NYT: Experts concerned as ballot problems persist.

[Stevepol]

Here's a rundown of a few of the many problems experienced with the Electronic Voting machine scam and con game this past election cycle. Maybe we're a step closer to getting paper, at least for the national elections. Courtesy John Gideon and VotersUnite

But after awhile you just wonder if there is even a spark of intelligence in DC anymore. Kucinich understands a little bit about all this and Dean slightly less perhaps, but who else at the national level even catches a sniff of how important it is to get rid of these machines -- or REALLY AUDIT them, not just pretend. Rush Holt maybe. Anyway, this article details some of the problems and it contains some really good quotes.

Experts Concerned as Ballot Problems Persist
By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: November 26, 2006




After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation’s voting system, this month’s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.

Tens of thousands of voters, scattered across more than 25 states, encountered serious problems at the polls, including failures in sophisticated new voting machines and confusion over new identification rules, according to interviews with election experts and officials.

snip...

Voting experts say it is impossible to say how many votes were not counted that should have been. But in Florida alone, the discrepancies reported across Sarasota County and three others amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote, election officials say, as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly. And in Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000.

“If the success of an election is to be measured according to whether each voter’s voice is heard, then we would have to conclude that this past election was not entirely a success,” said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan election group that plans to release a report Wednesday with a state-by-state assessment of voting. “In places where the margin of victory was bigger than the margin of error, we looked away from the problems, but in 2008 we might not have that luxury.”

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/us/politics/26vote.html?_r=1&oref=slogin