hand count. He's partially right: This hand count is connected to a criminal investigation aimed at the people who run elections in Pima County. But the problem is, Goddard's methodology in this investigation caused him to take personal control over the very public engine of Democracy. No one person can ever be allowed to take that control with zero oversight or observation. It leads to dark places. When a single government official takes control over election information, even as part of an investigation, it's a step that imperils our right to self-government.

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Report: Diebold Voting System Has "Delete" Button for Erasing Audit Logs

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By Kim Zetter - Mar. 03 (News Report) - the most startling information in the state's 13-page report is not why the system lost votes, which Wired.com previously covered in detail, but that some versions of Diebold's vote tabulation system, known as the Global Election Management System (Gems), include a button that allows someone to delete audit logs from the system.

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Mining the Minnesota Recount

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By D'Angelo Gore - Jan. 28 (Special Report) - The outcome of this squeaky-close race now rests with the courts. But even if Coleman wins on all points it's far from certain that he would gain enough votes to change the outcome. When the Canvassing Board was forced to count some disputed absentee ballots, for example, it was Franken who won a majority of them. Now Coleman wants even more rejected absentee ballots opened and counted, but nobody can say if he would get a higher percentage of those, or if he would just see Franken's margin increase.

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Expert: Voting machines easily altered

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

northjersey.com - By Elise Young - Jan. 28 (News Report) - A Princeton University professor demonstrated in court today how New Jersey’s most widely used voting machines can be opened with a screwdriver and their computer chips swapped by hand. “The machines are large and heavy. They’re left in the polling places for a few days until a trucking company can pick them up,” Andrew W. Appel, a computer-science professor, testified. “Many of the polling sites are unlocked. Anyone … can open it up and replace the software inside with fraudulent software.”

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Franken Starting To Make Big Gains On Challenged Ballots

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Dec. 18 (News Report) - it seems increasingly likely that Franken will soon be in the black when it comes to votes gained, and that the gap he faced on Election Day will begin to close. Both the Associated Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune project that Franken will overtake Coleman once this process is ended. And this count doesn't even include the disputed wrongfully rejected absentee ballots that the canvassing board ruled should be added to the final result.

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Dispute Between Coleman, Franken Now Shifts To Challenged Ballots

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

allheadlinenews.com - By Kris Alingod - Nov. 24 (News Report) - Seventy-three percent of precincts, or 65.65 percent of all votes, have been recounted, according to the Minnesota secretary of state's office when recounting temporarily ended Saturday night. Coleman has questioned a total of 945 ballots while Franken has challenged 948.

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The Morning After, Voting Problems Remain

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

TruthOut - By David Herbert - Nov. 19 (Investigative Report) - Dozens of volunteers fielded calls from harassed or confused voters in a command center complete with a 20-foot-high wall of digital maps and statistics. Upstairs, teams of lawyers hunched around conference tables littered with soda cans and cups of cold coffee, working the phones and dispatching legal teams to troubled polling stations.

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Voting Vendor May Be Ousted

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

www2.tbo.com - By Christian M. Wade - Nov. 08 (News Report) - Yet another new voting system for Hillsborough County? That's a possibility as the county tries to determine what role the newly purchased optical-scan voting machines - and the system's owner, Premier Election Solutions - played in Tuesday's election fiasco.

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Florida elections chief vows to purge felons and dead from voter rolls

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Sentinel.com - By Sally Kestin, John Maines, Megan O'Matz - Nov. 08 (News Report) - The Sun Sentinel reported before the election that Florida's registration rolls included more than 33,000 felons whose voting rights had not been restored and 600 people who have been dead as long as two decades. The newspaper has since identified more than 28,000 other dead people still on the rolls.

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Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

FiveThirtyEight - By Nate Silver, Mark Bluemthal - Nov. 04 (Special Report) - 1. Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.

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Virginia Voting: Broken Machines, No Paper Ballots

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Seth Coulter Walls - Nov. 04 (News Report) - As for her group's thwarted legal challenge, Browne-Dianis said the judge was sympathetic to the case during Monday's hearing. "He himself described waiting two and half hours, at age 85, to vote absentee. ... He said we need to go to the state legislature and get early voting, and that there is no remedy for voters for this election. And so we are monitoring the polls."

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Chaos Looms Over Pennsylvania Vote

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

American News Project - By Danielle Ivory - Nov. 03 (News Report) - Philadelphia is shaping up to be a key city in a key battleground state in this election, but machine problems and long lines may plague the polling stations and voter disenfranchisement will be a serious risk. Unfortunately for voters, the people charged with running a smooth election in Philly seem surprisingly unconcerned. Philly's veritable election czar, Marge Tartaglione (D), in particular, shocked ANP with her comments at a recent hearing. See more videos at the American News Project.

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McCain Advisor Says Voter Fraud is a “Perception” that “Plants Seeds of Doubt”

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Chisun Lee - Nov. 02 (Investigative Report) - A review of prosecutors’ statements and documents filed by Republicans in the most serious new cases alleging voter fraud shows that none offer an example in which a fraudulently registered person managed to cast a valid vote. While several cases argue that such frauds are possible, none sketched a scenario for how massive numbers of people could fake registrations and then vote.

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PA Counties Said Unprepared to Serve Voters, Meet Court Order for Emergency Paper Ballots

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Brad Blog - By Brad Friedman - Oct. 31 (News Report) - The directive requires that counties have enough emergency paper ballots (EPBs) on hand at polling places to ensure that voters can vote if half, or more, of a precinct's voting machines break down. County officials admit today that they were completely unprepared for the directive, and even for the likelihood of serious machine failure, despite known problems with the touch-screen voting systems they use, or the extraordinary voter turnout long-predicted for next Tuesday.

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VIDEOS: Vote Flipping on Touch-Screens in WV

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Brad Blog - By Brad Friedman - Oct. 31 (News Report) - Our friends at VideoTheVote.org were able to capture some early coverage of the vote-flipping incidents on ES&S iVotronic machines in WV. We now have reports of votes flipping from Democratic to Republican (and other) candidates across the states of WV, TN, TX and MO.

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Do the Right Thing

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Brennan Center for Justice - By R. Patrick Wyllie - Oct. 30 (Special Report) - Over the last couple of months, there have been countless media reports of officials and partisan operatives erecting barriers to voting—many of questionable legality. Less attention has been paid to the fact that multiple state and local officials have worked very hard to ensure that everybody who has the right to vote will be able to cast a ballot and have it count. Here's our "honor roll" so far:

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