Saturday, October 04, 2003

More on voting and e-voting


Many of these links are from the votingtech list:

Of course, Bev Harris' Black Box Voting . Required reading if you're interested in the subject.

Center for Voting and Democracy

LA County Registrar of Votors: Voting System Replacement

Maryland's Accuvote Report, and Verified Voting's rebuttal

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From LYNCHING BY LAPTOP by Greg Palast and Ina Howard

In 2002, with little public notice, Congress passed and the president signed the "Help America Vote Act." When the Bush family wants to "help" us vote, look out. Hidden behind the apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time-bomb.
The new law to "Help America Vote" will eat up $3.9 billion of taxpayers' money, partly to tempt states and counties to adopt computerized 'touch-screen' voting. Why is King worried? The first elections with computers produced vote-count horror shows that make one yearn for hanging chads. In 2002, Comal County, Texas, tried out new computer voting machines-and three Republican candidates each won their respective offices with exactly 18,181 votes. "Isn't that the weirdest thing?" County Clerk Joy Treater asked at the time. "We noticed it right away, but it is just a big coincidence."
Just down the road in Scurry County, Texas, two unexpected landslide wins for Republican candidates struck election clerks as just one coincidence too many. That county's clerk, Joan Bunch, investigated and found that a "faulty" computer chip had caused the county's optical scanner to record Democratic votes as Republican instead. After two manual recounts and one electronic recount using a replacement chip in the scanner, the Democratic candidates were found to have won by large margins and the original results were overturned.


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Dave Zweifel: High-tech voting must be fraud-free

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