=== January 2006 ===

Voting 2.0, Will Your E-Vote Count? By Cheryl Gerber, Chronogram 01.2006.

Voting System Results Still Out, Questions about the reliability of electronic ballots combine with changing regulations to fuel confusion and debate over technology. Los Angeles Times, January 3, 2006

E-voting Machine Screen. Election Center: The Fox Guarding the Henhouse Updated
by Joyce McCloy, NC Coalition for Verified Voting, January 15, 2006. The Election Center Wants To "Improve" Democracy -- And The Profit Margins Of Their Corporate Sponsors.

Dept of Justice
Politics Alleged In Voting Cases, Washington Post, Jan. 23. 2006.

Black Box Voting
ES&S and Sequoia May Be at Risk for Hursti-Style Hack, BlackBoxVoting.org, Jan. 3. 2006.

Open Source in Wisconsin
Electronic voting machines must be open-sourced, Wisconsin Technology Network, January 4, 2006.

Glenn Newkirk, InfoSENTRY, from North Carolina Voter, Jan. 26, 2006.

Law Journal, HAVA and Asian Voters, January, 2006. (9 MB)

Homeland Security Contracts For Vast New Detention Camps, PacificNews, Jan 31, 2006.

Lynn Landes' Voting Systems Lawsuit Reaches US Supreme Court, Yahoo news, Jan 30, 2006.
Legal papers
Docket

Doug Jones' Report on Arizona's Maricopa County Optical Scanners.
Arizona: Computer Scientist Releases Report on Maricopa County Voting Machine Problems by Warren Stewart, Jan. 12, 2006. Dr. Douglas Jones Questions the Quality of State and Federal Oversight of Voting Technology.

Election Theft Emergency By Terrence McNally, AlterNet, January 27, 2006. Mark Crispin Miller talks about how the right stole the 2004 presidential election - and how they'll do it again unless we stop them.

2005 FBI Computer Crime Survey
2005 FBI Computer Crime Survey
87% had "incidents," 64% lost money (shows severity of incident), 44% had intrusions by insiders. Can any Board of Elections beat these odds?
FBI Press Release
FBI: 87% of companies get hacked YahooNews, Jan. 20, 2006.

Election Officials in Arizona Refuse to Answer Senate Questions Or, How I Spent My Afternoon in the Theater of the Absurd. By Michael Shelby, Arizona Citizens for Election Reform, Jan. 19, 2006.

The Harri Hursti Hack and its Importance to our Nation By Susan Pynchon, Florida Coalition for Fair Elections, January 19, 2006. "I was one of ten people present at the 'hack' of the Leon County, Florida voting system, which took place on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon at the county elections warehouse." So begins one of the best stories of the year, and one of the most important.
Replaceabe Media on Optical Scan by Harri Hursti with Eric Lazarus, NIST report. Diebold Response to Leon County Test. Diebold Response to Leon County Test.

Lawsuit Aimed At Electronic Voting in Bucks County PA. Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 18, 2006
Activists Sue To Block Replacement Of Lever Voting Machines, PennLive.com, Jan. 17, 2006.

Diebold claims it has many offices, but they do not exist.

Paper Ballots Back On Track, Free New Mexican, Jan. 12, 2006. The full AP story on Governor Richardson’s announcement and its relationship to the Voter Action lawsuit in New Mexico.
Making Every Vote Count by Bill Richardson, March 2, 2006

EAC Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. . . On December 13, 2005, the U.S Election Assistance Commission (EAC) unanimously adopted the 2005 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, which significantly increase security requirements for voting systems and expand access, including opportunities to vote privately and independently, for individuals with disabilities.
. . The guidelines will take effect in December 2007 (24 months), at which time voting systems will no longer be tested against the 2002 Voting System Standards (VSS) developed by the Federal Election Commission. All previous versions of national standards will become obsolete at that time.

Poll Finds Few Captivated By Washington Lobbyist Scandal, USA Today, Jan. 11, 2006. This is relevant to the idea that democracy requies an informed, engaged citizenry.

New Mexico: Richardson Calls For Paper Ballots Statewide, By Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy, VoteTrustUSA Jan. 12, 2006. Governor Proposes Legislation Requiring Paper Based System In Every County.

US Dept. of Justice Threatens To Sue New York State over HAVA non-compliance, NY Times, Jan. 12, 2006.
US Dept. of Justice letter of Jan. 10, 2006
Response from the League of Women Voters of New York State and New Yorkers for Verified Voting, Jan. 12, 2006.
Department of Justice Threatens To Sue New York State By Warren Stewart, Director of Legilative Issues and Policy, VoteTrustUSA, Jan. 12, 2006.
BradBlog, Jan. 12, 2006: DoJ Threatens to Sue NY State and Board of Elections for Lack of HAVA Compliance! Even While the Feds Own Inability to Meet HAVA Reqiurements Continues. Additional reporting by John Gideon.

Accessibility For All Voters - Has It Arrived?, By Pokey Anderson, for VoteTrustUSA. January 11, 2006. An Interview with Dottie Neely, Advocate for the Blind

Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio's Connection To Electoral Fraud, Blogged by Brad on 1/10/06. The Dots Connect Between Abramoff, Ohio 2004 Election Smokescreen and Ney's Former Staffer Revealed to be on Diebold's Payroll While Working for White House Law Firm All the While as HAVA -- America's 'Election Reform' Bill -- is Used for Political Payoff in the Bargain...

Senator tied to 'New Times' inquiry is facing criticism Arizona Daily Star, Jan. 5, 2006.
Did Phoenix's New Times Buy A Subpoena? Arizona Daily Star, Jan. 4, 2006.

North Carolina
Per-County Cost Comparison, North Carolina, January 2006. By a Duke Computer Science grad student who is a member of National Committee for Voting Integrity.
Voting Machine Dirt and Then Some, The North Carolina Conservative, January 2, 2006.

Latest Episode Of Elections Circus -- Corporate "Sponsorship" of polling places, Sun Sentinel, Jan. 9, 2006.

Harris Miller, A Diebold Lobbyist, Runs for the U.S. Senate...as a Democrat!, Bradblog, Jan. 8, 2006.

No-Bid EAC Contracts for work on Voting System Standards go to vendors with close ties to EAC, Jan. 9, 2006. EPIC.org.

New EAC chairman, Jan. 4, 2006. Election Assistance Commissioners Paul DeGregorio and Ray Martinez III are now chairman and vice chairman of the EAC for 2006.

Battlefield Florida, A Chat with Lance deHaven-Smith, "Al Gore really did beat George W. Bush in 2000. Six years on, this is still a problem?" from Research In Review, Florida State University, Fall/Winter 2005.

Cheshire MA Rejects Voting Mandate For Machines, Jan. 4, 2006

Symantec and Hart InterCivic, Jan. 2006

=== December 2005 ===

NASED Certified Systems
List as of 12/22/05
List as of 11/18/05
Florida Voting Systems Info
Division of Elections, Florida Dept. of State

North Carolina
Don't Buy From Diebold, The Daily Dispatch, Dec. 17, 2005. By Warrenton County Republican Chair, Mike Wilburt.

Coalescing Evidence of Massive Voter Registration Fraud in Ohio 2004, Democratic Underground, December 30, 2005.

Colorado, Boulder County Draft RFP for voting systems
CAMBER citizen response
CAMBER Open Records Request intended to reveal how the RFP was developed, how public comments will be evaluated and incorporated.
CAMBER comment: The RFP is massive in scope and conflicts with most of the requirements expressed by citizens over the past couple of years. Linda Salas, Boulder County Clerk, allowed only 2 business days for public comment. Community leaders objected strongly to the Clerk and to the County Commissioners. In response to the outpouring of public criticism, the two day comment period has been extended by an additional 4 business days to January 4th. CAMBER recommends that the RFP be replaced by a more prudent proposal, after it has won the people's endorsement.

A Ban On Electronic Voting Machines, Albuquerque Tribune, 12/31/05. Note that the article gives a false impression of the cost of voting technology. It reports without clarification: "Herrera said the touch-screen machines run about $3,500 each. The Automark system - which requires a choice between two approved optical devices - cost about $10,000 for all of its components, Herrera said." The article failed to mention that one touch-screen machine for $3,500 handles a small number of voters per day -- depending on model perhaps as many as 200. Hand-marked paper ballots along with one Automark and one optical scanner for $10,000 handles as many as 2000-3000 voters. Thus, to serve a given number of voters, the purchase cost of paper ballots, Automarks and Optical Scanners is much less than touch-screens. Because fewer programmable devices are required, all transition and continuing costs are also proportionally lower.

State Quiet On Voting Machines Letter to the Editor from Debra Bowen, CA State Senator, Dec. 31 2005.

What’s All the Fuss About Diebold in FL & CA? Dec. 31 2005. Scoop: Opinion by John Washburn.

Hart InterCivic Paper Audit Trail demonstrated in Orange County, CA, 12/7/2005. The system is not listed as federally qualified in the most recent NASED list.

The Worst and Best in Election Reform, 2005 (Because There Was More Bad than Good), Tova Andrea Wang, The Century Foundation, 12/27/2005
It is depressing to see that major organizations still don't understand that evoting machines cannot support democracy because they conceal what needs to be observable by non-technical election observers. All election systems can be corrupted, but evoting systems conceal the evidence and prevent detection. The best approach is to use simple low-tech voting technology so that the largest number of ordinary citizens can participate and observe effectively. We should oppose turning elections over to technical experts whose work cannot be overseen by multi-partisan elections staff and ordinary non-technical election observers.

