TrueVote.US
is working to make sure everyone who wants to vote can and that every vote is counted accurately in a trustworthy fashion. The organization's initial focus was on ending paperless electronic voting in the
Maryland (see TrueVoteMD.org).
Touchscreen voting systems are the most expensive and least transparent
voting system available where independent audits and meaningful
recounts are impossible. Computerized voting systems have security
flaws that undermine the confidence of voters. TrueVote favors a paper
ballot based system counted in a transparent and public system. True
Vote favors a range of voting reforms, e.g. universal voter
registration, easier ballot access for third party and independent
candidates, non-partisan election administration, open debates, instant
run-off voting and campaign finance reform, among them.
Said Recently Threatened by Karl Rove, Had Beeen Key Witness in OH '04 Election Fraud Case
Built Alternate WH Email System, Websites for Bush, McCain, Swiftboaters, '04 OH Election, More...
By Emily Levy
The Akron Beacon Journal is reporting that the private plane of the GOP's highly-placed "IT guru" Mike Connell's went down in Lake Township, Ohio on Friday evening. Connell was killed in the crash and is reported to have been the only person on board. There are no reports of anyone on the ground being hurt, though his plane crashed in a residential neighborhood.
Connell is a familiar name to readers of The BRAD BLOG as a key witness in the King-Lincoln v. Blackwell lawsuit regarding fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio. That recently revived, long-standing lawsuit led to Connell's recent deposition on November 3, 2008, the day before this year's general election. According to plaintiff's lead attorney Cliff Arnebeck in July, a tipster had warned that Connell had been threatened by Karl Rove, as The BRAD BLOG reported at the time, in an attempt to intimidate him into "taking the fall" for Ohio election fraud not long after a motion was filed to lift the stay in that case.
Connell had been memorably described as a "high IQ Forrest Gump", by the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Ohio fraud case, for his apparent penchant at the scene of "every single crime" from Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 to the network firewall on a number of key Congressional committees to the case of the missing White House emails. (Video and text transcript of the interview with the attorneys here.)
In late September, the federal judge in the Ohio case agreed to lift the stay, and in late October he compelled Connell to give a deposition to plaintiff attorneys on the Monday before the Tuesday general election.
Connell had been served with a subpoena to appear in the federal courtroom in Ohio at the same College Park, MD airport where his single engine plane reportedly took off from last night, on his final solo flight...
One of my sources died in a plane crash last night...
Larisa Alexandrovna
I don't usually reveal sources, but I think this is incredibly important. Michael Connell died in a plane crash last night. He was a key witness in the Ohio election fraud case that I have been reporting on. More importantly, however, he had information that he was ready to share.
You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these ...
Franken Gets Big Win At Canvass Board
By Eric Kleefeld
Talking Points Memo
December 12, 2008
Al Franken's chances of winning the Minnesota recount may have just gone up astronomically.
The state canvassing board just voted unanimously that absentee ballots that were initially rejected because of clerical errors -- and the current estimate from the hearing is that there could be nearly 1,600 of them, based on some extrapolation -- should be counted, probably the single biggest issue that the Franken campaign has been hammering ever since this recount began, and which really seemed up in the air going into this hearing.
The board can't directly order the county officials to do the counting, only making a formal request to go back and count the votes and then submit amended totals. But many counties have already begun or finished the process of sorting the rejected absentees at the board's request, and board members did castigate any election officials who wouldn't do so, with some of them even leaving open the option of seeking a court order if necessary.
Because of all that, it seems very likely that the vast majority of these ballots will be counted before this is over -- and it could possibly seal the deal for Franken. Pre-election polling showed him winning the overall pool of absentee ballots by a solid margin, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume that the newly-counted votes will break for Al. If that proves to be correct -- and if Norm Coleman is unable to stop it through further litigation -- Franken will probably pull ahead of Coleman and win the election.
Late Update: Just to clarify, this was a separate question from the missing Minneapolis ballots, which they ruled on earlier and we posted on below. The board took on two crucial issues this morning, and on both of them ruled in favor of the Franken camp's position.
Chairman Scutari, Vice Chair Weinberg, and honorable Members of the New Jersey Senate State Government Committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you today on the matter of S. 2380, a bill to remove the requirement that voting machines produce voter-verified paper records by January 1, 2009, and to replace that requirement with a pilot program for paper records or ballots. I want to commend Assemblyman Reed Gusciora for his leadership and commitment in securing passage of New Jerseys paper record requirement in 2005, and to express my very deep disappointment and concern not only that New Jersey has failed to implement it, but is now considering possibility of abolishing the requirement and its timetable for implementation altogether.
