New worries about the reliability of U.S. voting machines (from Agence France Press)

[marmar]

New Worries Abound about Reliability of US Voting Machines
by Stephanie Griffith

Many US voters are worried that widespread problems next week with new electronic voting machines could lead to a repeat of past ballot count nightmares during the high-stakes midterm elections.

Maryland's Republican governor Robert Ehrlich is among the most prominent skeptics of the new electronic voting machines that have been put into widespread use since the bitterly-contested 2000 presidential election.

During Maryland's botched primary vote in September, polling stations across the state failed to open on time, while many of the new electronic voting machines crashed.

Ehrlich, who is up for for reelection in Tuesday's vote, said the technical hitches convinced him to cast his vote via mail-in ballot, and the Maryland governor has urged voters in the state to follow his lead.

"When in doubt, go paper, go low-tech," he declared after the state's problem-filled primary where election officials spent more than a week counting ballots.

Kimball Brace, head of the political consulting firm US Election Data Services, said voter fears about similar technical glitches at polling stations across the United States are not entirely misplaced.

"We've got more than a third of the nation voting on something new this year, and history has shown that the first time somebody uses a new piece of voting equipment, that's the time that they are going to have problems," he said.

High-tech electronic voting machines were supposed to help do away with the sorts of problems that ensued after the hard-fought 2000 presidential election in which then-Texas Governor George W. Bush eked out the narrowest of victories over vice president Al Gore.

The rest is at: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1103-03.htm

[teryang]

1. RFK Jr. documents e-voting screw ups chapter and verse

...both articles are posted at www.globalresearch.ca

Will The Next Election Be Hacked?


by Robert F. Kennedy Jr

November 3, 2006
Rollingstone.com


The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000 presidential-election disaster. Fox News' fateful decision to call Florida for Bush - followed minutes later by CBS and NBC - came after electronic machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore's total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described the mistake as "critical" in the network's decision. Seeing what was an apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election - then reversed his decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes...

The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff...,


Ney also made sure that Diebold and other companies would not be required to equip their machines with printers to provide paper records that could be verified by voters...

(in 2004) Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the University of California examined the state's official tally, they discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004." The three counties with the most discrepancies - Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade - were also the most heavily Democratic. Electronic voting machines, the report concluded, may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 votes to Bush. "No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

In Florida, an astonishing new law actually makes it illegal to count paper ballots by hand after they've already been tallied by machine.

Much more...