Monroe County PA Refuses to pay for New Voting Machines, Morning Call, 12/26/05

Ex-Bucks County PA Officials Stump for Voting Machines with Paper Trail, Morning Call, 12/27/05

"Threats to Voting Systems" papers presented to NIST, (National Institute of Standards and Technology). NIST is supposed to advise the EAC, but was de-funded during part of the time they were supposed to be advising.

Polling irregularities -- High-tech voting hasn't served CA well, LA Daily News, 12/27/05

Democracy Strikes Back! As Diebold Goes Down for the Count..., Brad Friedman, 12.29.2005. EXCELLENT SUMMARY OF DIEBOLD EVENTS.

Middletown Press State Supreme Court Rules Re-vote Needed, Middletown Press (Connecticut), 12/22/05.
Defective machine prompts high court to void Middletown election, Hartford Courant, 12/22/05.
Holy selective enforcement and judicial remedy, Batman! Can you imagine the chaos if jurisdictions had to hold a new election every time an electronic voting machine was broken? Note the possible political effects of this decision, or were they the causes of this decision? Read both accounts, and note different the slanting of the reporting.
Dover To Rerun School Election, Patriot News (Pennsylvania), 12/30/05.

County Borrows Voting Machines to comply with legal requirement for voter verified printout, 12/30/05.

Pennsylvania Dept of State Exam Results, Diebold TSx, OpScan, and GEMS Dec. 22, 2005.
Issue 1: "Qualification Testing" versus "qualified"
. . Page 2 states "The Department has received confirmation from Ciber, Inc. and Wyle Laboratories, Inc., federally recognized independent testing authorities (ITAs), that the System's hardware and software have successfully completed qualification tsting...." They then list GEMS 1.18.25 as part of the system. Yet a check of the latest NASED list of qualified voting systems does NOT include one that uses GEMS 1.18.25.
. . Passing "qualification testing" is not the same as being "qualified". The same assurance about "qualification testing" was given to the California Secretary of State in October 2003, yet as late as April 2004 the voting system had still not been "qualified".
. . Pennsylvania should not have certified the AccuVote TSx.
. . Two questions for Pennsylvania:
. . 1. Have the proposed voting systems received a "qualification number"?
. . 2. Has GEMS 1.18.25 itself received a "qualification number"?
Issue 2: VVPAT continuous roll paper
. . The PA Secretary of State refused to certify both the central-count and precinct-count optical scanner systems. These same systems are used in California, especially in counties where the TSx was de-certified for use.
. . Page 5 states that printing the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) on "continuous roll" paper (aka reel-to-reel) canot be certified in PA because it might compromise the secret ballot. On this issue the Secretaries of State of PA and CA, given almost identical Constitutional requirements for a secret ballot, came to opposite conclusions.

Fake voting rights activists and groups linked to White House By Bob Fitrakis, The Free Press, December 30, 2005. Top level Republican operatives with ties to the White House, Senate Majority Leader William Frist and the Republican National Committee (RNC) not only engaged in the suppression of poor and minority voters in the 2004 Ohio presidential election but they spun the election irregularities into a story linking blacks to cocaine and voter fraud. Bush allies in Ohio are now using this myth of voter fraud to pass a repressive "election reform" bill.

Fixing Elections for Fun and Profit Dec. 19, 2005. Information Technologist and recommends paper ballots. "Trustworthy vote counting is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. It's essential to any free country. The sloppy code and ludicrous back doors found in some computerized election equipment should be a wake-up call for all Americans -- and an object lesson to businesses everywhere in how not to outsource programming."

Voters Seek Order Barring Purchase of More Touchscreen Voting Machines in New Mexico.

Voting machine maker leaves N.C., Dec. 23, 2005. Local reporting. Officials fear Diebold's move will hurt efforts to replace machines.
Voting Machine Law Burdens Counties, Dec. 23, 2005. Local reporting. Officials say not enough time, money to buy new equipment. Election officials focus on the law, ignore problems with on the machines.
Diebold pulls out of North Carolina! (Again! And For Now...), Sends Letter to State Announcing Intention to Withdraw in Light of State Law Requirement for Submission of Source Code!
Said to be happy to help state change their law, however!
Blogged by Brad on 12/22/2005.
Diebold withdraws as N.C. voting equipment vendor; only one left The Dispatch, Lexington, N.C., AP State News, 12/22/05.

Diebold loses St. Louis, BradBlog, 12/22/05.

19 States to misss HAVA deadline, Yahoo News, Dec. 21, 2005.

California Activists Call the Cops on Diebold December 25, 2005, by Michael Collins. Movement for legal action against officials who allowed unauthorized software changes to voting machines starts in Northern California. Strong local support.

BlackBoxVoting analyses Diebold double-bind:
. . The FEC 2002 standards prohibit "interpreted code." The Hursti memory card attack, demonstrated in Leon County Florida, manipulated the voting system by passing code through the Diebold INTERPRETER.
. . California has just issued a demand to Diebold to send its system back to federal testing labs for a formal examination of the accubasic code and, specifically, the INTERPRETER.
. . California's move forces Diebold and the federal testing labs into a trap:
. . The Diebold system, both touch-screens and optical scans, cannot be certified in California at this time.
---- If Diebold submits the code for their interpreter to the Independent Testing Authorities (ITAs) this will force the ITAs to either recommend code that explicitly violates FEC standards (placing an unsupportable burden of liability on Wyle Laboratories and Ciber)
OR
---- The ITAs will have to remove the federal testing labs' recommendation for all Diebold products using the noncompliant code, effectively stripping Diebold of its federal certification.
. . Diebold is in a difficult position:
---- Diebold can refuse to submit its code to the ITAs, thereby losing the state of California with the resulting domino effect
OR
---- Diebold can submit its code and watch as the federal authorities move to strip it of its authorization to sell its products.
FYI -- NASED 2002 certification is based on FEC guidlines, which say: "Self-modifying, dynamically loaded, or interpreted code is prohibited, except under the security provisions outlined in section 6.4.e."
6.4.e says, "Unauthorized operations include modification of compiled or interpreted code."

Open Letter to North Carolina County Leaders and Officials from Joseph Waymack, Dec. 19, 2005.

Bush picks controversial nominees for FEC Washington Post, Dec. 17, 2005.

Hackers Break Into Computer-Security Firm's Customer Database Washington Post, Dec. 19, 2005.

Virginia Attorney general votes get second look, Statewide hand-count to be finished in 2 days. Recount will be the first of a Virginia statewide election since the 1989 governor's race. Roanoke Times, December 19, 2005.

Alaskan Democrats question vote results LONG GONE ELECTION: Tabulation method, reliability of machines are doubted. Anchorage Daily News, December 20, 2005.

Regional officials vow confidence in vote machines, Lompoc Record, Dec. 23, 2005. Why election officials should not have anything to do with computers -- they are not competent to evaluate them or respond appropriately to reports of trouble.

ES&S Troubles:
California Demands Repairs To Software For ES&S Voting Machines, New York Times, December 25, 2005. Troubles with ES&S in California.
Errors Lead CA Officials To Warn Voting Machine Company, Miami Herald, Dec. 23, 2005.
CA Sec. of State Threatened Decertification for ES&S After Failures in Recent Election!, Letter from SoS to Voting Machine Co. Warns of Numerous Problems Discovered on Touch-Screen, Optical Scan Machines! State Senator Outraged, Comments to BRAD BLOG, Calls for Full Release of Information by State!...And Releases Statement on Related Matters... Blogged by Brad on 12/23/2005.
Errors Lead CA Officials To Warn ES&S, Monterey Herald, December 23, 2005. Troubles with ES&S in California.
Diebold Hack Hints at Wider Flaws with other vendors' products. By Kim Zetter Kim Zetter, Wired News, 2005-12-21.

Diebold's Many Troubles
The Business of Voting, New York Times, December 18, 2005.
Letters to the Editor in response to the above article, New York Times, Dec. 25, 2005.
Class action lawsuit filed against Diebold alleging that Diebold issued false statements about the Company's business, products, financial results and prospects causing the Company's stock to trade at artificially inflated levels. Houston Chronicle, Dec. 19, 2005.
A law firm investigates Diebold ERISA violations, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 20, 2005.
California Sec. of State Refuses to Re-Certify Diebold Voting Machines! (For Now...) SoS: 'Unresolved significant security concerns', 'Source Code Never Ever Reviewed' State 'Punts' Issue Back to Feds for Further Testing, State Senator Objects -- Complete Letter from SoS, Senator Bowen's Full Statement... Blogged by Brad on 12/20/2005.