Voting must not be an act of faith, it must be an act of record, and that is why we must implement requirements that make computer-assisted elections independently auditable, and we must do it without further delay. I will explain my concerns in detail below, but let me dispel some possible misconceptions at the outset. First, as you know, I am a physicist, and so I am not arguing in favor of paper-ballot-based voting out of some fear or lack of understanding of the technology we vote on. Second, the original group of experts who helped me draft my legislation when I first introduced it in Congress in 2003 were computer security experts among the best and most highly-credentialed computer security experts in the country. Therefore, I would also like to think it is obvious that the driving force behind my legislation is not a lack of understanding of computer security risks, but rather a long experience and familiarity with computers, computer security and computer experts. And finally, as you may recall, I have personally experienced human error in vote counting: in my very first run for the seat I now hold, one of the county clerks in my district ascribed my vote totals to my opponent, and newspapers reported that I had lost the race. In fact, you might even say it runs in my family, because my own father was the apparent victim of the theft of paper ballots when he ran for office. So I am not operating under the assumption that human beings are automatically more reliable than computers, nor that paper ballots are fraud-proof and computer tallies are not. The point is voting must not be an act of faith, it must be an act of record, and independent audit records (voter verified paper ballots) must be required.
New Jersey enacted such a requirement in 2005. But inexplicably, although more than half of the country has succeeded in implementing such requirements since I first commenced this effort in 2003, New Jersey once a national leader is slow to act. Do people in those other states know something we dont? Say what one will about Frank Hague and ...
Bettencourt or no, Dems press forward with voter suit
By Alan Bernstein
Houston Chronicle
Dec. 10, 2008
The presidential election is in the history books and Harris County voter registrar Paul Bettencourt is quitting, but the Texas Democratic Party is expanding its lawsuit claiming the county illegally has blocked thousands of residents from registering to vote.
"Mr. Bettencourt's late-night resignation announcement is his attempt to avoid bringing to light the inner workings of his office over the past several years and still does not ensure that the problems surrounding Harris County voter registration will be resolved," the state party said Wednesday in a statement distributed by Houston lawyer Chad Dunn.
Republican Bettencourt, the tax assessor-collector, said it was ridiculous to suggest he and his staff purposely foiled voter registrations or that his resignation was triggered by the lawsuit.
Bettencourt acknowledged last Friday night that he had given a resignation letter to County Judge Ed Emmett the day before a month after both Republicans won their elections. Emmett and the four county commissioners will pick Bettencourt's replacement.
Attractive job offer
Bettencourt repeated on Wednesday that he is walking away from another four-year term only because he received an attractive job offer in private business.
He refused to describe his new job. His last day in office probably will be Dec. 23, he said.
Dunn, the Democrats' lawyer, said the lawsuit was expanded to, among other things, include as plaintiffs four people whose voter registration applications were stymied by what the party calls the county's "unlawful and hyper-technical voters registration activities." The lawsuit alleges Bettencourt's staff has disenfranchised voters by using unwarranted technical reasons for rejecting their registration applications.
Bettencourt said the four were rejected for routine, justifiable reasons involving their paperwork, and that the registration system in the county works well.
"You are going to have mistakes made," he said. "What you do is fix them."
Some decisions reversed
The bipartisan ballot board that decided whether to accept provisional ballots cast by voters whose names were missing from the Nov. 4 rolls accepted some that Bettencourt's staff had classified as incomplete. His staff was unable to get thousands of registrations onto the rolls before early voting.
Bettencourt apparently still will have to give pre-trial testimony in the lawsuit after this month and will be represented by the new county attorney, Democrat Vince Ryan.
The majority-Republican Commissioners Court is expected to pick a Republican to handle Bettencourt's tax collection and voter registrar operations.
SAN ANTONIO - 500,000 San Antonians turned out to vote last month. A record turnout in an historical election. But for some voters, the experience did not go smoothly. News 4 Trouble Shooter Mireya Villarreal exposes one of election night's biggest problems: The voting machines.
The News 4 Trouble Shooters uncovered more than 400 complaints were filed by election judges and voters this past November. Some of the complaints are so serious, the Bexar County Elections Department is already making changes.
