Voting Machine Issues, Confusion Compounded Delays Faced by Untold Thousands of Voters This Fall

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During early voting and on Election Day, the Election Protection Coalition, which had a volunteer staff of 10,000 lawyers, received calls via a national hotline, 1-866-OURVOTE. The calls were notated, categorized and posted on OurVoteLive.org. Of 86,000 calls received this fall, about 1,900 --- or 2.2 percent --- were about the machines. Two-thirds were registration and polling place inquiries.

There were 1,700 incidents after eliminating duplicates, Hall said. These calls generally did not involve problems encountered later Tuesday night during the vote count, he said in an e-mail. In contrast, the Democratic National Committee's election protection team monitoring machine issues, including the count, recorded "thousands" of incidents, a volunteer on that team said.

The most common voter hotline complaints were "about broken machinery, long lines, long waits to vote and reports of emergency ballots being used instead of the normal mode of voting," Hall said. "However, there are some interesting features from these reports."
Machine breakdowns and electronic poll book bottlenecks --- where voters check in before voting --- lead to many delays, Hall said. He cited a report from Atlanta where all 15 voting machines in a polling place had stopped working, and a New York City report of one poll book for hundreds of voters. A shortage of e-poll book laptops was reported in Georgia, while in Maryland poll workers could not get their electronic voting systems up and running, he said, citing typical complaints.
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( more analysis after the break )

It's not the change it's the possibility of change. That's how Barack Obama described his election on the night of November 4. " This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. " He said and he continued. "And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were."

Too right. The way things were, have led us to this point: as the data filters in... unemployment at 6.5% and rising... US consumer confidence is at the lowest point since its measurement began ... The entire industrial world is showing Negative growth for the first time since WW2...

We're in need of real change. There's no quick fix. And that's why it is less than reassuring to read over the list of economic advisers on the Obama transition team. Among them: Lawrence "women are genetically predisposed to limited science and math achievement" Summers, Robert "$200 million" Rubin, Paul "I played ball with the Reagan administration" Volker.

MORE

Americans heard more about socialism and the Weather Underground during the last part of the Presidential Election campaign than most of us had heard in years.

Today's show asks -- did '08 end an era - or revive one, politically speaking-- with former Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, Jamal Joseph, former Black Panther and Photographer turned PR guru David Fenton. We look at the power of the image to affect public opinion and the power of social movements to endure. Fenton has a photo show “Eye of the Revolution” opening in NYC this weekend at the Steven Kasher Gallery.MORE

There's plenty that needs to be fixed about our electoral system. The landslide for Obama is thrilling, but we continue to hear stories of messed-up ballots. Here's some voices from Video the Vote, produced by Sanford Lewis and Jonathan Mena. A retired judge in Ohio narrowly avoids disenfranchisement, as do citizens in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

In a bold move this week, Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel (R) announced she was sending letters to 4,770 registered voters that they may have to cast "challenge" ballots that won't be counted on election day.

In a striking announcement, she also declared that regular citizens could address the "problem" of non-citizen voting by contesting the citizenship of fellow voters at the polls -- forcing them to also cast challenged ballots that won't be included in election day tallies.
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Even more worrisome is that Handel explicitly stated that any voter's citizenship can be contested by any other voter on election day, a policy which could be used to target the state's rapidly-growing Latino population and other racial groups. As the AJC reports:

Any voter can challenge another’s qualifications to cast a ballot by notifying a precinct poll manager, Handel said. That voter then would be given a challenge ballot and would have to go before the election board.

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The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.

This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York. States would not have to use the system for their state and local elections, but most would choose to do so because of the cost savings.

( How it would work )

The Riz Khan show looks at how electronic voting could be manipulated to flip the outcome of the 2008 US presidential election.

Is it possible that the race for the White House is already over and has in fact been stolen?

Given the issues with the 2000, 2004 and even 2006 US elections, many analysts and observers are saying the 2008 election is headed for disaster some are even saying that the fix is already in.

Allegations of voter fraud, voter intimidation and purged lists are rampant.

