Blogger joan reports lays out an excellent diary here explaining how ES&S's iVotronic electronic voting machines essentially overturned the Christine Jennings election. A new voting watchdog consortium has issued a report attacking those same ES&S IVotronic machines and cited "excessive" problems in the 2006 election, the same election that was supposedly fixed after $3 billion was spent per the Help America Vote Act, the Republican joke of a voting reform law.
Also, as diaried by dmsilev here, the FBI has come along and discredited the system by which these electronic voting machines were originally certified in the first place!
One would hope that this would help along Christine Jennings... NC had a new election when their voting machines failed. Why can't Christine? Why can't she even look to see what happened to those machines?
So now the compromised FBI comes along and says the entire system by which the electronic voting machines were certified are so lacking in controls: they must stop doing their certifications. How about that. Aweful nice timing for Bush's FBI to do that right as Dems take Congress huh?
Of course this organization called Ciber has close ties to Republicans as previous articles and diaries have revealed.
In a setback to electronic voting systems, federal officials have temporarily barred the nation's major testing laboratory of the systems from approving new machines because of lax quality control procedures, The New York Times reported in Thursday's editions.
The federal Election Assistance Commission took the action last summer against Ciber Inc., of Greenwood Village, Colorado, which has tested most of the nation's voting machines, the newspaper said. It said the action was not disclosed then, but has been confirmed by officials at the commission and executives at Ciber.
The federal commission found that Ciber, the largest tester of U.S. voting machine software, was not following its quality control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests, the newspaper said.
http://today.reuters.com/...
What a shocker: No quality controls. Ties to Republicans.
As joan reports lays out in her diary on the iVotronic electronic voting machine, she points out, along with citing evidence of serious problems in previous Florida elections on these screwed-up machines, how the following Florida statute should also help out Christine Jenning's appeal to overturn her election in favor of a new election:
The system must communicate to the voter the fact that the voter has failed to vote in a race (under vote) or has failed to vote the number of allowable candidates in any race (under vote) and require the voter to confirm his intent to undervote before casting the ballot.
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/...
That didn't happen (the notification).
Kos made the bold statement during the 06 election: that the death of electronic voting machine was imminent (link anyone, can't find)...
I hope that Kos will continue speaking out against voter suppression and I hope Kossacks will continue to lead the way toward reforming the election system so Republicans' attempted coup d-etat by voter suppression (proven) and possible voting system tampering (access to the bad machines' code could determine that) can be stopped.
The report states there were many polling locations where machine malfunctions were not reported, but concludes that the problems reported were too widespread and pervasive to be considered anomalies.
And when the machines jam, it's usually in heavily Democratic territory...
Marybeth Kuznik, Executive Director of VotePA and an elected inspector of elections said there were many problems with e-voting, but all of it hit home on the morning of November 7th. "Every single voting machine in Westmoreland County began malfunctioning. Our machines which were ESS iVotronic™ voting machines were misprogramed with the wrong date. Apparently the software had been programmed with November 6th as the date of the election. This caused the internal clock on the machine to think the election was over," said Kuznik. "Every single time a voter was admitted to vote on a machine a poll worker had to go through an extra step to keep that machine up and running. This extra and unexpected step, which the poll-workers were not trained for, caused many problems. One was of course longer lines but much worse was when the Judges of Elections saw this, some of them became alarmed, re-started the machines, This caused the machines to shut down permanently without the county staff coming out to intervene and had to revert to paper ballots which did not arrive for over an hour. Some were even turned away or had to leave because they couldn’t wait to vote."
"The first hand accounts from distressed and frustrated voters unable to make their voices heard because of machine failures is both upsetting and compelling," said Warren Stewart, policy director for VoteTrustUSA. "It's impossible to read these reports and not see that it is crucial that we improve these machines immediately." [link]
NOTHING ELSE MATTERS IF ELECTIONS ARE COMPROMISED.
I expect just as much action from the Democratic Congress on voting reform as I do on Bribery Reform (lobbyists, election financing, earmarks, etc. etc. etc.). These reforms go hand in hand.