"I think we just came out stellar," says elections administrator Jackie Callanen. "It went very smoothly."
For the most part, things did go smoothly.
But taking a closer look at these complaints reveals more than 160 calls about the Ivotronic voting machine, or IVO's for short. The complaints range from one about a voting machine that disappeared to another that died with lots of votes inside.
"It still comes down to the human factor," explains Callanen. "We're asking our election officials, and especially on election day, to come back and remember what you did six months ago. When you haven't seen it or set it up for those six months."
Callanen says her department has used the IVO's for the last five years. And for the last five years, there have been complaints. Callanen tells the News 4 Trouble Shooters, there is a valid explanation for each complaint.
"They have forgotten to plug it in the back, they've forgotten to stand it up so the air circulates around it, or as we talked yesterday, they forget to push the button on the surge protector," says Callanen. "It wasn't a problem. We collected every vote."
Every vote counts? "Every vote counts!" adds Callanen.
Callanen says the machines that died were taken to the elections warehouse where the votes were extracted.
News 4 spoke with Bexar County Democratic Chair Carla Vela. She says the November election flowed smoothly in comparison to other years, but is still concerned about the number of complaints.
"I'm sure we still have glitches, because people did say they pushed a button, for let's say democrat, and it popped up republican." Vela says there will always be problems when voting on electronic machines, but she believes more training for election judges could mean fewer complaints in the future.
Callanen says they are taking these complaints seriously. Before the next city election in May, election judges will go through an IVO refresher course, including an online training session.
By Sharon Schmickle
Minnesota Post
December 11, 2008
In upbeat Minnesota fashion, state officials have said some good lessons could come from the headaches of having to recount the nearly 3 million votes cast in the state's U.S. Senate race.
Indeed, lessons are emerging even before the recount turns into a critical phase next week when the State Canvassing Board is to rule on contested ballots. They range from the handling of absentee-ballots to the recount process to gaps in state election law.
Absentee ballots
Minnesota needs to revamp the error-laden process for casting and counting absentee ballots, Joe Mansky, Ramsey County's Elections Manager said at a forum presented Wednesday by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.
Whether or not the state intended or sanctioned early voting, it clearly has come to Minnesota through the absentee ballot process used by some 288,000 voters this year, Mansky said.
Nearly 12,000 of those absentee votes were rejected by election officials for allegedly violating voting rules, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said at the forum. Whether or not those rejections should be reviewed is one of the flash points in the recount battle. Ritchie estimated that 9 or 10 percent of them were in error.
Whatever the outcome of the absentee-ballot battle in the Senate race, Mansky said the rejection rate is too high and the state should:
Create a Website where absentees could learn whether they are eligible to vote, whether their ballots were received and whether there were any problems.
Acknowledge that early voting has arrived and make it more accessible by setting up early-voting facilities at "Cub Foods, Target ... where the people are."
Set up ballot counting machines in government buildings so that instead of wrestling with a "maze of envelopes" early voters could fill in their ballots and feed them to the counter just as others do on Election Day.
Relieve local election judges of the duties of counting the absentee ballots on top of everything else they have to do.
Of about 100 improperly rejected absentee ballots in Ramsey County this year, two of the errors were made by office staffers before the votes were counted and all of the rest were made by election judges, Mansky said.
"They are overworked on Election Day," Mansky said. "We need to put them in a position to succeed and the way to do that is to never send them the absentee ballots."
Some counties have reviewed their rejected absentee ballots even though state law is murky on how they should be handled. Others have taken the position that voters can go to court to challenge rejections, Ritchie said. He called the court option unacceptable, especially for soldiers and Marines who are ...
BUFFALO, N.Y. So how many videographers does it take to help the world's foremost democracy achieve its fairest (presidential) election in over a decade? Based on this year's results, perhaps a few thousand or so (beyond the working press). That's how many persons officially participated in "Video the Vote"'s first presidential election effort in 2008. Video the Vote (VtV) was launched in 2006 in response to bipartisan charges of vote stealing, voter suppression and fraud etc. which marred the prior two presidential elections in 2000 and 2004).
In response, assorted grass roots initiatives were launched to prevent and discourage many of these abuses in future elections. The aim of VtV was to capture voting abuses, or at least first hand accounts, on video, and to make this widely available, online and on TV. "We want to expose how elections are manipulated and votes suppressed in elections and to help make them a bit fairer by sharing this with millions of Americans," said VtV co-founder, John Ennis. More than 3,000 persons volunteered to particpate in VtV this year, many of them seasoned videographers but with many concerned amateurs as well.
