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Here, I
use the definition of Red States by the Swing State Project. Please
select your state of interest to proceed. (If there is no link, that
means there is no content for that state yet).
INDIANA 11/16/04_3
[Permalink]
Older News
from Indiana: Vote machine company Elections Systems and Software
(ES&S) has a legacy of installing illegal software and lying about
it BradBlog
has some pertinent links:
A
series of investigative stories (here,
here,
and here)
by WISHTV.com in Indianapolis from April of this year, have just
come to my attention (sent by several different readers).
They concern yet more troubling reports about the Election Systems
& Software (ES&S) company, who's software and tabulating
machines, along with Diebold's, are responsible for tabulating about
80% of the votes in America. Both companies were founded by the same
man, who just happens, along with the rest of their Boards of
Directors to be big donor/supporters of the Republican Party.
The series of reports from WISHTV earlier this year tell of ES&S
employees surreptitiously installing illegal, uncertified software,
into the voting and tabulating machines in Marion County, Indiana.
They then ordered their regional ES&S project manager to lie
about it to county officials. She refused. As had her husband in a
previous ES&S incident, where he was also a project manager, in
a different Indiana county. He was fired for his refusal.
In one of the reports, the Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler is
quoted as saying that ES&S "has willfully and purposely
deceived me and the Marion County election board...[W]ith complete
disregard for business ethics and with intent to deceive, [ES&S]
deliberately worked to keep their actions from the Marion County
election board and its employees."
The county's election board vice chair added, "Throughout the
process, there have been missteps and outright fabrications and
mistruths given to us by the vendor implementing the election
process."
The assiduous BRAD BLOG readers will note that ES&S has popped
up time and time again in so many of these stories of
"irregularities" related to electronic voting and
tabulating machines. Amongst the many troubling incidents so far
reported here:
Additionally, DailyKos
reported late last night on yet another Indiana county where the
U.S. Congressional results are now in doubt and a recount may be
coming shortly due to revelations from nearby Franklin County where a
recount was already held after it was discovered that the
optical-scan tabulating machine was counting straight Democratic
ticket votes as Libertarian votes!
11/16/04_2
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Voter registration forms
never turned in lead to ballot disqualifications in Indiana Via
Votersunite,
a report from a local NBC
affiliate:
"This needs to
be addressed because there's definitely a big gaping hole
there." Emily Luvberg didn't get to vote.
She and countless
others thought they registered at pop up voter registration sites.
Luvberg signed up at a cultural event.
But days before the
election she found her name missing from the rolls. Others didn't
find out until they tried to cast a vote. "It was extremely
upsetting because just like everybody else, I had a vested interest
in this election."
The government
designed a new federal provisional ballot as a safety net. A
provisional ballot gives a voter who would otherwise be turned away
one last chance to make their vote count. But even with that,
there's no guarantee.
In Hendricks County,
where Lovberg's registration never showed up, officials handed out
102 provisional ballots.
But how many counted?
Hendricks County Election Supervisor Laura Herzog says,
"Unfortunately, none of them were actually able to be
counted."
And Luvberg's
reaction, "wow!"
Election officials
say missing initials voided some, but in most cases there was no
confirmation of voter registration.
"We don't
regulate these voter registration drives by any means," says
Herzog, "so unfortunately some of those applications might not
always make it to the proper county office."
Indiana Secretary of
State Todd Rokita points out, "There is no crime to ask people
to register to vote. It is a crime, however, if you intentionally
fail to turn in that person's voter registration form."
11/16/04_1
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Straight party votes for
Democrat registered as votes for Libertarian and vice versa in
Franklin County, Indiana. Additionally, other irregularities such as
unvoted ballots and "programming errors". Via
Votersunite,
a report in the Palladium-Item:
Franklin County isn't
the only Indiana county that had programming troubles with optical
scan voting equipment this year.