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/10448.html

The North Carolina Association of County Commissioners put ES&S and Diebold's price list on their home page. Diebold
ES&S

DREs and the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), 10% failure rate, Dec. 17, 2005

Two Florida Counties, one using Diebold optical scan machines, and another using Diebold DREs have scrapped Diebold and decided to switch to ES&S optical scan voting machines and the AutoMARK ballot-marking device. ES&S voting machines are independently auditable; its optical scan machines are easier for election officials to use; and they use a more secure operating system.
Leon County, FL to Dump Diebold After Undetectable Hack Reverses Test Election!, Blogged by Brad on 12/14/2005.
Volusia County, FL Dumps Diebold Too! Blogged by Brad on 12/16/2005.
Leon County - New tests fuel doubts about vote machines, Dec. 15, 2005.
Leon County - Elections supervisor: Some Diebold voting machines can be hacked, Dec. 15, 2005.
Leon County - County says electronic voting machines can be hacked Dec. 15, 2005.

David C. Kimball of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has Papers and Links on Voting Technology and Election Reform.

Warning Bell in Ohio by Tova Andrea Wang, The Century Foundation, 12/6/2005. A federal court in Ohio has just issued a decision that has potentially enormous significance for elections all over the country. In The League of Women Voters et al. v. Blackwell, a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss by the Governor and Secretary of State. Instead, he ruled that if the League and other voting rights organizations can demonstrate there were "systemic breakdowns" in the election system that led to widely disparate levels of voting access throughout the state in 2004 (and for over three decades before that), the state likely violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Undated ES&S price list for optical scan equipment, downloaded from http://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/hava/docs/ES&SFPCBF_pricing.pdf

Staff Opinions Banned In Voting Rights Cases Criticism of Justice Dept.'s Rights Division Grows. By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, December 10, 2005; A03.

Voting Machines Under Scrutiny, States Face a Jan. 1 Deadline to Meet Reliability Standards. Washington Post, December 7, 2005; page A23. By Brian Bergstein, Associated Press.

Election Integrity News from VoteTrustUSA, Dec. 5, 2005.

Uncertainty clouds future of e-vote tests Despite movement toward new standards for machines, change may be years away/ By Ian Hoffman, Staff Writer, Inside Bay Area. Michael Shamos on federally-certified electronic voting systems: "There's stuff in there that's so horrible, I can't understand it." A recent Maryland study of 6 voting systems found that all six voting systems did not record 3-4% of the votes (most elections are decided under that percentage). One of the leading promoters of electronic voting estimates that approximately 10% of voting systems are failing on election day. In the latest California testing it was revealed that as simple an act as accidentally sliding one's finger on the touchscreen could cause the machine to crash (one in five did crash during the test).

Diebold insider alleges company plagued by technical woes, Diebold defends 'sterling' record, by Miriam Raftery, The Raw Story, 12/6/05.

California voting summit shuts out voting reform advocates; Panels appear stacked with electronic voting proponents , by Miriam Raftery, The Raw Story, 12/1/05.

Optical Scanners Fail. 12/4/05. 10 counties in Colorado have either Sequoia or ES&S Optech Eagle III-P precinct based optical scanners. The machines failed in the last election and the state had all ballots hand-counted. Two races ended up with results changes. These machines may now be decertified for use in the state.

Department of Justice Bush Appointees Overrule their Own Voting Rights Act Attorneys to Approve Texas Redistricting Plan. Conyers Calls for Investigation of DOJ Voting Section and Voting Rights Act Preclearance Procedures.

With Nowhere Left to Hide, Diebold Pulls Out of North Carolina Dec. 22, 2005. Following a flurry of litigation that found EFF fighting both alongside and against the state Board of Elections, Diebold on Thursday withdrew from the North Carolina procurement process, ceding the state’s voting machine business to rival ES&S.
North Carolina Illegally Certifies Diebold E-voting System. Board of Elections Ignores Rules to Escrow Code, Identify Programmers. Dec. 2, 2005. Raleigh, North Carolina - The North Carolina Board of Elections certified Diebold Election Systems to sell electronic voting equipment in the state yesterday, despite Diebold's repeated admission that it could not comply with North Carolina's tough election law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes that this raises important questions about the Board of Elections' procedures as well as the integrity of Diebold's bid for certification.
Diedold's Immaculate Conception-Certification.

New Ohio legislation suppresses voters, voter registration, and recounts: "With new legislation, Ohio Republicans plan holiday burial for American Democracy" by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, December 6, 2005, Freepress.org. "HB3's most publicized provision will require positive identification before casting a vote. But it also opens voter registration activists to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio. When added to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and along with a Rovian wish list of GOP attacks on the ballot box, democracy in Ohio could be all but over."

Don't give in to state's dawdling for Diebold Daytona Beach News Journal supports defiance of state pressures.

State's eye on vote scanners, Secretary of State Gigi Dennis might seek new machines in 10 counties after hand recounts changed two results last month. 12/04/2005.

Allegations have been made that at least one DRE scrolls more easily or faster forward (down the ticket) than backward (back to the top of the ballot). This makes it time-consuming and difficult to verify the ballot after votes have been entered, and could result in undetected vote switching. This is especially dangerous in a state that allows straight-party voting, like Pennsylvania, where the entire ballot might be altered by the machine logic if the straight-party option has been used.

A growing list of foreign-owned companies count American votes:
Liberty - NEDAP - Netherland owned
Sequoia - Smartmatic - Venezuelan owned
Unisyn Ink-a-Vote - Malaysian owned through International Lottery & Totalizator Inc. (The Ink-a-Vote is used in Los Angeles Co. and marketed by ES&S who recently signed an exclusive agreement with ILTI to manufacture and market a Precinct Ballot Tabulator.)

Mandate on voting machines still riles officials in region, Litchfield County Times, CT., 12/29/05.

Vote Fraud Hurts All West Virginians, Charleston Daily Mail, 12/30/05.

"Kerry's decision not to fight has left millions of Americans wondering if their democratic birthright has been stolen--along with the last two presidential elections."

=== November 2005 ===

California
California County Voting Systems for Nov. 2005 Special Statewide Election

Diebold
Certification Test for Diebold, CA document, Nov. 11, 2005. Page 7, item 13 clearly states the .ABO are pesent on memory cards for both the OS (optical scanner) and TS (touch screen). This is only the excutive summary. There is a full report also by Steven V Freeman.
Comment by WheresThePaper.org: The use of computers in elections undermines democracy because it shifts the focus from voting, votes, ballots, and tallies to this technical mumbo jumbo that few election officials or voters understand.

Liberty Election Systems Troubles
The Irish Times reports a suggestion for how to get rid of Ireland's Liberty machines. "Will the Minister find some place, such as Zimbabwe or Florida, which may need the assistance these machines could provide? The machines could be sold as a job lot, and we could at least cut our losses."
Overview of Liberty machines in Ireland (where they are known by the name "Nedap") Ireland canceled the use of Nedap voting machines after an independent commission said the secrecy and accuracy of the voting could not be guaranteed.
One of Liberty's claims to New York election commissioners who know so little about computers that they can barely send an email is that Liberty systems are more secure than their competitors because "they use FIRMWARE, not SOFTWARE" so their systems cannot be corrupted. If firmware could prevent insider tampering and outside hacking, that would be wonderful. Unfortunately, it is not true.
NEDAP in Europe . Click on a country, some have good information. The voting machine being marketed is the Power Vote. (A free translation website http://www.worldlingo.com )

Scrap the "Secret" Ballot - Return to Open Voting. By Lynn Landes, 11/4/05. From the Ukraine to the United States, many voters no longer believe that their votes are counted correctly. And that's regardless of whether paper ballots or voting machines are used. The problem is the "secret" ballot. The entire voting process should be 100% transparent. To that end, I am proposing a protocol for Open Voting with Total Transparency.

BlackBoxVoting documents it: two testing labs certify defective voting machines. The Huntsville, Alabama small offshoot office of Ciber Labs, run by Shawn Southworth, and the Wyle Labs office which has been supervised by Jim Dearman) are responsible for repeatedly certifying defective voting machines that violate Federal Election Commission standards. November 17, 2005.

Rosemarie Myerson's cost survey as of Dec. 1, 2005
Rosemarie Myerson's updated cost survey, 67 Florida counties.
Article on Myersons's report at VoteTrustUSA
Report on Diebold Blended system

Poll Workers in Dover NJ May Be Voted Out Over Irregularities, Nov. 11, 2005.

Ballots Didn't Allow Straight Party Vote, GeorgetownTimes, Nov. 10, 2005.

All of Tuesday's Votes Still Not Counted, Jersey Journal, Nov. 11, 2005. Comedy of errors but the public is assured that the outcomes were not affected.

Minnesota to use ES&S op scan and Automark statewide, ES&S Press Release, Nov. 3, 2005.

Pennsylvania Dept. of State web site carries misinformation from private group against verifiable elections.

2004 Election Day Survey on EAC web site.
Table of Contents
Contains info on how many counties used each type of equipment.
Paper 1,734
Lever 394
Electronic 608
Punch Card 260
Optical Scan 2,541
Multiple Systems 123
Unknown 908
Section 9 on equipment usage

Best Practices Toolkit for election administration, revised, is now available from the EAC. November 30, 2005.

Poll Workers get pancake breakfast after election instead of training before Toledo Blade, 11/18/05.

Black Box Voting Advice -- How To Observe on Election Day November, 2005.

California: Is Los Angeles County Above the Law? November 06, 2005. Officials in the nation's largest county are trying to misinterpret the state's mandatory random audit provision. According to an email from Conny McCormack, Registrar/Recorder of Los Angeles County, she has asserted that “early voted ballots on DREs…are not required to be a part of the 1% manual tally.”