In this episode of Riz Khan we speak with investigative journalist and author of the New York Times Best Seller Armed Madhouse Greg Palast.

In his most recent endeavour Palast has teamed with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to produce a non-partisan guide which advises Americans on how to protect their voting rights.

Also joining the programme is David Freddoso a political reporter with the conservative magazine National Review and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.

He argues that ACORN, a liberal community-based organisation, is trying to steal the election through voter fraud.

Minority voters in New Mexico report to TPMmuckraker that a private investigator working with Republican party lawyer Pat Rogers has appeared in person at the homes of their family members, intimidating and confusing them about their right to vote in the general election.
Earlier this week, we reported that Rogers -- a lawyer and state committeeman for the GOP, who in previous elections worked closely with the party in pressuring New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to pursue bogus voter fraud cases -- is involved with a new effort to gin up concerns about the issue. Last week the state party falsely claimed that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a local Democratic primary race in June. Rogers, described in an Associated Press report on the allegations as "an attorney who advises the state GOP," told the news wire that the party planned to turn the suspect forms over to law enforcement authorities.
The visits to minority voters by the P.I. appear to be connected to last week's effort.
The story starts last week, when several representatives of the New Mexico Republican party, including Rogers, held a press conference to announce that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June in Bernalillo county, which contains Albuquerque. The party released the names of ten of these people -- almost all of whom are Hispanic.
The allegations quickly fell apart. ACORN announced that it had contacted the county clerk's office, who had verified that all of the voters were in fact legitimate. The group now says it has independently contacted 8 of these 10 voters to separately verify their validity.
At that point, the national GOP, which had at first jumped on the story as rare evidence of genuine voter fraud, seemed to quietly back off.
But that wasn't the end of the story.MORE

With every incident so far reported of touch-screen vote-flipping during early voting in this year's general election --- from county to county in WV and in Nashville TN) , it's been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine that's failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In most instances, it's been an attempted Democratic vote, flipped to a Republican, or another party.
These are the same machines that lost 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County in the 2006 U.S. House Race for Katherine Harris' old seat. The Democrat, Christine Jennings, was declared the loser to Republican Vern Buchanan (whose own wife had trouble voting for him that day), by just 369 votes. Several academic studies, and even the GAO, has been unable to rule out either tampering or hardware/software error for the disappeared 18,000 votes.
As we wrote earlier this week, after there was finally one report of a vote flipping from Democratic to Republican in TN (a very rare instance, btw!), these machines need to be taken out of service now, impounded and quarantined immediately, and every voter needs to be given a paper ballot where these machines are currently being used! Voters who have such problems need to let every other vote in line know which machine should not be used (and we offer other tips below, as well.)
The latest reports today of ES&S vote-flipping come from Palo Pinto County, TX, where two voters --- one of them an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters --- saw straight-ticket Democratic votes flipped to straight ticket Republican votes. Two times for the first person, and three times for the alternate election judge!
The report is a doozy...

At least two Palo Pinto County residents say they experienced early voting problems when the touch-screen voting machines they used kept switching their straight-party vote from Democratic to Republican. "When I cast an early vote [Wednesday] at Palo Pinto County Courthouse, my vote was switched from Democrat to Republican right in front of my face - twice!" reported Lona Jones, a Precinct 1 county resident.
Intending to vote straight party on the Democratic ticket, Jones said she was surprised Wednesday when the electronic voting machine "on the left as you face the machines" in the courthouse basement asked her if she wanted to cast her vote for a straight Republican ticket.
Thinking she had pushed the wrong button the first time the machine "came up Republican," Jones said she repeated her intended straight-party vote.
"The second time I was sure to just touch the Democratic button," she said, further reporting that the machine responded to her selection, "'Do you want to change your Republican straight ticket vote to a Democratic vote?' I pressed, 'Yes,' then it came back up and it was a total Republican ticket again.

