NewsTrust - Election Reform - Most Recent Stories: News (Mainstream)

Who cashed in during 2008?

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By Kenneth P. Vogel - Sep. 04 (News Report) - The analysis... found at least 73 staffers were paid more than $150,000 during the 2008 election cycle, a two-year period spanning 2007 and 2008. CQ’s analysis didn’t include salaries paid to Senate campaign staffers, because those campaigns are not required to report their finances to the FEC electronically, making their records much more difficult to access and search.

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Diebold Quietly Patches Security Flaw in Vote Counting Software

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Aug. 12 (News) - Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold, has patched a serious security weakness in its election tabulation software used in the majority of states, according to a lab that tested the new version and a federal commission that certified it.

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Health-Care Firms Have Supported Lawmakers Debating Reform

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Dan Eggen - Jul. 21 (News Report) - As liberal protesters marched outside, Sen. Max Baucus sat down inside a San Francisco mansion for a dinner of chicken cordon bleu and a discussion of landmark health-care legislation under consideration by his Senate Finance Committee.

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Looking Abroad For Answers On Voter Registration

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

National Journal - By Eliza Newlin Carney - Jul. 20 (News Report) - Unlike the United States, which puts the onus for registering entirely on the voter, many Western democracies put government officials in charge of adding voters to the rolls, according to a recent study by New York University School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice. These include Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Peru and Sweden.

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How To Win the Presidency

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Tara Ross - Jul. 17 (Special Report) - Electoral College opponents may be nearly halfway to their goal of eliminating America's unique presidential election system. But you won't hear anything about it from the media that are understandably obsessed with health-care reform, cap and trade, and the troubled economy. And you certainly won't hear anti-Electoral College activists brag about it. The "National Popular Vote" website proclaims, more modestly, that NPV has achieved 23 percent of the votes that it needs to succeed.

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Iran: Ballots Exceeded Voters by Millions

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Jun. 23 (News Report) - Officials found that a total of 3 million more ballots were cast in these cities than there were eligible voters, according to the New York Times. Nonetheless, the council insists that the election results are valid and says the 3 million discrepancy would not affect the results of the election.

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Recount Set as Iran Seethes

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

Wall Street Journal - By Farnaz Fassihi - Jun. 17 (News Report) - Pro-government and opposition demonstrators poured into the streets of Iran's capital Tuesday for a fourth day of sometimes-violent rallies, as the country's religious leaders agreed to a partial recount of Friday's disputed presidential vote.

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Why the official Iranian election results are suspect

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

McClatchy - By Warren P. Strobel - Jun. 16 (News Analysis) - In American politics, it would be as if President George W. Bush won re-election over Sen. John Kerry in 2004 by taking Kerry's home state of Massachusetts, doing surprisingly well in liberal New York City and besting his 2000 vote totals by 40 percent.

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Voter Turnout High in Polarized Iran, Rivals Claim Victory

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Thomas Erdbrink, William Branigin - Jun. 12 (Breaking News) - Rival claims of victory roiled Iran's hotly contested presidential election Friday amid heavy turnout, as crowds of voters waited to cast their ballots long after the polls were supposed to close.

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Court: Coleman must pay Franken $95,000 in court costs

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Minneapolis Star Tribune - By Associated Press PAT DOYLE - Jun. 11 (News Report) - A three-judge panel today required Republican Norm Coleman to pay Democrat Al Franken $94,783 to cover court costs in the seven-week U.S. Senate trial. The ruling, by the panel that heard the trial, approves an administrative decision last month by the Ramsey County clerk's office. Franken's team had sought $161,510, but a deputy county clerk rejected a request that Coleman pay Franken for his cost of obtaining public records that made up many of the exhibits in the trial and some other expenses.

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Voting Machine Company Agrees to Hand Over Source Code

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Jun. 08 (News Report) - During the city’s primary election last September, Sequoia’s optical-scan machines added about 1,500 ‘phantom’ votes to races on ballots cast in one precinct. Sequoia blamed the problem on “static discharge” or human error.

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Few voter ID fraud cases found in Texas

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

Dallas Morning News - By Terrence Stutz - Apr. 08 (News Report) - "We can't prove there is voter ID fraud. The Democrats can't prove there isn't," said Skipper Wallace, the Republican Party chairman of Lampasas County. "We may have a big voter impersonation problem we don't know about. I think we do." That brought a quick response from Dallas Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchia: "There are also people who believe in UFOs who have never seen them, either."

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Most electronic voting isn't secure, CIA expert says

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

McClatchy - By Greg Gordon - Mar. 25 (News Report) - The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering.