More than 3,000 volunteer camera operators monitored polling places.
My own decision to participate in VtV harks back to the 2004 presidential election when I volunteered as an election monitor in Columbus Ohio, ground zero on the election roadmap for both presidential candidates. At every polling place we visited, on Columbus' heavily black East Side, and in university precincts, long lines of voters waited for hours in the rain to vote due to a shortage of voting machines. The persistent rain caused lens fogging, and permeated the audio track, but the biggest problem was moving the video afterwards.
Also, as an election monitor, I had limited time to shoot video, let alone to edit or get it to a TV news hub from a laptop. Wifi networks weren't nearly as prevalent then as now, so locating a network then wasn't nearly as easy as it is today.
This year I wanted to spend all of my time shooting the election and any problems that might crop up, and also to be able to quickly get it to TV news outlets too, if noteworthy, and to post it online. VtV's partnership with (units within) PBS, CNN, New York Times, etc., and also with YouTube, made it feasible to access both pipelines via their Web site, at least theoretically.
ONE MAN BAND
As a shooter working with VtV, all I needed, besides my camera package, was a computer and a broadband connection to feed edited footage to the VtV Web site. They were equipped to handle a variety of file formats captured and edited on either a PC, a Mac or an IntelMac. Because a substantial minority of their volunteers were rank amateurs, video-wise and didn't have their own editing software, VtV even provided uploading instructions for ...
Now that our country has elected a 21st century president, we should reconsider our 18th century electoral system.
Two examples from the seemingly never-ending 2008 election showcase the system's flaws. More than a month after election day, we still don't know who won Minnesota's Senate race. In Georgia's U.S. Senate contest, it took two elections and tens of millions of dollars to produce a winner. Both races could have been resolved quickly and with less expense using instant runoff voting. Because the Constitution leaves it up to the states to decide how to elect their senators and presidential electors, instant runoff voting could be used at all levels of government.
Instant runoff voting is worth learning about -- not just because it saves time and money and is more democratic than our current methods, but because you may find yourself using it before too long. The Los Angeles City Council has created a task force to determine the feasibility of using it for local elections. It already has been used for several election cycles in San Francisco and has been approved for use in a number of Bay Area municipalities.
With instant runoff voting, voters indicate their first, second and third choices among candidates on the ballot. If a candidate wins a majority of first-choice rankings, that candidate is elected. If no candidate receives an initial majority of first-choice rankings, the candidate with the fewest first-choice rankings is eliminated and that candidate's supporters have their votes count for their second choice. The process repeats until a candidate emerges with majority support.
The Georgia runoff was triggered because a Libertarian candidate won 3% of the vote and the Republican finished the first round a handful of votes shy of a majority. In Minnesota, 16% of the votes went to a third-party candidate. In both cases, had voters been able to indicate their second choice on the ballot, we would have known the outcomes of the races on election night, saving a second election, a recount and lots of time and money.
Instant runoff voting is also an important innovation because it produces a winner who has demonstrated support from a majority of voters. When a candidate wins election with less than majority support, it means that a majority of voters have actually rejected that candidate. That's not fair to the voters, and it undercuts the legitimacy of the electoral process. It is also, unfortunately, a common occurrence in California and national politics. Three of the last five presidential elections, and three of the last four gubernatorial elections in California, were won by a candidate who failed to win the support of a majority of voters.
A similar dynamic played out in recent U.S. Senate races in Alaska and Oregon. In those cases, a Democrat won election with a minority of votes cast when the ...
Paralysis at the Federal Election Commission: Image With 3-3 deadlocks common on key issues, often along party lines, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) made up of three Democrats and three Republicans has sometimes seemed like it was built for paralysis. 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain has called the commissions design a fundamental problem. The FEC is supposed to enforce the nations federal campaign finance laws. But even in cases of bipartisan agreement that a campaign or committee has violated those laws, the FECs lengthy investigation process means there can be no punishment until after the election is long past. And in 2008, the FECs inability to exercise meaningful control of the most expensive presidential election ever ran into an even more serious impediment: lack of a quorum. With the terms of three commissioners expired and one other seat vacant, President George W. Bush and the U.S. Senates Democratic majority engaged in a procedural stand-off over the confirmation of new commissioners from December 2007 until late June 2008. As the campaign steamed along and questions and controversies arose, there was literally no one there to field them leaving the nations elections without a referee.
