Nigerian vote not credible, say EU observers

By Tom Ashby

Reuters
Monday, April 23, 2007; 8:43 AM

ABUJA (Reuters) - European Union observers said Nigeria's presidential election could not be considered credible on Monday as early results showed ruling party candidate Umaru Yar'Adua set for a landslide win.

Outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo said elections were not perfect, but appealed to Nigerians not to lose faith in the democratic process.

The ballot for the first handover of power from one civilian leader to another in the vast oil producer was undermined by ballot-stuffing, violence and a shortage of millions of voting papers on Saturday.

"These elections have not lived up to the hopes and expectations of the Nigerian people and the process cannot be considered to have been credible," said Max van den Berg, chief EU observer, in a statement.

A local coalition of civil society observers called for the cancellation of the vote to allow a re-run in Africa's most populous country, scarred by decades of corrupt dictatorship since independence from Britain in 1960.

"The election was a charade. A democratic arrangement founded on such fraud can have no legitimacy," they said.

The EU observers called for urgent action over the election, but did not say if it should be cancelled and held again.

World leaders had expressed hopes that Nigeria, West Africa's economic powerhouse, would emerge as a major force for the spread of democracy across the continent.

Obasanjo appealed to any aggrieved parties to use legal avenues to seek redress, adding that results so far did not deviate from projections.

YAR'ADUA LEAD

Partial results from a third of Nigeria's 36 states showed Yar'Adua of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) with 9.8 million votes versus 1.3 million for his nearest rival, local media said. A definitive result is expected later on Monday.

But the figures also revealed more evidence of fraud. Results from one area of Delta state were cancelled because they showed more votes than registered voters. Residents had reported a near total absence of ballots on voting day.

Obasanjo, whose election in 1999 returned Nigeria to democracy, must step down after failing to rewrite the constitution and stay for a third term.

Former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, the leading opposition candidate, said he would not accept the result and called on parliament to impeach Obasanjo.

The opposition said it might bring its supporters out on the streets if the PDP claimed victory.

About 65 people have been killed in violence related to both the presidential election and regional polls a week earlier in the world's eighth-largest oil exporter. World oil prices rose on Monday because of the fears of further violence.

The government said unnamed coup plotters were trying to discredit the poll after failing to blow up electoral headquarters on election day with a petrol tanker.

Police arrested protesters at the electoral headquarters in the capital Abuja on Sunday and banned all rallies.

Election commission head Maurice Iwu acknowledged some materials arrived late at polling stations but said the "big picture" was of a free and fair election.

Analysts had predicted Yar'Adua would win due to unrivalled funding and the powers of incumbency, but Buhari had been expected to put up a credible challenge because of widespread disaffection with poverty and crime.

(Additional reporting by Austin Ekeinde in Port Harcourt, Camillus Eboh and Estelle Shirbon in Abuja, Tume Ahemba in Lagos)