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Diebold Admits Systemic Audit Log Failure; State Vows Inquiry

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Mar. 17 (News Report) - Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on election day. The company acknowledged that the problem exists with every version of its tabulation software.

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

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

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Mar. 03 (News Report) - But the most startling information in the state's 13-page report (.pdf) is not about why the system lost votes, which Threat Level 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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German court rules against voting machines

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

International Herald Tribune - Mar. 03 (News Report) - Germany's highest court ruled Tuesday that the use of voting machines in the country's last election was unconstitutional, a verdict that likely will mean no machines will be used when Germans vote this September.

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Voting Machine Audit Logs Raise More Questions about Lost Votes in CA Election

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Jan. 13 (Investigative Report) - Humboldt County officials deleted at least 27 batches of optical-scan ballots from GEMS during the November election process -- a common practice when officials make a mistake and have to re-scan a batch -- yet the audit log shows that only one batch was "aborted" (aborting a batch is a different procedure from deleting a batch, which might explain why the log recorded this action and not the others).

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The Wisdom of Crowds

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

Slate - By Bruce Reed - Dec. 18 (News Analysis) - ... the current system of handpicking Senate replacements is a bad idea even if the governor isn't asking for ransom. Voters are the biggest losers, but they aren't the only ones. The appointment power is a decidedly mixed blessing for governors. And more often than not, it turns out to be a bad deal for the replacements themselves, as well as for whichever political party they and the governors who appointed them represent.

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Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Dec. 09 (News Report) - An investigation shows that the paper mail-in ballots were scanned properly by officials into the central-count optical-scan system made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) -- a receipt printed out by the machine at the time they were scanned on November 1, three days before the election, indicates that the machine recorded the ballots. The ballots even showed up in preliminary tallies counted on election night on November 4 and in a report printed out on November 23. But some time after this point, the tabulation software inexplicably deleted the ballots without election officials ever knowing.

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Facing crisis, Canadian leader shuts Parliament

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Ian Austen - Dec. 05 (News Report) - Canada's parliamentary opposition reacted with outrage on Thursday after Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down the legislature until Jan. 26, seeking to forestall a no-confidence vote that he was sure to lose and, possibly, provoking a constitutional crisis.

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Presidential Election Voting Machines Violate Copyrights, Suit Claims

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

InformationWeek - By Paul McDougall - Nov. 05 (News Report) - Artifex Software, of San Rafael, Calif., claims that PES systems infringe on its copyrighted Ghostscript PDF interpretation and printing software. Artifex claims PES is using Ghostscript in its electronic election systems even though Diebold and PES "have not been granted a license to modify, copy, or distribute any of Artifex's copyrighted works," Artifex claims in court papers filed late last month in U.S. District Court for Northern California.

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Record number of voters expected to deluge polls

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

Associated Press - By Deborah Hastings - Nov. 04 (News Report) - What is uncommon about Tuesday's contest is the sheer number of voters expected to descend on more than 7,000 election jurisdictions across the country. Voter registration numbers are up 7.3 percent from the last presidential election. "We have a system that is traditionally set up for low turnout," said Tova Wang of the government watchdog group Common Cause. "We're going to have all these new voters, but not a lot of new resources. The election directors just have very little to work with."

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High Turnout May Add to Problems at Polling Places

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

New York Times - By Ian Urbina - Nov. 03 (News Report) - In Ohio, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner sued the maker of the touch-screen equipment used in half of her state’s 88 counties after an investigation showed that the machines “dropped” votes in recent elections when memory cards were uploaded to computer servers. As an extra precaution, Ms. Brunner required all counties to provide paper ballots to anyone who wanted to use them.

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The 2008 presidential campaign has been like no other

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

Los Angeles Times - By James Rainey - Nov. 03 (News Analysis) - How long has the presidential campaign been going? When it started in spring 2006, America's voters worried most about the war in Iraq, consumer confidence had reached a four-year high and the Dow Jones industrial average bumped along comfortably above 11,000.

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Republican Politico Admits No Proof of Voter Fraud from Fraudulent Registrations

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

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Nov. 03 (News Report) - Despite claims from the McCain and Palin campaign and Republican politicos that fraudulent registration applications can lead to massive voter fraud, a member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee said in an interview published by Politico.com that he knew of no case in which a fraudulent voter registration application had led to someone casting a fraudulent vote. Ronald Michaelson, who was also the executive director of the Illinois Board of Elections for nearly three decades, said that trying to cast fraudulent votes by first submitting phony voter registration applications didn't make for a very sensible or plausible election-rigging scheme. Michaelson said the rancorous debate over the issue in recent weeks has undermined voters' confidence in the election process.

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