Follow-up:
After a compromise between the Senate Democrats and the Republican administration led to confirmation of a total of five new commissioners on June 24, 2008, the quorum issue was resolved. Efforts by some in Congress to enact broader reform have not made it out of committee in the House or the Senate.
Election Assistance Commission Has Not Met Mandates: Image Established in response to the chaos of the 2000 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), by many accounts, has been ineffective thus far in smoothing out the nations voting problems. The commission, created as part of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), is an independent, bipartisan commission tasked with developing guidance to meet HAVA requirements, adopting voluntary voting system guidelines, and serving as a national clearinghouse of information about election administration, as well as accrediting testing laboratories and certifying voting systems. Former President Ronald Reagan called the right to vote the crown jewel of American liberties, but after the controversial 2000 election, Democrats and Republicans agreed major legislation was needed to address serious problems in the election system. The EAC got off to a stumbling start, chronically short of funds receiving only $1.2 million of $10 million authorized in 2004 and unable to secure office space for its first two years. Subsequently, the commission came under significant criticism including multiple reprimands from the Government Accountability Office for its failure to establish and maintain a clearinghouse of information on how state and local governments implemented guidelines and operated voting systems. The EAC admitted it was resource constrained in its ability to ensure voting systems perform securely and reliably.
Follow-up:
On November 8, 2007, less than a year before the 2008 election, the EAC finally announced what then-Commission Chairman Donetta Davidson called an important first step in building a national clearinghouse of voting system reports that have been conducted by states and counties. That step became the Voting System Reports Clearinghouse section on the EACs website, which now includes five reported problems. But the Commission only includes those reports voluntarily filed by states and localities, and the information in the clearinghouse only reaches those state and local election officials who actually visit the website. An EAC spokeswoman said that the agency has made significant progress since the GAO criticisms. She noted that the EACs power is limited by the mandates of the Help America Vote Act and that the GAO recently recommended that Congress expand the Commissions role in resolving voter system problems. Meanwhile, a 2006 Gallup poll indicated that only 28 percent of Americans were very confident that across the country the vote would be accurately cast and counted.
Prior to the general election this year, problems arose in Texas whereby voters who opted to cast straight-party tickets on electronic voting machines were losing their presidential votes when they touched their presidential candidate's name after selecting the straight-party option.
That issue has raised a new controversy in Dallas County because of how this action of voters is interpreted differently if the voters vote on a paper ballot or an electronic machine.
Let me explain.
When a voter opts to vote a straight-party ticket on an electronic machine, he or she touches a button indicating the choice, and the machine automatically selects every candidate from that party in each race. But a problem arose in Texas this year because prior to the election many Democratic voters received a misleading e-mail that told them that if they voted the straight-party option, the machine would record all of their choices except one in the presidential race. Voters were instructed to specifically touch their presidential candidate's name after they'd selected the straight-party option to ensure that their presidential vote was recorded.
The problem with this is that the e-mail was wrong. A straight-party vote on a touch-screen machine did record a vote in the presidential race. Any voters in Texas who followed the e-mail instruction wound up erasing their vote in the presidential race because touching a candidate's name that had already been selected on a straight-party ticket de-selected the candidate's name.
Touch-screen machines are programmed to do this so that voters have the option of voting a straight-party ticket on most races, then casting a cross-over vote in selected races for a candidate from a different party.
But the issue has raised an interesting dilemma in Dallas County where a recount of a close race is underway. The race involves a seat in the state House of Representatives and could decide whether Republicans or Democrats control the state legislative body. The Republican incumbent currently leads the Democratic challenger by only 20 votes.
Apparently, some voters who voted straight-party tickets also touched their candidate's name in the state House race after they selected the straight-party ticket, to emphasize their choice and make sure the machine recorded their vote in that race.
Voters do this all the time on paper ballots. They'll fill in an oval indicating they want to vote a straight-party ticket then fill in the individual candidate's oval as well to emphasize their choice and ensure that officials have no question about their intent.
But, as I mentioned, when voters do this on electronic machines, instead of adding emphasis to their choice, they inadvertently delete their choice.
The Texas secretary of state's office has said that a ...
TRENTON New Jerseyans would have to wait nearly two more years for retrofitted voting machines under a bill approved Monday by an Assembly committee.