© 2007 Reuters

Campaign against alleged voter fraud fuels political tempest

Posted on Thu, Apr. 19, 2007
U.S. ATTORNEYS By Greg Gordon McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates. The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won. Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association. Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could shed more light on the reasons for those firings when he appears Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Civil rights advocates charge that the administration's policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to support Democrats, and by filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions. Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson called any allegation that the department has rolled back minority voting rights "fundamentally flawed." She said the department has "a completely robust record when it comes to enforcing federal voting rights laws," citing its support last year for reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the filing of at least 20 suits to ensure that language services are available to non-English speaking voters. The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare. Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights. On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins. Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern. "As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens," he said. Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have: -Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election. -Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly. -Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million. -Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges. The administration's presence was felt last year in at least one state legislative battle over voter identification. In Missouri, where Republican Sen. Jim Talent was fighting to hang onto his seat and hold the U.S. Senate for the GOP, a Republican-backed photo ID requirement cleared the state House of Representatives by one vote in May 2006 after an intense lobbying effort in which backers alleged voter fraud in heavily Democratic St. Louis and Kansas City. "The White House was heavily involved" in the effort to win passage, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the Republican floor leader, said in a telephone interview. Stevenson said he wasn't privy to the details of the White House efforts. In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division's Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states. One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals. Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act's confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination. In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn't impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them. Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors' approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters' rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division's top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys. Later in 2005, career lawyers wrote a memo recommending that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a $20 photo ID. They argued that the requirement would discriminate against poor blacks, but that was quickly rejected. Toby Moore, one of the five career lawyers who reviewed the memo, said the only dissenter to the recommendation was a new hire, Joshua Rogers, a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association, a partisan organization interested in election issues. Moore said that John Tanner, who'd just been appointed the new section chief, "doctored the memo ... reversing many of our findings," and used the occasion to change procedures so that he alone could make future recommendations. A Georgia state judge, acting on a suit by civil rights groups, struck down the law as unconstitutional. Moore, now the project manager for American University's Commission on Election Reform, said he believes that administration officials felt the Voting Rights Section was populated by "recalcitrant, embedded, liberal Democrats ... and they were determined to plant their DNA, change the institution and bring it to bear on behalf of Republican interests." Spakovsky, who declined to be interviewed, also played a role in an expansive interpretation of the new federal election law. The Help America Vote Act directed states to create central, computerized voter registration lists, to make a "reasonable effort" to remove ineligible names and to match new applicants' driver's licenses and Social Security numbers to those in state databases. A failure to match wasn't grounds for rejection: Tiny variations such as the inclusion of a middle name or misplaced figure could prevent a match. But when confused state officials asked the Justice Department about the requirement, Spakovsky offered a harsh reading of the law. In a letter on Sept. 8, 2003, he advised Judith Arnold, Maryland's counsel for election laws, that the application "must be denied" if an applicant's data failed to match that in driver's license and Social Security databases. He wrote that "the prudent course" would be to let those voters cast provisional ballots that would count only if their registration information were verified later. His guidance was posted on the Voting Rights Section's Web site. Some states, including California, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, began to reject applicants whose credentials didn't match. The rejections prompted a lawsuit and protests by civil rights groups, which halted the practice. The practice was "a barrier to voting," said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, whose suit in Washington state led to a court injunction. Catherine Blinn, Washington state's assistant elections director, said in a sworn statement last year that her state was merely following guidance from the Justice Department and cited Spakovsky's letter to Maryland. Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor. Former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a moderate Republican, said in a phone interview that Justice Department officials reviewed his office's regulations and okayed the rejections, but gave no hint that they exceeded federal law. The Bush administration also has shifted enforcement priorities under the National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter" law because it provides for registration at state vehicle licensing and public assistance agencies. In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to 1 million. Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for potentially ineligible voters. Deputy Director Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national voter registration group, called this "selective enforcement. ... They've focused on purging of voters from registration rolls at the expense of enforcing provisions that encourage registration." He said that Kentucky eliminated 4,000 people from its list of voters, but "did it poorly, and took off people who lived there and tried to vote." One of the Justice Department suits was filed against Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Last week, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City, the capital, threw out the suit, noting that the motor voter law was intended to increase voter participation and eliminate fraud. The judge wrote that the Justice Department had offered no evidence that anyone had been denied his right to vote as a result of deficiencies in voter rolls, and "nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred." For more information on the Georgia litigation, as well as other major election law litigation: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/common-cause.php

Justices defend Florida recount decision

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press WriterWed Jan 24, 5:28 PM ET

Three of the five Supreme Court justices who handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 say they had no choice but to intervene in the Florida recount.

Comments from Justice Anthony Kennedy and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor are in a new book that was published this week. Justice Antonin Scalia made his remarks Tuesday at Iona College in New York.

Scalia, answering questions after a speech, also said that critics of the 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore need to move on six years after the electoral drama of December 2000, when it seemed the whole nation hung by a chad awaiting the outcome of the presidential election.

"It's water over the deck — get over it," Scalia said, drawing laughs from his audience. His remarks were reported in the Gannett Co.'s Journal-News.

The court's decision to halt the recount of Florida's disputed election results, thus giving Bush the state's electoral votes, has been heavily criticized as an example of the court overstepping its bounds and, worse, being driven by politics.

Rather than let the recount take place and leave state officials and possibly Congress to determine the outcome of the election, the court's five conservative justices decided to intervene.

They eventually overturned a ruling of the Florida Supreme Court and halted the recount of the state's disputed election results 36 days after the voting. The decision effectively gave Bush Florida's electoral votes — and the presidency — by 537 votes.