Ripley, Brown and
Carroll counties each had a different problem, ranging from
handcounting a race because the software program didn't comply with
Indiana law to 63 unvoted ballots in one precinct, according to the
scanner's tally tape.
The Legislature
decided this year that all voting systems will get another look next
year. Certification of voting systems approved by the Indiana
Election Commission before Jan. 1, 2005, expires on Oct. 1, 2005,
said Kate Shepherd, communications director for Indiana Secretary of
State Todd Rokita.
...
Voting systems
already must undergo a public test in each county before the
election and that's where Ripley County discovered an error with
Fidlar Election Co. optical scan memory cards, Ripley County Clerk
Ginger Bradford said.
The memory cards that
count the votes in optical scanners had the wrong precinct labels,
so the cards were sent back to the company, Bradford said. Bradford
said she didn't know if the error could be called a programming
error.
"They
reprogrammed the cards when they got them back, so it sounds maybe
like it was a programming error," Bradford said.
A programming error
in Fidlar optical scanners in Franklin County led to a recount last
week. The error caused straight-party Democratic ballots to be
counted for Libertarian candidates and straight-party Libertarian
ballots to be counted for Democratic candidates, Fidlar officials
said.
The recount changed
the outcome of the election, awarding one of three seats to formerly
defeated Democrat Carroll Lanning and taking a seat from the
initially declared winner, Republican Roy N. Hall. Hall is
considering a challenge.
Carroll County, with
optical scanners from Election Systems and Software (ES&S), had
to handcount county council votes in its 19 precincts on election
day. The Indiana Election Commission determined the computer program
didn't comply with Indiana law for that office, Carroll County Clerk
Laura Sterrett said.
11/12/04
[Permalink]
Over 50,000 votes not
counted in Democratic Indiana county due to electronic voting machine
"glitch" BradBlog
has the details:
This time, "something
zapped it" in a heavily Democratic country in Indiana:
"Maybe there was a power surge," LaPorte County Clerk
Lynne Spevak said. "Something zapped it."
At about 7 p.m. Tuesday, it was noticed that the first two or
three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an
identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300
registered voters.
That means the total number of voters for the county would be
22,200, although there are actually more than 79,000 registered
voters.
...
Spevak said workers at the clerk's office thought a computer
correction could be done once they received a software patch from Election
Systems and Software, the Chicago company that provided
the tabulation software. However, the patch did not work.
"We thought we could get a copy of it e-mailed file to us and
start all over, but once the program was downloaded from Chicago,
it still didn't work right," Spevak said.
11/11/04 [Permalink]
Indiana County orders
voting machine audit after voting machine breakdowns and reports of
"straight-party" votes for Democrats showing up as votes for
Republicans
Via reader radtimes, here is a report
in The
Courier Press:
The Vanderburgh
County Commissioners voted unanimously to conduct an
"independent audit" of the Nov. 2 election results,
following complaints about possible malfunctions of the county's
touch-screen voting machines. Reports of breakdowns of the machines
and long voter lines that forced some voters to wait up to three
hours to cast their ballots set the stage for the decision at
Monday's meeting.
The commissioners
agreed to seek proposals this week from information-security firms
that specialize in elections and agreed to appoint a Republican and
a Democrat to help oversee the audit process.
"We need to make
sure this equipment was working properly," said commissioners
president Catherine Fanello, who last week issued a call for an
independent evaluation of the performance of voting equipment used
in the election. Fanello cited a series of complaints from election
workers and voters, as well as reports around the country of other
counties confronting problems with their touch-screen voting
machines. Vanderburgh County is leasing the machines under a
five-year, $2.9 million agreement.
Among the complaints
Fanello said she'd heard was that the machines, manufactured by
Election Systems & Software, malfunctioned for some who tried to
cast "straight-party" ballots. Some who cast
straight-party Democratic ballots saw their votes show up as votes
for the Republican Party. Despite assurances from a company official
that the equipment had passed federal standards and had withstood
rigorous testing, Fanello said any computer-based technology has the
potential to go awry.
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