The legislation would roll back the Jan. 1 deadline to alter 10,000 machines with printers so voters could verify that their ballots were recorded correctly. It also would allow local tests of those machines, plus trials of optical-scanning technology used elsewhere in the country.
"Let the consumers really test what works," the bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman Joan Quigley, testified before the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
If passed by the full Legislature and signed by Governor Corzine, the bill would lead to the third deadline extension for the project. The new deadline would be November 2010, well beyond next year's gubernatorial election.
"The image of Keystone Kops comes to mind," Nick Lento, an activist from Cliffside Park, told the panel. "You can't keep on doing this. This is wrong."
The retrofit issue was forced four years ago by voting-rights activists who sued the state, claiming that the equipment was defective and unreliable. The manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, disputed their claims, but agreed to add printers and make other alterations.
Tests of the altered machines by New Jersey Institute of Technology computer scientists found jamming and other problems with the printers, and experts are working on those fixes.
More recently, Princeton University scientists demonstrated that the machines' software was vulnerable to tampering. But the manufacturer and New Jersey voting officials disputed the Princeton team's findings and stood behind the equipment, which was used for the Nov. 4 election.
TRENTON New Jerseyans would have to wait nearly two more years for retrofitted voting machines under a bill approved Monday by an Assembly committee.
The legislation would roll back the Jan. 1 deadline to alter 10,000 machines with printers so voters could verify that their ballots were recorded correctly. It also would allow local tests of those machines, plus trials of optical-scanning technology used elsewhere in the country.
"Let the consumers really test what works," the bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman Joan Quigley, testified before the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
If passed by the full Legislature and signed by Governor Corzine, the bill would lead to the third deadline extension for the project. The new deadline would be November 2010, well beyond next year's gubernatorial election.
"The image of Keystone Kops comes to mind," Nick Lento, an activist from Cliffside Park, told the panel. "You can't keep on doing this. This is wrong."
The retrofit issue was forced four years ago by voting-rights activists who sued the state, claiming that the ...
The Mississippi Republican Party filed suit against the Leflore County Election Commission and Southeast Greenwood poll manager Gail Griggs today for failure to perform their statutory duties in the November 4 election.
Our evidence and eye witnesses reveal a serious failure in this precinct to follow Mississippis election laws and ensure a fair and honest election, said Mississippi Republican Party Chairman Brad White in a statement. We will not tolerate voter fraud, voter intimidation and violations of election laws. We want the next election in Leflore County to follow the law. And we want voters, candidates, and elected officials around the state to know we support honest elections and will fight against election fraud.
White alleges that Leflore County poll watchers were seated too far away from the booths, rendering them ineffective, while unauthorized poll watchers loitered about the polling location. The party also claims people were assisting voters who had not requested any help and that voters received instruction and direction on who to vote for at the voting machines.
The suit also claims affidavit voters left the view of poll workers to go vote in a different room at one polling place and that the poll manager and bailiff ignored notifications of violations and refused to enforce the law.
The party filed a petition for writ of mandamus asking the Leflore County Circuit Court to find that the Leflore County Election Commission and Griggs failed to perform their statutory duties. The party also asks the court to issue a writ of mandamus commanding the defendants and their successors in office to execute their duties in all future elections.
The party is basing its suit on information it received from Republican Secretary of State Delbet Hosemann. The case is before Leflore County Circuit Judge Jannie M. Lewis.
Democratic Party Chairman Jamie Franks did not immediately return calls for comment.
COLUMBUS, Ohio · Democrats will hold at least 256 seats in the House when the 111th Congress is sworn in next month, after a county commissioner came from behind to win an open seat in central Ohio.
Mary Jo Kilroy, a Franklin County commissioner who came within 1,062 votes of unseating incumbent Republican Deborah Pryce two years ago, will be representing Ohio's 15th Congressional District.
On Sunday she overcame a 594-vote deficit to beat Republican Steve Stivers by 2,311 votes after provisional ballots were counted in Franklin County, home to Columbus.
The district is now in Democratic hands for the first time in 42 years.
Kilroy's victory gives the Democrats a gain of 21 House seats, but two races are not totally over.
In Virginia, incumbent GOP Rep. Virgil Goode has requested a recount in his narrow loss to Democrat Tom Perriello in the 5th district. A recount also appears likely in the 4th Congressional District in western Louisiana after Republican John Fleming squeaked past Democrat Paul Carmouche in the race to replace retiring 10-term Rep. Jim McCrery, R-La. Only a few hundred votes separated the two.
