After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.
Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.
Republicans write rules
New GOP majority locks in power as Democratic unity noticeably erodes
Republicans began making the rules for the Georgia House of Representatives on Monday, leaving once dominant Democrats little recourse but to howl as they adjust to the new order of things.
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Republicans wasted little time consolidating their newly won power. The new House rules let Richardson appoint legislative "hawks" who can swoop in to any committee with the authority to vote the way the speaker wants them to.
The rules do not specify how many "hawks" Richardson can name, but he said there will probably be no more than two or three. Democrats immediately bristled, arguing the move guarantees Republicans can win any dispute in committee. "I hear them crying," Richardson told reporters later. "I promise we're not going to abuse this."
Kim Griffith voted on Thursday-- over and over and over.
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She went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. "I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before President Bush's name," she said.
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She again tried to vote for Kerry, but the screen again said she had voted for Bush. The third time, the screen agreed that her vote should go to Kerry.
In several battleground states across the country, a consulting firm funded by the Republican National Committee has been accused of deceiving would-be voters and destroying Democratic voter registration cards.
Arizona-based Sproul & Associates is under investigation in Oregon and Nevada over claims that canvassers hired by the company were instructed to register only Republicans and to get rid of registration forms completed by Democrats.
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Substitute teacher Adam Banse wanted a summer job with flexible hours, so he signed up to knock on doors in suburban Minneapolis and register people to vote.
He quit after two hours. "They said if you bring back a bunch of Democratic cards, you'll be fired," Banse contends. "At that point, I said, 'Whoa. Something's wrong here.'"
Continue Reading "Something's Wrong Here" » »Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State
By MICHAEL MOSS
Published: October 23, 2004
Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.
Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.
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Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.
Voting arrangements in Florida do not meet "basic international requirements" and could undermine the US election, former US President Jimmy Carter says.
He said a repeat of the irregularities of the much-disputed 2000 election - which gave President George W Bush the narrowest of wins - "seems likely".
Mr Carter, a veteran observer of polls worldwide, also accused Florida's top election official of "bias".
Continue Reading "Suspicious Minds" » »Citizens for Legitimate Government ... said that an old law requires all voter registration forms to be on cards that are 80lb stock paper. This is a hangover from the days when such forms had to be kept for a long time.
However, according to the group, that requirement has long since stopped being important since all applications are immediately scanned and stored in a computer database and are no longer physically stored.
However, for some reason, just before the voter registration date is about to end, Ken Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State ordered local election boards to send out 'correct forms' and tell voters to re-apply.
The Citizens for Legitimate Government claims that the local boards have been snowed under with requests and can't process the voter application forms in time.
The result is that they will not be able to vote.
Many voters not yet back on rolls
BY GARY FINEOUT
Miami Herald
TALLAHASSEE - With less than six months to go before the presidential election, thousands of Florida voters who may have been improperly removed from the voter rolls in 2000 have yet to have their eligibility restored.
Records obtained by The Herald show that just 33 of 67 counties have responded to a request by state election officials to check whether or not nearly 20,000 voters should be reinstated as required under a legal settlement reached between the state, the NAACP and other groups nearly two years ago.
Some of the counties that have failed to respond to the state include many of Florida's largest, including Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach.
Quietly Florida Admits 2000 Election Fraud
By The Associated Press
April 26, 2002 | Filed at 10:17 p.m. ET
MIAMI (AP) -- A federal judge has approved a settlement between Leon County and civil rights groups that sued over widespread voting problems in the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
The state and six other counties remain in the case brought by the NAACP and four other groups who sued in a dispute that grew out of the long-uncertain results of Florida's vote for president.
Continue Reading "Mistakes Were Made" » »Expert Says E-Voting Is 'Terrible'
Wednesday May 5, 2004 7:16 PM
By HOPE YEN
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - A computer science expert criticized electronic voting systems planned for the November election as highly vulnerable and flawed, saying on Wednesday a backup paper system is the only short-term solution to avoid another disputed presidential election.
"On a spectrum of terrible to very good, we are sitting at terrible,'' Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. "Not only have the vendors not implemented security safeguards that are possible, they have not even correctly implemented the ones that are easy.''
Continue Reading "Issues And Ideas" » »The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday voted 5-4 to uphold Pennsylvania congressional districts drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature to put Democrats at a disadvantage, but it left open the door to future lawsuits alleging gerrymandering.
Democrats claimed that the Pennsylvania districts, configured to reflect population losses in the 2000 census, "sacrificed every traditional districting principle -- slashing through communities, splitting precincts, municipalities and counties and producing a map that can only be described as a contorted mess." But a federal court upheld the configuration in a decision that the high court affirmed yesterday.
Four justices, led by Antonin Scalia, would have used the Pennsylvania case to declare that complaints of partisan redistricting could never be brought before federal courts, no matter how much a new configuration favored one party or the other.
Scalia, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas would have overturned a 1986 decision in which the court held that some partisan gerrymandering could be so extreme as to violate the "equal protection of the laws" guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
But Scalia couldn't persuade a fifth justice to sign his opinion, so yesterday's ruling goes into the Supreme Court record as a so-called "plurality" opinion, with limited application as a legal precedent.
Continue Reading "Entrenchment" » »WASHINGTON - Zell Miller, Georgia's maverick Democratic senator, says the nation ought to return to having senators appointed by legislatures rather than elected by voters.
Miller, who is retiring in January, was first appointed to his post in 2000 after the death of Paul Coverdell. He said Wednesday that rescinding the 17th Amendment, which declared that senators should be elected, would increase the power of state governments and reduce the influence of Washington special interests.
"The individuals are not so much at fault as the rotten and decaying foundation of what is no longer a republic," Miller said on the Senate floor. "It is the system that stinks. And it's only going to get worse because that perfect balance our brilliant Founding Fathers put in place in 1787 no longer exists."
Continue Reading "Rotten And Decaying Foundation" » »