Schwartzenegger Hits Snag At Polling Place LA Times, 11/8/05.

Voters Report Problems With Voting Machines In Roanoke County Virginia WDBJ7, 11/7/05.

Florida Improperly Certified the Diebold TSX By Susan Pynchon, Florida Fair Elections Coalition, November 28, 2005.
Florida Fair Elections Coalition's preliminary review of documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request to Florida's Division of Elections reveals that the state improperly certified the Diebold "paperless" TSX voting machine and improperly certified Diebold's so-called "blended" system.

Clint Curtis and Congressman Tom Feeney from Florida District 24, the continuing drama. Tom Feeney was incoming Speaker of the House in Florida and lobbyist and corporate attorney for Yang Enterprises in Oviedo, Florida in September/October of 2000 when he asked Clint Curtis to create a prototype vote flipping program that would
a) run on a touchscreen,
b) not require third party intervention, and
c) leave no trace.
http://bradblogtoo.blogspot.com/2004/12/video-online-of-clint-curtis-testimony.html
Video of Clint Curtis testimony before Congress on December 13, 2004

Diebold machines face crucial test By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER, Inside Bay Area, 11/28/2005. Certain corn scanners, used to record moisture levels in corn, use the same memory cards as Diebold Election Systems' optical scanning machines for ballots and can easily modify them. That makes corn scanners a tool for vote hacking.

Confusion, Misreporting Surround Reports on CA Sec. of State Diebold Voting Machine 'Hack' Test!. Mainstream Media Reports Indicating Scheduled Attempt to 'Hack' Voting Machines Appear to Be Incorrect. State, Activists Still Negotiating Paramaters, Scheduling of Test as State and Federal Deadlines Draw Near.
Blogged by Brad on 11/27/2005, With Additional Reporting by John Gideon.
BlackBoxVoting's report on correspondence with Secy of State
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson asks Black Box Voting to do a test, but tells the press he's asked Finnish security expert Harri Hursti to do it, before he formally invites Hursti or obtains any agreement from Hursti to do the test;
- He gives Black Box Voting a Nov. 30 deadline, then tells the press he has no idea where the Nov. 30 date came from.
- He asks Black Box Voting to confirm they intend to do the test, they confirm, and then never hear from his office again.
- The participants in the test learn by reading in the newspaper that the test has been delayed (18 hours before it is scheduled to begin).
- In a related matter, while on the radio McPherson's office could not answer the simplest of questions about what transpired at a Nov. 21 Diebold hearing.
Voting-machine report, up on CALIF Secy of State website (Diebold)

Florida Notice of new Polling Place Procedures Manual
Florida Polling Place Procedures Manual

Ohio's Diebold Debacle: New machines call election results into question, by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, OpEdNews, November 25, 2005.
Poll Shock, Off by 40 points, newspaper's predictions may be disturbingly accurate. By Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services, November 24, 2005.
Democracy Breakin': Ohio's Electric Boogaloo, Nov. 19, 2005.

Democracy in America Has Officially Become a Privatized Circus, Blogged by Brad on 11/23/2005.

Mitnick: It's a new breed of hackers By Joris Evers, CNET News.com, November 4, 2005

New Mexico: Voting Reform is getting Costly, but Automark is the people's choice. The article says that meeting state and federal requirements would cost between $14 and $34 million, but coyly does not say which systems cost least. Probably that is the paper ballot-opscan-Automark option.

Calling all librarians, library users, and book reviewers: The publishers of Rep. Conyers' Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio can't get it into public libraries because trade journals didn't review it, so the libraries don't 'know about' it. Librarians, please buy it. Library users, please ask for it. Reviewers, please review it.

=== October 2005 ===

Sequoia Voting Systems Should Not Be Certified by the Illinois State Board of Elections, October 16, 2005.

Report on California Public "Volume Test" of 96 Diebold Machines, Oct. 11, 2005.

Evoting Experts Call For Revised Security Guidelines, Oct. 3, 2005. "There used to be no gap between the process of voting and people's understanding of voting," said Deirdre Mulligan, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law and a member of the ACCURATE team. "Now, the advances of technology have taken a process that was meaningful and transparent and understood by everyone, and turned it into a black box that only a regulator can understand." The ten researchers also said that "current voting systems are not designed with security in mind and current testing procedures mistakenly focus on voting functionality, not system security."

Early Voting and [loss of] Ballot Secrecy

The National Association of Counties wrote a letter to members of Congress on October 20 asking for HAVA deadlines to be extended to give time for counties to comply. A bill had already been introduced on June 30, 2005, HR 3163, "To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to delay for 48 months the deadlines by which States must comply with the election administration requirements of title III of such Act."

Hart Intercivic Scanners fail in Boulder CO Daily Times, Oct. 8, 2005.

Tom Feeney, Alleged Election Rigging Conspirator, Op/Eds Against 'Voter Fraud'.< Blogged by Brad on 10/29/2005.

Elections, Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed, Report to Congressional Requesters from the United States Government Accountability Office, September 2005.
Press Release: Davis, Waxman, Sensenbrenner, Conyers, Boehlert, and Gordon React to GAO Report on Security Problems With Electronic Voting Systems.
pdf The GAO report confirms many of the security and usage issues with DREs that activists have been talking about.

Cost Comparison of Florida Counties shows DRE counties spend 40% more annually to run elections than counties using Paper Ballots and Optical Scanners.

Florida Election Reform Conference, Nov. 12-13, in Orlando.

Vote-PAD, Voting-on-Paper Assistive Device.
This is an accessible ballot-marking device that is NOT computerized, a simple non-computerized device that enables voters with manual strength/dexterity disabilities to vote privately and independently using the same paper ballot marked by other voters with a pen or pencil.

NIST conference, Threat Analyses & Papers, Oct 7, 2005

National Summit to Save US Elections - Day 1, Oct. 3, 2005
National Summit to Save US Elections - Days 2-3, Oct. 5, 2005

The Threat to American Democracy Remarks by Al Gore to a conference organized by "We Media" in New York, October 5, 2005.

Not news, but a helpful book. Doing Democracy

=== September 2005 ===

Blind voters don’t see eye to eye with election officials, 9/2005, Greensboro, NC.

America's Next Election Nightmare, by Andrew Gumbel, Sept. 27, 2005.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 act establishes the Election Assistance Commission and some sub-committees. One of these committees is the Technical Guidelines Development Committee which has requested public comments on their Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.
CAMBER has submitted our comments to the guidelines. This two volume document is not useable, and will cost the nation much time and money. The document should be totally replaced.

Officials Don't Want To Verify Vote, Ian Hoffman, Inside Bay Area, 9/27/05. Elections officials across California are waging 11th-hour opposition to using paper records for verifying electronic ballots, partly arguing that the printouts -- as well as the electronic voting machines themselves -- are vulnerable to fraudulent programming.
Writing to the governor recently, the California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials suggested that fully computerized, touchscreen voting machines, known as Direct Electronic Recording devices or DREs, should not be checked by recounts.

Software bugs delay voter registration system in Wisconsin. Duluth Superior, Sept. 20, 2005.
Clean up voter list mess Madison.com, Sept. 28, 2005.

New Voting Machines Coming to Hanover County Virgina. Report includes assessment of costs and reasons for selecting paper ballot, optical scanner, and Automark equipment.

"Election officials across the United States are increasingly looking to electronic voting systems as a way to administer elections more efficiently, but skeptics have raised concerns about the security and reliability of these systems. ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING, new from the National Academies' National Research Council, offers a set of questions that policy-makers and the public should ask to help ensure that the technologies implemented are secure, reliable, efficient, and easy to use." The report was chaired by DICK THORNBURGH, former governor of Pennsylvania, and RICHARD F. CELESTE, former governor of Ohio, and was released on September 13, 2005.
Contact: Herb Lin, Senior Scientist and Study Director, CSTB, National Academies, 202-334-3191. HLin @ nas.edu
Press release
Full report
Read it one page at a time here

Public Comment on the 2005 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines Submitted to the US EAC, Sept. 30, 2005 by ACCURATE, A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections.

EAC Advisory 2005-005, why lever machines may not meet HAVA requiremnts, Sept. 8, 2005. No comparable advisory has set forth why DREs do not meet HAVA requirements. This advisory was released less than two weeks after John Gideon's Lever Machines Don’t Have To Be Replaced According to The EAC was published on 8/28/05.
It is clearly a political decision to assert that levers cannot be manually audited, but that the internal "tapes" on a paperless DRE can be manually audited.

9/30/05 -- Black Box Voting (This is a long entry)
You can use the file below for presentations just as is, or for guidelines on developing your own communications. You can quickly flip from page to page. The presentation is in three sections: Why voting is so important, how to evaluate the real risks, and factors in local and national election manipulation.
http://www.bbvdocs.org/presentations/attacks-public.pdf

If you have questions about the information in the presentation, just post your questions here, and we’ll provide one-on-one answers to help you and others (who probably have the same questions):
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/10409.html

Note that the Carter-Baker panel shifted the "frame" of elections integrity. They want to "restore voter confidence" -- but they don’t make much effort to repair the flaws themselves. Here is our quick, point-by-point rebuttal to the Carter-Baker Report:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/10345.html
Jimmy Carter and James Baker write their story in the New York Times, Sept. 23, 2005.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT THIS?
We are often asked “what can citizens DO to repair our broken election system?” Black Box Voting is investing in real solutions to help repair our elections process. We are not waiting for new laws to be passed, new voting machines to be invented, or public officials to change their ways.