( what to do about it as a voter, and a bit of good news )

STATE OF THE VOTE: 17 DAYS TO GO
A Round-up of Problems Facing Voters Nationwide

Voter registration application backlogs.
The unprecedented registration and get-out-the-vote efforts by both parties, along with the historic nature of this election, promise to elicit a record number of voters on Election Day. Mountains of new voter registrations are causing backlogs in voter data entry - which partisans are using as reasons to keep these applicants from making it onto the rolls, as we've just seen in Ohio. Backlogs often force local election offices to send out verification and polling place information late or not at all.

In Colorado: election officials are struggling to verify thousands of voter registration forms before October 20 when early voting opens. In Georgia: a week ago, in DeKalb County about 30,000 registrations were sitting in boxes waiting to be entered. In New York, in Dutchess County, officials are telling voters that if their backlogged registrations aren't processed in time, they should request a court order to vote. In Alabama, a controversy is raging over who can be registered, contributing to the backlog of requests.MORE

( More voting news )

While the right bleats about ACORN over voter registrations that ultimately don't matter, we have the Republicans in Michigan admitting that they wanted to prevent voters from casting ballots in an illegal scheme to purge rolls of names of people caught up in the mortgage meltdown. Marcy at FDL: Democrats and Republicans have settled the suit seeking to prevent Michigan Republicans from using foreclosure lists to challenge voters. The MDP statement on the settlement says:

An agreement announced today by Obama for America, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Michigan Republican Party, the Michigan Democratic Party, the Macomb County Republican Party, the Macomb County Democratic Party, and plaintiffs Duane Maletski, Sharon Lopez, and Frances M. Zick protects the voting rights of foreclosure victims. The settlement acknowledges the existence of an illegal scheme by the Republicans to use mortgage foreclosure lists to deny foreclosure victims their right to vote. This settlement has the force of law behind it and ensures that Republicans cannot disenfranchise families facing foreclosure. [my emphasis]

Here's Michigan Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer on the settlement: Today's settlement protects the voting rights of all Michigan citizens and guarantees that Republicans cannot use foreclosure lists to deny or challenge anyone's right to vote. It is no surprise the Republicans back pedaled when their illegal scheme was revealed, and their surrender today ensures that Republicans cannot take advantage of the economic crisis to deny anyone's voting rights. The agreement is a win for Michigan families ready to vote for change, and we will continue to aggressively protect everyone's right to vote. [my emphasis}

Of course, as Kagro X has pointed out, Mukasey can blow off Conyers (as he has Conyers' request for more urgency on voter protection) precisely because we didn't get the evidence from Miers and Turdblossom to make this case legally before we got back into election fever.

So here we are, with the subpoenas still unenforced in the case that was supposed to crack the "administration's" engineering of bogus "voter fraud" allegations against Democrats immediately preceding critical elections wide open, and now witnessing... the "administration" engineering bogus "voter fraud" allegations against Democrats immediately preceding a critical election.

Like Alberto Gonzales, Mukasey seems to have lost all shame about allowing the GOP to play these games.

Voting a straight ticket is anything but straight in this country.

In North Carolina, if you're voting a straight-party ticket, you must vote separately for the president. If you don't, you risk your vote for president not being counted.

In Texas, Alabama and South Carolina, voting a straight-party ticket includes the president. Email rumors, of course, say otherwise.

We need to have some serious mythos mojo on the sujbect of voter suppression ourselves. This should be a major centerpiece of the next Congress, with hearings out the wazoo, not just in Washington DC where the Versailles media will try its best to ignore it, but in field hearings around the country as well.

And after the hearings, there should be legislation. Legislation to put the right to vote into the Constitution. Legislation to mandate the highest level of state responisibility to register people to vote. Legislation to ensure that voter ID laws come with strict provisions to ensure that the IDs are readily available at no charge. Legislation to mandate the highest possible level of transparency in the administration of voter registration and elections.

In short, there should be a major voting rights and election reform bill passed to address the full range of shenanigans and shortcomings that have come to light since the 2000 election. And it should be carried out in a manner that does everything possible to revive and reinforce the mythos of the civil rights movement.