"A no-brainer! A state court deciding a federal constitutional issue about the presidential election? Of course you take the case," Kennedy told ABC News correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg in her new book, "Supreme Conflict."

Kennedy said the justices didn't ask for the case to come their way. Then-Vice President Al Gore's legal team involved the courts in the election by asking a state court to order a recount, Kennedy said.

Legal scholars and the four dissenting justices have said the Supreme Court should have declined to jump into the case in the first place.

In a decision made public on the evening of Dec. 12, 2000, the court said the recount violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because Florida counties were allowed to set their own standard for determining whether to count a vote.

"Counting somebody else's dimpled chad and not counting my dimpled chad is not giving equal protection of the law," Scalia said at Iona. Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, also were part of the majority.

O'Connor said the Florida court was "off on a trip of its own."

She acknowledged, however, that the justices probably could have done a better job with the opinion if they hadn't been rushed.

Still, O'Connor said the outcome of the election would have been the same even if the court had not intervened.

She was referring to studies that suggest Bush would have won a recount limited to counties that Gore initially contested, although other studies said Gore might have prevailed in a statewide recount.

Resignation Of Lawyers At FEC Raises Concern

By Matthew Mosk

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 18, 2007; A21

The announcement yesterday that the top two lawyers for the Federal Election Commission had resigned helped spread an undercurrent of concern about the diminishing role of a once-prominent public voice on the intersection of money and politics.

The stated reasons for the departures of FEC General Counsel Lawrence H. Norton and Deputy General Counsel James A. Kahl was that the two men had landed private-sector jobs at a large firm with offices in six states. Norton and Kahl, reached yesterday, said their resignations were not intended to send any broader message.

But those who monitor campaign finance law with some dedication said the departures coincided with a perceived shift in the way the commissioners have worked with the general counsel.

Paul S. Ryan, a lawyer who monitors the FEC for the Campaign Legal Center, said the general counsel was once free to opine publicly about pressing policy matters but that has not been the preference of the commissioners as of late.

"The influence of the general counsel has clearly been diminishing," Ryan said. The commissioners "no longer seek the general counsel's opinion publicly with respect to answering difficult questions of law."

Lawrence M. Noble, who served as general counsel for 13 years before leaving the FEC in 2001, said he has noticed the same trend, though he did not know if it contributed in any way to his successor's departure.

"It's fair to say the commissioners are looking less to the general counsel for policy advice than they may have previously," Noble said. "What we've seen, in certain areas, is that the general counsel's office is not coming up with recommendations as it once had, at least not publicly."

That shift, if it in fact is occurring, comes at a time when the agency will handle some vexing policy matters, including the continuing implementation of the 2002 campaign finance reforms, a persistent debate over the activities of independent groups and oversight of a presidential election that is expected to test the outer bounds of fundraising limits.

FEC Chairman Robert D. Lenhard said the commissioners, and the general counsel, will approach all of those matters in the same way they always have. He has not seen "much of a pattern or trend or evolution in the role there."

Some of those who put the FEC under a microscope "are reading too much into a couple of different cases," Lenhard said. "The general counsel is free to speak his mind in open session and in executive session."

One case under that microscope, Ryan said, examined whether political parties could raise and spend unlimited amounts of campaign money on recount drives.

When the parties asked the FEC in 2002 and 2004 to allow them to spend money that way, Ryan said, Norton's public comments opposing the idea persuaded the parties to withdraw their requests. In 2006, though, Norton made no recommendation, and the parties persevered, brokering a deal with the FEC on the issue, Ryan said.

"To me, it was an obvious sign that the general counsel was no longer being allowed to recommend a course of action," Ryan said.

Norton and Kahl dispute this analysis of why they resigned.

"I'm not shocked people would read that into our decision, but it has nothing to do with it," Kahl said.

He and Norton said they are leaving together to give the firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice a sizeable footprint in the fast-changing area of campaign finance law.

"I've had as free a hand as ever to give the commission unvarnished advice," Norton said. "I have had ample authority, all the authority I need."

Ohio Elections Workers on Trial

Thursday January 18, 2007 6:31 PM

By M.R. KROPKO

Associated Press Writer

CLEVELAND (AP) - Three county elections workers conspired to avoid a more thorough recount of ballots in the 2004 presidential election, a prosecutor told jurors during opening statements Thursday.

