Voting and Elections

DNC.org:

Governor Howard Dean will lead a national grassroots voter registration effort. The cross-country bus tour, "Register for Change," will build on the overwhelming enthusiasm and voter turnout seen during the primaries as Democrats mobilize and organize voters for the fall election.

The tour kicks off with events in Crawford and Austin, TX, on Thursday, July 17th. Dean will also deliver the Opening Keynote Speech at Netroots Nation 2008 in Austin, TX. On Friday, July 18th, and Saturday, July 19th, the tour will continue with events in Hattiesburg and Jackson, Mississippi, and New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

So when's the bus coming to Utah?

NYTimes:

Preparations for the 2010 census are a shambles.

Committees in the House have been holding hearings to vet the problems and monitor progress. But with each hearing, it becomes more obvious that prospects for a robust census are unlikely to improve considerably unless and until the next president brings in new leaders. They are needed at the Commerce Department, which includes the Census Bureau, and at the bureau itself, which — like so many federal agencies — has been mismanaged and demoralized during the Bush years. [...]

The quality of the nation's democracy depends on the census, because the numbers are used to decide the number of Congressional seats from each state and hence the number of votes each state has in the Electoral College. It's hard to ignore the impression of partisan motives in policies that hobble the census, because an inaccurate census invariably undercounts out-of-the-mainstream groups not typically aligned with Republicans.

On Monday might, The Brad Blog reminded us that most of the votes in the Pennsylvania primary would be unverifiable:

On Tuesday night, you will be told who the winner of the Pennsylvania primary is. You will accept it. You will have no choice. No matter who the winner really is. Or isn't.

This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."

Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.

With or without a so-called "paper trail" printer, all touch-screen/push-button/DRE voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.

San Francisco Chronicle:

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen sued a Nebraska voting machine company on Monday, seeking fines and reimbursements of nearly $15 million from the firm for allegedly selling nearly 1,000 uncertified machines to San Francisco and four other counties.

San Francisco's 558 AutoMARK ballot-marking devices were among 972 of the machines that Election Systems & Software sold in California last year without putting them through the state testing process. [...]

"ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught," Bowen said in a statement after filing suit against the company. "I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into the state, ignore the laws and make millions of dollars from California's taxpayers in the process."

OK, folks, the numbers are coming in and the carefully concealed extra costs of the electronic voting machines are coming home to roost — twice this year and again in 2008. Julie Rose, KCPW, reports the SLC Council is experiencing sticker shock:

The Salt Lake City Council is ready to bite the bullet and pay three times more for its municipal election than it has in previous years. The extra costs are mainly because the new electronic voting machines require more training for poll workers at higher wages. The machines are also in short supply, which could mean fewer polling locations, which troubles City Councilman Dave Buhler:

"I worry about what that does for voter involvement and participation — particularly for some of our older voters who may have a harder time getting out if the location is further away," says Buhler.

The men to call to account are Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert and his Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Cragun. The latter misled the SL County Council by saying The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) required a total conversion to the electronic voting machines (DREs). In fact HAVA only required one such machine at each polling place to accomodate voters with vision or hearing impairment. BTW, the DREs do nothing to accomodate voters who cannot enter polling places.

D4U member (and Democracy for Utah website administrator) Ryan Stokes got his letter published in the Deseret News today:

Vote 'no' on machines

I read your editorial (May 24) about people who want paper ballots to record votes, with probably the same sense of self-assuredness you must have felt writing it. I also feel that only ignorance or fear could produce an opinion contrary to mine on the matter of verified voting.

So to address your stated fears, I want to assure you that those opposed to this misuse of technology need not be uncomfortable with advances in technology, nervous Nellies, afraid of gremlins, older than 40, fuddy-duddies or Luddites.

The mark of education and understanding is turning the unknown into the known. Simple simulations have already shown that the voting machines we used in Utah can simply start out with more votes for one candidate than the other.

And you would demand I give my faith freely to my elected officials; I cannot have faith in elections that can start in favor of one candidate, or in which votes are discarded or invented. As far as I can see, humans are not outdated technology.

Ryan Stokes
Holladay

Ryan's letter was in response to the D-News' name-calling editorial from last Thurdsay. The full text of Ryan's letter is available below.

An unusually bilious screed in the Deseret News — did someone let Joe Cannon write this editorial?

Right now, some people are worried there are gremlins in the current voting machines — that electronic voting is unreliable and open to tampering. They spout anecdotal evidence of irregularities here and there to fuel their fear and want paper ballot backups to fend off any conspirators. It's the same kind of itchy-witchy thinking that leads people to hide bags of money under their mattresses.

And dare we say that almost all of those those skittish souls are likely older than 40? The younger generation sees the outcry for the tangible comfort of paper ballots as a hallmark of the fuddy-duddy. The notion sounds, to young ears, like people demanding election results be chiseled into granite for security. [...]

Utahns do not have the time, money or obligation to create a "security blanket" of paper ballots for Luddites to wrap around themselves in the night.

Did you get the message? If you think electronic voting isn't secure, you're a superstitious throwback to the 16th century who's afraid of technology.

You can respond to this "argument" at letters@desnews.com.

Deseret News:

While proposed changes to the nation's voting laws may not require replacing Utah's 2-year-old electronic voting machines, time-consuming and potentially expensive equipment updates would probably be necessary.

The changes could cause enough difficulties that many of Utah's county elected officials are weighing in with resolutions opposing HR811, a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., that would require all electronic machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot that is "durable." [...]

"We've literally spent millions of dollars to implement this machinery, and it was all accurate," said Sandy Hoffman, Utah County elections coordinator. "If they forced us to use a scanned ballot it would take us forever and the press would maybe not even get election results on election night, it would take that long."

Hey, if it means I can be sure my vote was counted accurately, I'm willing to wait.

Miami Herald:

Florida's experiment with touch-screen voting machines is over.

The Florida Legislature voted Thursday morning to spend nearly $28 million to scrap the ATM-style machines used in 15 Florida counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, and replace them with ones that use paper ballots.

The push to switch Florida from the touch-screen machines was a top priority of Gov. Charlie Crist, who said he doesn't want the state to be embarrassed anymore by its elections. [...]

Under the bill that Crist will sign, the 15 counties that use touch-screen machines will have until summer 2008 to replace them with optical-scan machines. The bill gives counties until 2012 before disabled voters must also have access to machines that have a paper trail.