THE DO-IT-YOURSELF VOTASCOPE PROGRAM
. . Working with expert Harri Hursti, Black Box Voting is distributing the new “Votascope” program. It’s free. It’s open source. Anyone can use it to find out if their local election is ailing. (This is not a complete solution by any means. Right now, the Votascope program will help with absentee votes and mail-in votes. Recounts are also often done on this kind of machine.)
Here’s how it works:
. . Harri Hursti discovered that some voting machines automatically create a file that you can obtain using the Freedom of Information Act (“Public Records Requests”).
. . This type of voting machine takes photos of each ballot, which it keeps in a file automatically. You can get these ballot photos with public records requests.
. . Of course, elections have a lot of ballots. The July 26 San Diego election, for example, had about 250,000 ballots, about 75,000 of which went through the kind of voting machine that takes and keeps digital photos. The recent school election in Marin County, California was all mail-in, and had about 15,750 ballots go through this kind of voting machine. It would take a long time for you to count all those ballots.
. . The Votascope program counts the ballots for you, using precise “open source” programming.
. . Of course, it will come with instructions. It can do many diagnostics. For example, you will be able to diagnose various election ailments with Votascope.
. . Example: One way to tamper with an election is to set the machine to reject or accept more votes. The Votascope program can catch this manipulation.
. . Votascope can also find machines that are poorly maintained, or show you if a ballot design favored one candidate over another.
. . Votascope will be available for free downloads at Black Box Voting beginning in mid-October, in time for the Nov. 8 elections this year! The photo files it uses to count ballots are ALREADY in voting machines; you can get them on CD or DVD; the laws you need to get them are ALREADY on the books.
. . The first edition of the Votascope program counts Diebold ballot images. Later editions will count images from Hart Intercivic and, if possible, ES&S.
. . With your help, we can soon find out how healthy (or unwell) our elections are. Here is more information on the new Votascope checkup program for voting machines:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/10268.html

CURRENT INVESTIGATIONS
. . How did we get into this mess with voting machines? Who made the decision to privatize our elections?
. . The Election Center and R. Doug Lewis are of interest, because this entity and this individual organized elections officials and propagandized the introduction of voting machines in the United States. The Election Center and R. Doug Lewis were involved in consolidating election officials under the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED) and overseeing the Independent Testing Labs (ITAs) that certified the current crop of tamper-friendly voting systems.
. . We wanted to know who started The Election Center (a private organization) and who hired R. Doug Lewis. In a recent trip to Washington D.C., we obtained copies of microfiche documents that provide this information. Here they are:
http://bbvdocs.org/general/The-Election-Center.pdf
. . These documents show the names of all directors in 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1997. R. Doug Lewis was appointed director of The Election Center in 1994, so the individuals in 1993 and 1994 would presumably be those people who hired him.
. . R. Doug Lewis's resume does not seem to check out. He claims he was an “assistant to the president in the White House” but he doesn’t say which president. He says he ran the Texas Democratic Party and the Kansas Democratic Party, but we can find no evidence of this and no one with those parties seems to remember him.
. . Because we have not yet been able to confirm who he is or his whereabouts prior to the mid-1980s, we are continuing to examine his background and the role he has played in U.S. elections. We do know that he sold used computers in the late 1980s, before taking over The Election Center, taking over training of election officials, and pushing voting machines into every corner of the U.S.
END 9/30/05 -- Black Box Voting (This is a long entry)

Rebecca Mercuri Comment

Comment by Rebecca Mercuri on VVSG, 9/30/05

New Mexico

Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters,
New Mexico canvass data shows higher undervote rates in minority precincts where pushbutton DREs were used.
Paper ballots tabulated by optical scan systems had nearly identical presidential undervote rates for all ethnicities, but where the Danaher Shouptronic and Sequoia Advantage pushbutton paperless electronic voting machines were used:
-- Hispanic precincts averaged more than 3% higher presidential UV rates than Anglo precincts
-- Native American precincts averaged more than 5.5% higher presidential UV rates than Anglo precincts.

Just as information about the loss of Hispanic and Native American votes in the Nov. 2004 presidential race becomes public, the EAC publishes a Survey that shows that these voters tend to be not interested in voting for president.

But VoterAction.org is discovering evidence that misuse of computerized voting machines accounts for the irregularities.

Diebold Troubles

Diebold Analysts Question Reasons Behind Shake-up, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sept. 25, 2005.
Diebold Insider Speaks!,
Diebold Stock Plummets! Down 15.5% at Today's Close! President/COO Quits! CEO Walden O'Dell Takes Over!.
More Trouble for Diebold, This Time in Georgia..., Blogged by Brad, 9/27/2000.
CERT Cyber Security Bulletin about the back door on Diebold GEMS tabulator that allows for vote count changes:
"A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could a local or remote authenticated malicious user modify votes. No workaround or patch available at time of publishing. We are not aware of any exploits for this vulnerability."

Carter-Baker Commission

Carter-Baker Commission Report, Sept. 19, 2005. The 21-member Commission offers 87 recommendations.
another link.

Reaction to the Carter-Baker report:
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, By Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy, VoterTrustUSA, Sept. 19, 2005. Don't Let Congress Use the Carter-Baker Report to Make Vote Verification Meaningless
John Conyers replies.
Reform Now for the Future, 9/29/05, by Andrew Gumbel, author of Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America.
Congressman Rush Holt's reaction
Critique of Carter-Baker Election Reform Report from The Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity: Today the Carter-Baker Commission on Election Reform identified five important "pillars" to guide political leaders seeking to fix an electoral system sorely in need of repair. Ultimately, however, the Commission’s report is a "bait-and-switch" for voters seeking real reform because of the Commission’s failure to advance policy changes that will significantly address many of the voting irregularities experienced in the 2004 election.
What Baker-Carter Got Right, Rob Richie and Steven Hill, September 27, 2005.
Carter-Baker Dissent. This new web site came into being because the C-B commission chose not to allow discussion of dissenting views within the report itself. Tom Daschle and Spencer Overton dissented to the Voter ID recommendations. Mr. Overton put up this site.
Democrats.com suggests using Social Security numbers as voter ID.

Other

Playing Games With Voting Rights NY Times Editorial, Sept. 14, 2005. Ex-felons voting rights in Pennsylvania.

Running on the Right to Vote By William Rivers Pitt truthout.org, Sept. 22, 2005.

Certification of voting systems is now handled through the EAC. List as of 9/2/05 Vendors are expected to rush now to get their products qualified to the 2002 standards before January 1, 2006. After that date those same systems will no longer be able to meet the 2002 standards because at that time HAVA requires that all systems meet Section 2.2.7 accessibility standards. There may be a lot of 'grandfathering' of systems that are already qualified. The EAC should make a new category of "2002 Qualified but Not HAVA Compliant".

ITA Approved Systems 1-03 to 11-03
Updated List of ITA Approved Systems from 12-03 to 7-05. Note that on this list (which is not up-to-date at this time), it shows voting systems. According to the ITA Secretariat, Brian Hancock, and a note at the bottom of the first of the links (above) the ITAs only certify systems and not parts of systems.

Censored!, by Camille T. Taiara, Sept. 7-13, 2005, San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Election Assessment Hearing, June 29, 2005 Preliminary Report of Findings: Voice of Election Customer Summaries. Sept. 22, 2005. http://www.electionassessment.org

Boulder County Election Plan Fundamentally Flawed Sept. 21, 2005, by Al Kolwicz, CAMBER.

VoteFiler Sept. 29, 2005.

How to collect data to monitor elections from Kathy Dopp, USCountsVotes.org, 9/28/05.

=== August 2005 ===

Money from Vendors to Election Center
Remaking the Rules, Private voting-equipment companies play part in reforming county elections. Real Change News, August 17, 2005

What experts are telling judges about technology?
Experts compile tech guidelines for judges, San Luis Obispo, 8/3/05.

Can HAVA money be spent on non-compliant equipment?
Washington Secretary of State certifies equipment that is not HAVA compliant, 8/3/05.

Lever Machines Don’t Have To Be Replaced According to The EAC, By John Gideon, Information Manager, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA, August 28, 2005.

EAC Testimony on Voting System Standards by John Gideon, Information Manager, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.org, August 21, 2005.

Diebold machines fail mock election test in CA, State says Diebold failures in massive mock election could translate to problems at polls. By Ian Hoffman, Inside Bay Area, July 29, 2005. "There was a failure rate of about 10 percent, and that's not good enough..." E-voting Machines Rejected After State Tests By John Gideon, Information Manager, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.org August 3, 2005. On July 29, 2005 newspapers in California were reporting that the Diebold TSx voting machines had failed in a mock election test. The papers reported a 10% failure rate on a voting system that had just been federally qualified only 2 months previously.

Diebold AccuVote TSx with AccuView Printer by John Gideon, Information Manager, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA, August 26, 2005.

How can w Ensure Accurate Election Results via Independent Audits & Election Data Monitoring?
Look up your own county election official's mailing address here:
http://uscountvotes.net/scripts/lettergen/ltr_pick_addressee.php
http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/election_officials/Audits_Monitoring.pdf

Don't Prettify Our History By Paul Krugman, New York Times August 22, 2005.