``The evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless,'' Prosecutor Kevin Baxter said. ``They did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months'' on the recount, he said.

Jacqueline Maiden, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections' coordinator, faces six counts of misconduct over how the ballots were reviewed. Rosie Grier, manager of the board's ballot department, and Kathleen Dreamer, an assistant manager, face the same charges.

Defense attorneys said in their opening statements that the workers in Ohio's most populous county did nothing out of the ordinary and hid nothing from the public.

``They just were doing it the way they were always doing it,'' said defense attorney Roger Synenberg, representing Dreamer.

The workers are not accused of voter fraud but of purposely breaking the law to avoid a time-consuming and expensive hand count.

Prosecutors do not allege that the defendants affected the outcome of the presidential election, which President Bush would not have won without Ohio. The recount, requested by third-party candidates, showed the Republican incumbent beat Democratic Sen. John Kerry by about 118,000 votes of 5.5 million cast.

Ohio law states that during a recount each county is supposed to randomly choose 3 percent of its ballots and tally them by hand and by machine. If there are no discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be recounted by machine.

If there is a difference, the county must randomly recount 3 percent of the ballots a second time. All the county's ballots must be recounted by hand if there is a second discrepancy, but if there isn't, all the ballots can be recounted by machine.

Baxter said testimony in the case will show that instead of conducting a random count, the workers chose sample precincts for the Dec. 16, 2004, recount that did not have questionable results to ensure that no discrepancies would emerge.

^---

On the Net:

Cuyahoga County elections board: http://www.boe.cuyahogacounty.us/

Fla. Judge Denies Access to Voting Machine Code

Judge Denies Plaintiff Motion to Review Paperless Voting Machine Source Code in Contested Election