If the results stand, Democrats would have have 257 Congressional seats to the GOP's 178, a 79-seat majority.
The weekend news wasn't all bad for Republicans. GOP attorney Anh "Joseph" Cao stunned the political establishment Saturday by defeating indicted Democratic Rep. William Jefferson in Louisiana's 2nd Congressional District, and will become the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. The race was delayed by Hurricane Gustav.
In Ohio, Kilroy got 139,582 votes to Stivers' 137,271, or 46 percent to 45 percent. Two minor candidates split the remaining 9 percent.
"I am very proud to serve our community as the next congresswoman from central Ohio," Kilroy said in a statement. "In Washington, I will work together with both Democrats, Republicans and president-elect Obama to tackle the real problems that our community faces."
Stivers, a state senator, conceded the race to Kilroy shortly after the results were released Sunday.
"While I am extremely proud of the race I ran, ultimately, is was not enough," Stivers said. "I have called Commissioner Kilroy to congratulate her for her hard-fought victory, and I wish her well in Washington."
The counting of the roughly 24,000 provisional ballots 40 percent of them cast by voters in the 15th District went forward after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Friday that 1,000 of the ballots under dispute must be thrown out because of voter error. In a 4-2 decision, the court struck down Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's directive that said the votes should be counted.
Justices said Brunner improperly instructed county elections officials to apply conflicting standards to ...
By Thadeus Greenson
The Times-Standard
December 7, 2008
Since 2004, Premier Elections Solutions has known about the programming error in its software that caused almost 200 ballots to be dropped from Humboldt County's final November election tally, but that came as news to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office.
Secretary Bowen is certainly concerned about Premier's carelessness with yet another elections product and thinks it's distressing that the company took virtually no action for years on this apparent defect, Secretary of State Press Secretary Kate Folmar wrote in an e-mail to the Times-Standard. Secretary Bowen is talking with the company, county elections officials and others about how to prevent this problem from ever happening again in California.
Just days after the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors certified the November election results, the county election's first-of-its-kind Humboldt County Election Transparency Project uncovered the fact that 197 vote-by-mail ballots, which had been scanned through vote counting machines, were mysteriously deleted from the final ballot tally as tabulated by Premier Elections Solutions GEMS software.
The 197 missing ballots would not have changed any of the election's outcomes, according to Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich.
However, transparency project volunteer
Mitch Trachtenberg said, the unveiled problem in Premier's software underscores a major issue.
Our votes are too
Advertisement
Click here...
important to be counted by secret code running on proprietary machines, he said in a statement.
The problem was traced to a programming error with the specific version of the software used in Humboldt County -- a programming error that sometimes results in the first deck of ballots scanned through the vote counting machine vanishing without a trace from the final results.
Premier Elections Solutions spokesman Chris Riggall said the company became aware of the problem in October 2004, and sent out e-mails to its customers detailing how to work around the problem and schooled its customers on the procedure at a variety of events.
The two other counties in California that use the same version of the software -- Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo -- were aware of the problem and how to work around it, but Bowen's office was not, despite having conducted a top-to-bottom review of all the state's voting equipment in 2006 due to concerns about the reliability of the state's elections systems.
San Luis Obispo Assistant County Clerk Recorder Tommy Gong said his office received the advisory from Premier, quickly worked the work-around procedure into its election protocol, and hasn't had any problems. Gong also said his county has a method for double checking the results.
TALLINN, Estonia -- Parliament has approved a law making Estonia the first country to allow voting by mobile phone.
Lawmakers approved a measure Thursday allowing citizens to vote by mobile phone in the next parliamentary elections in 2011.
Estonians were allowed to cast Internet ballots in last year's parliamentary vote.
The mobile-voting system, which has already been tested, requires that voters obtain free, authorized chips for their phones, said Raul Kaidro, spokesman of the SK Certification Center, which issues personal ID cards in Estonia.
The chip will verify the voter's identity and authorize participation in the electronic voting system, he said.
The system and software have proven effective and reliable in an independent security audit, Kaidro said. He dismissed security concerns, claiming the system "is the most secure way to authenticate digital signatures."
Kaidro said he expects the 2011 vote to be the first of its kind, though he said neighboring Finland and Sweden possess the software and technical capabilities to conduct a similar "cellular election."
Estonian officials said the Internet voting system in 2007 proved secure despite worries about hacker attacks, identity fraud and vote count manipulation.