All I Did Was Say They Can't Run a Fair Election by Andrew Gumbel, August 30, 2005, The Independent (UK): 'He caters to a British sensibility that sees us as an errant colony run by a gang of thugs'

Manual Audit Requirements Introduction, Aug. 20, 2005.
Manual Audit Requirements in various state laws where voter-verified paper records are used.
Sample VVPB and Audit Legislation.

Former Unisys official will be head of both Sequoia and Smartmatic, Aug. 26, 2005.

NASED list of certified voting systems

PR Week (subscription required), August 25, 2005: "Diebold Election Systems (DES) has hired Ogilvy PR to burnish the company's image and the benefits of electronic voting in California," reports PR Week. The state decertified one of DES' e-voting machines last year, and now the company wants to ensure that their "story is told" and that voters "understand the technology," said Ogilvy's Michael Law, who heads DES' California work. Ogilvy is researching public perceptions of DES and developing messages "about the ease of electronic voting, particularly for voters who do not speak English, as well as for handicapped voters." O'Dwyer's reports that DES' California PR is part of a national campaign headed by former Democratic National Committee chair Joe Andrew. Andrew has been praised for his "grassroots organizing" and "golden rolodex" of CEOs and labor leaders. Other PR firms DES has employed include Public Strategies and Compliance Research Group.
info about Joe Andrew
Joe Andrew, member of New Democratic Network's Advisory Board
ACTION:
Email or call Mr.Andrews and ask him not to work for Diebold,
a company that needs to put its effort into making better equipment and making its paper trail work, rather than a PR campaign.
Phone calls are most effective, & remember to be polite but firm.
Washington DC Office
Phone: 202/408-5210
jandrew@sonnenschein.com
Also, contact the NDN and ask them why one of their most
prominent advisors is working for Diebold.
e-mail at info@ndnpac.org or call at (202) 544-9200.
Diebold hires top Dem for PR blitz, Former party chairman make the case for voting to California, Ian Hoffman, 8/20/05.

The Election Center: The Fox Guarding the Hen House By Joyce McCloy, Coordinator, N.C. Coalition for Verifiable Voting August 26, 2005.

What to observe in pre-election testing
Testing Voting Systems Also, find out about communications capability including wireless connectivity. A test script that runs electronically will be set up in advance to work correctly, so have actual persons cast actual ballots and test each possible ballot position and combination.

Threats to Voting Systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will host a workshop to allow the U.S. election community to participate in developing an analysis of threats to voting systems, October 7, 2005, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The goal of the workshop is to solicit and gather threat analysis material and to gather critical analysis of the collected threats, the plausibility of various scenarios, assumptions made, and what lessons can be learned as a result of the analysis. Participants in the workshop are encouraged to submit a position paper to the conference by September 30, 2005.

Lawsuit in Tennsessee claims that paperless ballots violate the Tennessee Constitution.

HAVA and the Rush to Poor Judgment by Vicky Karp.

National Summit To Save Our Elections, conference in Portland, Oregon, Sept. 30 thru Oct. 2.

Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America (Paperback) by Andrew Gumbel. In a riveting and frightening account, Gumbel, U.S. correspondent for Britain's Independent, traces election fraud in America from the 18th century to the present, spotlighting the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, vote buying in the Gilded Age and the history of black disenfranchisement in the post-Reconstruction South. The last 100 pages are devoted to the elections of 2000 and 2004. Gumbel rehearses the Florida mess and argues that those who care about voting rights should be terrified by Justice Scalia's argument in Bush v. Gore that the Constitution doesn't per se guarantee a right of suffrage. Gumbel shows that the confusion (at best) and cheating (at worst) that went on in Florida are not unusual, describing numerous county and state elections plagued with problems: registered voters purged from the rolls; queues at polling places so long that would-be voters gave up; and confusing ballots.

Citizens Request Recount in San Diego Mayoral Race, alleging fraud by Diebold vote-tabulating equipment. By Miriam Raftery, rawstory.com. Aug. 18, 2005.

Comparison of Testing Costs, PBOS versus DRE by John Washburn, Aug. 17, 2005.

Why no Internet Connection by John Washburn.

How to Count Thousands of Paper Ballots by Hand by John Washburn. Regarding cheating with the weighing scales, it is possible that someone would stick a heavy piece of metal into the stack of paper ballots before they are weighed. That's the same problem as the guy with a piece of lead under his fingernail who makes stray marks on the ballots for his party's opponent. My question is, why don't people used due diligence to detect and prevent it? Why aren't the ballot-handler's hands checked before they start work? Why doesn't someone look through the ballots to find any sheet of metal? It is a political decision to "not look." There's no technology that can't be tampered with. There are technologies that are easy to protect (paper) and others that are impossible to protect (computers).

Venezuela - Electoral Musings: How about those null votes!.

Media, Politics, and Apathy: The Specter of Voter Fraud by Steven Carbo, Director of Demo's Democracry Program.

Exactly What You Don't Want: Your Elections on Diebold's Server, Consumer Report from BlackBoxVoting.org, Aug. 8, 2005.

Utah's Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert misinforms his counties.

Kathy Dopp's report on NASED's summer conference, Aug 12-14, in Beverly Hills, CA.

Kimble: 'Mother of security holes' in state voting system August 11, 2005. This article is about optical scanners in Arizona. The most amazing thing is that comparable articles about the possibility of computer fraud with DREs rarely get into the mainstream press -- yet VotersUnite.org has published 120 pages of documented failures of such systems. The big difference between OpScan and DREs is that we have a real paper ballot for recounting with OpScan. With DREs the voters never see their own legal ballot which exists only in the electrons of the computer's internal circuits. If people wanted election integrity, they would push for paper ballots and hand counts. That would require citizen involvement, but the direction of elections these days is to "professionalize" them and shut citizens out of traditional roles as workers and observers.

The National Science Foundation announced will spend $7.5 million over five years for a new project called A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE). Accurate will be based at Johns Hopkins University, and its director will be Aviel D. Rubin, a professor of computer science at Hopkins who in 2003 revealed security flaws in voting systems made by Diebold Election Systems.
NSF announcement.
NSF awards related to voting.
The problem with a project like this is that when you get a bunch of computer scientists together to deal with voting, they will of course come up with a computerized solution. Perhaps the funding will actually require that. But no computerized voting allows the non-technical citizen voter to see their own ballot and mark it directly, and no computerized voting allows the non-technical citizen observer to observe the storage, handling, and counting of votes. It shuts citizens out, and forces a "trust" election, which means the election lacks legitimacy regardless of whether or not computerized fraud occurs.
David Dill of VerifiedVoting.org: "ACCURATE is an multi-institution, interdisciplinary, academic research project on trustworthy computing. The research will focus on voting as a example of an application where trust is a critical issue (we expect that the results will be more widely applicable). It does not replace any existing organization; our goal is to help fill an existing gap by discovering new technology and new knowledge about trust and computing technology, including perspectives from computer science, psychology, and law. The grant can only be used for academic research, and most of it will go to student support." The whole article is at http://verify.stanford.edu/dill/accurate-essay.html

Sharona Merel's overview -- the place of evoting in the big picture.

Ohio election chief can't certify how federal money was spent By Wayne Madsen, Online Journal Contributing Writer, Aug. 19,2005

Accupoll Operations Could Trouble Voters, By Christopher Carey of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 08/13/2005.

The Gorilla in the Room Must Be Dealt With, Lack of Election Reform Threatens to Make All Progress Irrelevant, by Anthony Wade, www.opednews.com, August 6, 2005.

Bad guys web site.

Diebold hires top Dem for PR blitz, Former party chairman make the case for voting to California, 08/20/2005, By Ian Hoffman, Staff Writer, Inside Bay Area.
Mr. Andrew's bio.

What They Did Last Fall By Paul Krugman, The New York Times Opinion, August 19, 2005.

From Black Box to Pandora's Box, speech by Joan Krawitz, VoteTrustUSA, August 8, 2005, delivered at the Voting Rights and Electoral Reform Strategy Session in Atlanta, GA.

Jesse Jackson and the Keep the Vote Alive March and Rally in Atlanta, August 6.

A Firewall for Democracy by Andrew Gumbell, Aug 4, 2005, Los Angeles Times.

Utah counties risk losing their federal HAVA funds if they purchase voting systems that do not meet federal standards for HAVA funding.

Letter to Jurisdictions with Paper Ballot Systems -- Keep them!

Is the Federal Process for Qualifying Voting Systems Broken? by John Gideon, Information Manager, www.VotersUnite.Org and www.VoteTrustUSA.Org, August 17, 2005.

Phony GOP 'Voting Rights' Group Delivers Onslaught of Disinfo Today! BradBlog, 8/2/05.
Indicted GOP Moneyman Tied To ACVR, Phony GOP 'Voting Rights' Group!. The DNC Finally Fights Back at the Republican Run 'American Center for Voting Rights' Hoax!

Election Fraud Continues in the US , New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004, By Peter Phillips, August 13, 2005, CommonDreams.org.

Project Censored The news that didn't make the News, website about the November, 2004 election.

