Voting & Elections
« Previous EntriesOpen Source Voting Machine Success
Friday, August 8th, 2008Our elections have been corrupted by the fact that the computers we use are proprietary. Both the hardware and the software are secret. That’s bad news for democracy.
The good news is that Open Source Voting Software was a success at the Linux-World Conference and Expo.
NY and NJ Voting
Thursday, February 28th, 2008There’s bad news and good news on the election integrity front. New Jersey is a big, important state. Too bad it doesn’t care about conducting honest elections. It doesn’t take a lot of looking to find story after story about the bad voting machines in this state.
In New York, 80 voting districts cast zero votes [...]
How Clean is Your Election, Colorado?
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Many voting activists believe that the only honest solution to our election systems problems is to switch to hand counted paper ballots. Colorado may make exactly this move in 2008.
At the end of 2007, Colorado decertified the optical scanners used to count paper ballots. As of a few days ago, these scanners still did not [...]
How Clean is Your Election, Pennsylvania?
Monday, February 18th, 2008Instead of cleaning up their elections, Pennsylvania is making a big investment in bad voting machines! More than a dozen counties use the discredited Diebold machines. Other Pennsylvania counties are using bad voting machines from Sequoia.
Pennsylvania voting officials recognize that there are problems with the machines. Instead of starting over, they are putting [...]
Election Update: WA, CA and the new Holt bill (H.R. 5036)
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008The election season is becoming more ridiculous. In Washington State, the Republican Party chair called a halt to the vote counting when McCain had a 242 vote lead - with 13% of the votes waiting to be counted! You don’t need to fool around with voting machines when one man has the authority to fix [...]
Election Updates from CA & GA
Friday, February 8th, 2008The California Secretary of State de-certified most of California’s electronic voting machines, but they were in use throughout San Mateo and Orange Counties.
It’s important to keep in mind that there are two key places in an election where computers play a role. Sometimes the vote itself is cast on an electronic voting machine, as was [...]
Elections: NM, CA, & OH
Thursday, February 7th, 2008New Mexico’s election was dirty for reasons that had nothing to do with voting machines. Three ballot boxes had unsupervised sleepovers with polling place managers on election night. Since the New Mexico race boils down to just a couple of hundred votes out of many thousands of votes cast, the results will be suspicious no [...]
Elections: Super Tuesday
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008Fifteen of the states to hold elections on Super Tuesday used electronic voting machines. New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Delaware, and Arkansas used machines that do not leave any kind of paper trail. How do we know these elections were honest? We have to take their word for it. It’s impossible to do a recount.
Alabama, [...]
Elections: FL & NH
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008This week’s dirty election was held in Florida, where bad machines using secret software were used to process the votes.
The same type of fatally flawed voting machines that were used in New Hampshire were used in Florida. These are Diebold machines. In an effort to avoid scrutiny, Diebold has changed its name to Premier Election [...]
Elections: SC GOP Primary
Sunday, January 20th, 2008The South Carolina Republican primary election was hardly a model of democracy. Once again, expensive voting machines, running secret software, ruined a close election. McCain was declared a winner by 3%.
Electronic voting machines got in the way of a fair election.
This election was conducted on bad machines. There is no paper trail. Republicans in South [...]