Cashing In On Chaos? By Warren Stewart and Ellen Theisen, VoteTrustUSA, August 7, 2005.

=== July 2005 ===

The Black Box Report by Harri Hursti.
Security Alert: July 4, 2005, Critical Security Issues with Diebold Optical Scan Design

Diebold Machines Fail Mock Election in CA, see more about this event in August section above.

How Can We Ensure the Accuracy of Vote Counts?, July 4, 2005, by Kathy Dopp, Utah Count Votes.

Audio links to Thom Hartmann and Paul Lehto's presentation in Portland, July 16, on "The Corporate Takeover of America's Elections."
Thom Hartmann...about 33 minutes
www.PhilosopherSeed.org/realaudio/thartman.ram
www.PhilosopherSeed.org/mp3/thartman.mp3
Paul Lehto....about 32 minutes
www.PhilosopherSeed.org/realaudio/plehto.ram
www.PhilosopherSeed.org/mp3/plehto.mp3

General Assembly of North Carolina, Legislative Fiscal Note, voting equipment replacement, cost comparison of optical scan, DRE, and mixed optical scan and DRE.
Session Law 2005-323, Senate Bill 223 General Assembly of North Carolina, Session 2005

Ohio Voters File Historic Lawsuit Against State Charging Unconstitutional Administration of Elections, July 28, 2005.

EAC Voluntary Guidance on Implementation of Statewide Voter Registration Lists

Which Voting Machines Are More Accessible? by Heleni Thayre, July 19, 2005.

Century Foundation report notes flaws with evoting, offers excellent guidance to state election officials on what to watch out for, but can't bring themselves to recommend VVPB. discussionby AScribe, The Public Interest Newswire.

Jim March of BBV gets arrested trying to observe vote count and explains his action

None dare call it stolen summarized by Mary Anne Saucier. None Dare Call It Stolen, HARPERS, August 7, 2005, By Mark Crispin Miller.

Dramatic new charges deepen link between Ohio's "Coingate," Voinovich mob connections, and the theft of the 2004 election by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, The Free Press, July 29, 2005.

PA Voting System Examination Schedule and Certification Status Information, and other Pennsylvania certification woes include the fact that if vendors have to submit equipment to be certified, they can prevent use of paper ballots, optical scanners, and Automark ballot-marking machines by simply not submitting them for certification.

The audit of voter-verified records in Nevada, 2004.

The New EAC Advisory and What It Means by John Gideon of www.VotersUnite.Org and www.VoteTrustUSA.Org, July 21, 2005.
EAC Advisory 2005-004: How to determine if a voting system is compliant with Section 301(a), a gap analysis between 2002 Voting System Standards and the requirements of HAVA Section 301(a).
(5) Accessibility of the voting system to the voter includes accessibility to all equipment needed to cast and count ballots. Many jurisdictions use a paper ballot voting system that requires the voter to submit his or her own ballot after casting for purposes of ballot counting. Where such voting systems are in use, such jurisdictions must to the extent reasonably and technologically possible afford a disabled voter the same ability to submit his or her own ballot, in a private and independent manner, as is afforded a non-disabled voter. In this example, visually disabled voters must be allowed to submit the ballot independently, as the disability is one that is capable of being accommodated, and technology and practice provide a means that can be used to allow the visually disabled voter to submit a ballot with the same degree of privacy and independence afforded to a sighted voter (e.g., a privacy sleeve).
This analysis clearly allows use of optical-scan voting systems and describes how a system such as the AutoMARK can be made to be accessible, (e.g. a privacy sleeve). This does not say that paper ballot voting systems cannot be used.
(7) Section 301(a)(3)(B) contemplates that an accessible voting system can include a direct recording electronic (DRE) voting system or other voting system equipped for individuals with disabilities. This advisory should not be read to preclude the innovation and use of accessible voting systems other than DREs for purposes of meeting this requirement.

The following line is quoted from page 141, Section E-5, of the 1990 FEC Voting System Standards:
"Voter confirmation does not, however, guarantee that the voter choices are correctly recorded and updated in memory registers."
The FEC 2002 or 2005 Voting System Standards appear to have dropped this bit of reality, but in fact what they knew then is still true today!
--submitted by Susan Pynchon, Florida Fair Elections Coalition

On March 17, 2003, the Department of Justice wrote a letter to Alabama Secretary of State Nancy Worley stating:
"The Election Assistance Commission ("EAC") set up under HAVA will eventually issue voluntary voting guidelines and guidance as to what constitutes an accessible voting system. Until that guidance is adopted, the voluntary guidance of the Federal Election Commission on Voting System Standards can be used to determine the accessibility of voting machines. (These can be found at www.fec.gov/pages/vss/vss.html at section 2.2.7 of the Voluntary System Standards)."
The letter can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20030423214900/http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/hava/states_ltr.htm
Section 2.2.7 is now at http://www.eac.gov/election_resources/v1/v1s2.doc see page 2-12.
Section 2.2.7.2 states:
DRE voting systems shall provide, as part of their configuration, the capability to provide access to voters with a broad range of disabilities. This capability shall:
e. For electronic image displays, permit the voter to:
1) Adjust the contrast settings;
2) Adjust color settings, when color is used; and
3) Adjust the size of the text so that the height of capital letters varies over a range of 3 to 6.3 millimeters;
The currently qualified Diebold TSx does not permit the voter to adjust the contrast setting, nor does it allow the voter to adjust the size of the text. It may not have the feature of adjusting the color setting.
Therefore, according to the opinion of the DoJ, it isn't accessible.

Accessible Voting Systems Vendor Fair Survey Results. Evaluation took place on April 4, 2005, and the survey was conducted by the Oregon Secretary of State.

The Case Against Diebold and Florida's Division of Elections A Report by Florida Fair Elections Coalition (In Support of Volusia County Council's Decision to Reject the Diebold "Blended" Voting System) July 9, 2005.

Is there any way to end the love affair with DREs?
Most don't have more than 2 or 3 of the 11 disabled accessibility features shown at http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6028
They aren't cost effective: (scroll half way down page) http://www.ncvoter.net/affordable.html
They have a higher undervote rate than optical scanners: North Carolina Study indicating that optical scan machines have the most consistent and lowest undervote rates of the various technologies used this past election. 2004 report http://www.cs.duke.edu/~justin/voting/totals.html
DREs in New Mexico dropped votes 5 times as often as optical scanners did: Nov 2004 http://www.votersunite.org/info/newmexicophantomvotes.asp
Florida study indicating that DREs had 8 times as many undervotes as optical scanners: July 2004. http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?list=type&type=26
Just how effective and "worth it" is a voter-verified paper ballot, especially if it's only used by a small number of voters? Very effective: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~justin/voting/paper_effectiveness.html
DREs add, subtract, and even lose votes: http://www.ncvoter.net/news.html

Is this funny? Not really, it is another demonstration of how electronic election fraud can be accomplished.
Don't like what you see?
Votes not cast for the right candidate?
No problem, just log on, then "White Out the Vote" with this handy dandy Online Digital Ballot editor - works well with any sort of digital ballot image.
This gadget will be the wave of the future.
Think of the possibilities when used in conjunction with votes recorded by "alternative vote verification systems".

Voting Machine Accuracy vs. Verifiability by John Gideon, July 5, 2005. Insight into the Opinion of Those Who Write the Voting System Standards

Problems with Optical Scan equipment in Yakima County, WA.

Sherole Eaton of Hocking County, Ohio, battles for her job after attempts to fire her due to her whistleblowing in the Triad Affair.
Hocking County, OH Barred from Replacing Recount Whistleblower Sherole Eaton
more
Fired Ohio Election Board staffer defiant over "retribution" May 25, 2005.
Was Hocking County Board of Elections member illegally appointed? May 25, 2005.
Ohio Recount Stirs Trouble by Kim Zetter, Wired News, Dec. 20, 2004.

Open Letter to John Tanner, Chief, Voting Section, U.S. Department of Justice. Civil Rights Section in response to his June 29, 2005 letter to Nick A. Soulas, Jr., Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, Civil Division, Franklin County. By Bob Fitrakis.

Ask your county election director a question -- will they be attending the Election Center's Annual National Conference? Election Center pictures.

How Can We Ensure the Accuracy of Vote Counts?, a working paper by Kathy Dopp of UScountsvotes.net, July 4, 2005. Although the paper is specific to Utah, any state that has or is contemplating purchas of Diebold or Sequoia touch-screen voting machines can make use of this paper's outline and some of its content. Appropriate for city and county attorneys, city councils, county councils or commissioners and election officials, and press.
Press Release - Comprehensive Report on Voting Equipment Selection.

=== June 2005 ===

DNC Report:
Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio.
Report from the Voting Rights Institute of the Democratic Party. June 22, 2005.
Section XII, Recommendations for Future Action, page 3 paragraph 11:
11. Jurisdictions should be encouraged to use precinct-tabulated optical scan systems with a computer assisted device at each precinct, in preference to touchscreen ("direct recording equipment" or "DRE") machines.
[The computer assisted device would be the Vote-PAD, Automark, or other accessible ballot-marking device that enables voters with disabilities or minority languages to mark their paper ballot privately and independently.]
The BradBlog comments on this report.

Democracy Values, a one-page flyer.

Senate Rules Committee Testimony of David Dill, By David Dill, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, and Founder of the Verified Voting Foundation and VerifiedVoting.org, Before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, June 21, 2005, Hearing on Voter Verification in the Federal Election Process.
Transcripts and audio of the hearing testimony and Q&A.

Voting system costs from VerifiedVoting.org.

Democracy At Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio

Letter from Linda Lamone, President of NASED, to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, April 17, 2005.

Jim Dickson touts 6 vendors

Activists greet Tennessee election officials and begin a dialog.

Guess Who's Going to Hollywood? (Your election commissioners? By John Gideon, VotersUnite! and VoteTrustUSA, June 18, 2005.

Corporate Control of the Election Process By John Gideon, June 15, 2005.

Cost analysis by Mike Fischer of Yale.

What percentage of "surprise random audits" would be effective in finding problems? Demo by Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org.

Is HAVA Being Abused? Part 1, June 1, 2005
Is HAVA Being Abused? Part 2, June 2, 2005
By John Gideon and Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org
NASED is bending its own policies to quickly certify vendors via the 1990 standards rather than the 2002 standards. This allows vendors to say they are certified in time to get sales before the HAVA deadlines.

Bob Fitrakis. The political scientist and newspaper editor on how, in plain view, the Ohio presidential election was rigged, By DEAN KUIPERS. 06-16-05.

Victory in Volusia County, Florida, June 6, 2005.

Optical scan machines hacked in Florida, article by the BlackBoxVoting.org Team, June 3, 2005.

Preliminary Analysis of E-voting Problems Highlights Need for Heightened Standards and Testing, NRC Whitepaper by Deirdre Mulligan and Joseph Lorenzo Hall. Undated, before or during June, 2005.

=== May 2005 ===

My Right-Wing Degree, by Jeff Horwitz, Salon, May 24, 2005.
Put Horwitz's article together with "Vote Centers" and you have an preview of the future.

Unilect decertification in Pennsylvania, source documents that are revealing about the certification process.
Video that got Unilect Decertified in Pennsylvania.
Shamos said in his decert report that he did NOT recommend certifying it the first time! Apparently PA hired Glen Newkirk of Infosentry out of Raleigh NC to pass it.

5-27-05: Optical scan system hacked, Bev Harris reports.
Special Report: Black Box Voting Attempts to Penetrate The Leon County Florida Optical Scan Voting System.
Discussion.
Diebold's removable vote-storage memory cards, contain executables that get called directly by the voting application program. These executables are not encrypted, not validated before being called, and not subject to program length or checksum validation. The executable can alter vote totals and produce perfect "zero" tapes and total sums, can shift an arbitrary number of votes from one candidate to another without any diagnostics detecting the switch, and pass logic and accuracy tests. All these memory cards are supposed to do is hold vote information. Instead, their memory storage format allows code execution. This is improper in voting equipment. All executables should be stored in a single secure location and each executable should protect its data by preventing it from being modified by other executables. In other words, the documented, certified code inside the Opscan firmware is "calling" any available code on the memory card, whatever it may be. This is a deliberate back door, not a security error.
Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways), Scoop, May 31, 2005.

Does ES&S Really Want To Sell Automark Machines?.

Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, Version 1, Initial Report, May 9, 2005.
Another copy.

How to file a FOIL request.

Attack on Ohio election board whistleblower and leaked Blackwell threats re-fire Ohio's election theft scandal by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, The Free Press, May 23, 2005.

Thomas R. Wilkey selected as new executive director of Election Assistance Commission, May 20, 2005.

Internal memos from state elections directors, secretaries of state, legal counsel and others, spanning 2001 - 2004. Bev Harris filed FOIA requests, and has posted documents received.

5 New Consumer Reports from Black Box Voting: who owns voting machine companies; who is paying whom; more on powerline communications and voting systems.

misc info from Trusted Logic Voting (TLV) - resource site for using OASIS EML voting specifications to create trusted open public election system solutions. Comments and analysis of electronic voting systems, devices and methods.

Voter Registration Databases:
Steve Carbo of Demos says that "well-designed computerized, statewide voter registries are our best hope for accurate voter rolls that will allow eligible voters to cast a ballot that will be counted." The California Election Protection Network takes a deeper look and foresees potential trouble: "the government has no authority to contract with any Private entity to control data that could impact the public's right to a free and fair election" or "to permit the ... consolidation of personal data in the hands of one private entity, especially ChoicePoint."
Is the notion of computer security a fantasy?
June 20, 2005, Progress Report: PRIVACY -- MASTERCARD BREACH RAISES CONCERNS ABOUT NEED FOR GREATER PROTECTIONS: Coming on the heels of major identity theft scandals (http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=730617#3) involving Choicepoint, Lexis-Nexis, and even the Department of Justice's travel agency, MasterCard International (http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/general/2005-06-19-breach-usat_x.htm?csp=34) announced 40 million card holders of all brands might be exposed to fraud due to a security breach. The breach involves 13.9 million MasterCard accounts, 22 million for Visa USA and an unspecified number for American Express and Discover. With security breaches becoming more prevalent, there is also a greater concern that the federal government could be next. Personal information in the hands of strangers is disconcerting enough, but secret intelligence stolen by our enemies would be even more dangerous. The Center for American Progress has recommended a number of measures (http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=651807) that could be taken immediately to secure personal information assembled by government contractors.

Cheney's Betrayal -- Forgotten in the filibuster debate: the vice president's unconstitutional decision not to follow Senate rules. By Bruce Ackerman, Web Exclusive: 05.23.05.

The Biggest Story of Our Lives 05.10.2005, by Jim Lampley.

Citizens in the rain, Maybe we can't have election reform without media reform, By ROBERT C. KOEHLER, Tribune Media Services.

Our Kids Are Not Doomed, Stephanie Coontz, Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2005.

The Institute on Money in State Politics has a new study, Money and Diversity in State Legislatures

Daily KOS, The lie that won't die, May 11, 2005.

"I'm here to stop the count" Never Shy, Bolton Brings a Zeal to the Table, By Scott Shane, New York Times, May 1, 2005.

=== April 2005 ===

Lawsuit for counting votes in secret
Lehto and Wells v. Sequoia and Snohomish County, Washington, filed April 7, 2005

Nashville Conference Audio Tapes, from the Nashville Conference, April 8-10, 2005.

The silent scream of numbers, The 2004 election was stolen - will someone please tell the media? By ROBERT C. KOEHLER, Tribune Media Services, 14 Apr 2005.

Silence of the Scams, by Diane Perlman, Newtopia Magazine, April 11, 2005

Questions surface regarding legitimacy of Baker-Carter election reform commission By Larisa Alexandrovna, RAW STORY Staff, Apr. 14, 2005

Carter Gets It -- But Will His Electoral Commission?

How Blackwell and Petro Saved Bush's Brain: And the rise of the right wing juggernaut in Ohio by Bob Fitrakis, Free Press, April 27, 2005.

Failing the [International] Electoral Standards The Nation, by Andrew Gumbel, April 25, 2005.

Analysis of the Nov. 2, 2004 election

Ballot cover invention may help the blind vote. Inventive election workers develop secrecy sleeve now used for the Automark.

Paper Makes a Comeback as Electronic Elections Spur Opposition April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Meet the next big thing in paperless voting: paper.

The California Voter Foundation's new report on voter participation barriers and incentives.

Twisted news from the Wall Street Journal: The Secretaries Revolt First Congress passes HAVA and requires the states to augment or replace easily-observed and verifiable voting equipment with electronic equipment to achieve "accessibility," and creates the EAC to administer the money and provide "assistance." Then, Congress refuses to fund the EAC, and the EAC is appointed nearly a year after HAVA requires. Then John Fund asks, "Can we trust our elections to a body that cannot follow clear federal law and its own rules of procedure?" He's referring to the EAC, not Congress or the Executive Branch! Then he blames Hillary (in advance, for partisan bias should she become president).

=== March 2005 ===

Why Johnny Can't Vote, By Barbara Simons. APS News online, March 2005.

Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies by the US CountVotes! National Election Data Archive Project March 31, 2005. Executive Summary.

Electionline analysis of the use of provisional ballots in 2004.

Teresa Heinz Kerry - Hacking the "Mother Machine"? by Thom Hartmann, March 10, 2005, CommonDreams.org

New 'Non-Partisan' 'Voting Rights' Org Appears Little More than Republican Front Group! 6-Day Old Tax-Exempt Group Run by High Level GOP Operatives! Blogged by Brad on 3/22/2005. High-Level Republicans from the New 'Non-Partisan' 'American Center for Voting Rights' Explain Themselves... Um...Sort of. Blogged by Brad on 3/23/2005.

A Design for a Genuinely Verifiable Evoting System By Richard C. Hawkins, 3/17/05.

We don't get angry enough By Frank Pitz, Online Journal Contributing Writer, 3/11/05.

=== 2004 ===

Lessons Learned, Maryland
Lessons Learned, Montgomery County, Maryland, 2004 Lessons Learned Report
When the right to vote goes wrong: Maryland Citizens Tell the Story of Election Day 2004. On Tuesday, November 23, 2004 TrueVoteMD released a report and presented findings from nearly 600 pollwatchers who toiled long hours on Election Day documenting hundreds of incidents disenfranchising possibly thousands of voters ranging from denials of provisional ballots to numerous kinds of voting machine failures.