By Brad Friedman, The Brad Blog

December 29, 2006

Court finds Plaintiff's Request for 'Access to Trade Secrets' of ES&S Would 'Result in Destroying, Gutting' Voting Machine Company's 'Protections' Judge Rules Jennings, Voters Motion Based on 'Nothing More Than Conjecture' --- UPDATES: Appeal Said Likely, Additional Late Details on Congressional Challenge in Race In a ruling issued this afternoon, the presiding Florida Circuit Court Judge William L. Gary denied the plaintiffs motion to allow review of the source code for the paperless touch-screen machines used in the contested U.S. House race in Florida's 13th district between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan. Jennings, and a number of Florida voters and Election Integrity organizations had filed suit asking for a revote and to allow them to review the software used on the voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, Inc. (ES&S) after some 18,000 votes seem to have disappeared in the race to fill the U.S. House seat vacated by former FL Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The state has previously certified Buchanan as the winner by a 369 vote margin. Gary's terse ruling [PDF], issued this afternoon denying the motion to compel the company to turn over their source code, states that ES&S has a right to keep their software hidden from review by both the Jennings camp and voters, supporting the company's "right" to keep their "trade secrets" protected. An audit of the machines was previously conducted by a panel convened by the state. The various plaintiff groups had roundly criticized both the make-up of the panel and the procedures used during the testing, characterizing it as an "exercise in futility." The panel was led by a known hard-right Republican partisan and included the state's own official responsible for voting machine certification. No independent Election Integrity advocates were included on the panel. That audit --- to nobody's surprise --- revealed no problems in the hardware or software as tested. But the plaintiffs have argued that only an independent investigation of the source code used on the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines might reveal reasons for the inexplicably large undervote rate in the race, more than 12%, only found on Sarasota's paperless touch-screen systems. Absentee paper balloting in the county, and on voting machines in other counties which make up the FL-13 district revealed no such anomalous undervote rate. Undervote rates on paper absentee ballots in the same race, in the same county, were just over 2.5%. Neither the Buchanan camp, or anyone else, has so been able to give a credible explanation for the disparity. Gary's ruling denying Plaintiffs' motion to examine the voting machine source code finds that: D. The machines now challenged were tested as required by law prior to the early voting and election day voting and were found to be working properly. E. Because the election was a close one and due to Plaintiffs' allegations an audit was conducted on the voting system to verify its accuracy. F. Two parallel tests were conducted on the subject screen systems and representatives of both Plaintiffs and Defendants were present. The test results revealed 100% accuracy of the equipment in reporting the vote selections. G. Plaintiffs have presented no evidence to demonstrate that the parallel testing was flawed and or the results not valid. H. The testimony of Plaintiffs' experts was nothing more than conjecture and not supported by credible evidence. I. For this Court to grant Plaintiffs' motions would require this Court to find that it is reasonably necessary for the Plaintiffs to have access to the trade secrets of Defendant, Election Systems & Software, Inc., based on nothing more than speculation and conjecture, and would result in destroying or at least gutting the protections afforded those who own the trade secrets. The plaintiffs had been requesting a revote for the election in the Florida circuit court. Jennings has filed a contest in the U.S. Congress, under the Constitutional provision which allows the House to determine the seating of members. When the new Congress convenes in January they must decide whether to seat Buchanan as is, seat him provisionally, seat Jennings instead or leave the seat vacant, essentially forcing a Special Election in FL-13 or take some other action. Miami Herald's brief coverage of the story claims, "House Democrats also said today that they will not take any action to block Buchanan from assuming the Southwest Florida seat when Congress reconvenes next week." Though we've yet to read any such statement. If true, it would be unfortunate, given the fact that even ES&S' only expert put on the stand during the hearings in Florida --- notably, he was a political scientist, not a computer expert --- concurred that had it not been for problems with the voting machines, Jennings would have won the race. A study of the undervote ballots in the race, had previously found the same thing. According to the study, had votes been recorded on those ballots, Jennings would have won the election by a near 3,000 vote margin. Sarasota Herald-Tribune's coverage, as it has been throughout the FL-13 Meltdown, is much better than Miami Herald's. They offer additional details on the statement from Democrats mentioned above, adding the crucial caveat that if Buchanan is seated, it will likely be only conditionally while an investigation moves forward... Democrats in Congress meanwhile, said they'd allow Republican Vern Buchanan to take the seat next Thursday, but with a warning that the inquiry wasn't over and that his hold on it could be temporary. ... "The House has the power to collect evidence and make a decision about who, if anyone, was duly elected to represent the people of the 13th district," U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., said Friday before the judge's ruling. Holt plans to make an official statement next week making it clear that by seating Buchanan, the House isn't forfeiting the right to reverse that decision later. "No one who is in a disputed election like this should get too comfortable in the House of Representatives," Holt said in a news conference at the Capitol. ... Drew Hammill, a spokesman for incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that the judge's ruling Friday didn't change plans by the House to investigate the election, and also noted that the ruling isn't final because Jennings can appeal. But Democrats have no plans to block Buchanan from taking the seat, deciding the people of the southwest Florida district should have representation while the contest is being decided, Hammill said. "This is the best way to maintain representation for Florida District 13 while allowing the two appropriate challenges to run their course," said Hammill. Jennings said she agreed. "I think it's the right thing to do, to seat Vern Buchanan temporarily while we gather evidence," Jennings said before Gary's ruling. "But I am pursuing this and I do believe I will end up being the representative for the people of the 13th District." Though the statements from Holt, Pelosi and Jennings came prior to Gary's ruling today, it is unclear whether or not Congress may have right to compel ES&S to make its source code available to House investigators via subpoena. And, indeed, one of the attorneys representing the Florida voter plaintiffs in the case has said they will most likely appeal Gary's ruling. "We'd like to get (the code) and prove our case as opposed to listening to the state and (the voting machine company's) theories," Mitchell told the Herald-Sentinel. This article was posted at Brad Blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.

The Road to Reliable Elections

December 11, 2006

Editorial

Two influential federal advisory groups have added their voices to an emerging national consensus that voting machines must produce a voter-verified paper record if they are to be trusted. One of those groups, the one dominated not by scientists but by election officials, was more grudging than it should have been. But their analyses should give further support to members of Congress who plan to push next month for a strong federal law requiring voter-verified paper records.

More than half of the states now have laws requiring electronic voting machines to produce paper records that voters can review to ensure that their votes were correctly recorded. Voters understand that without this paper, there is no way of knowing if the software registered their choices incorrectly, either by accident or by design.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency that promotes good standards in everything from medical devices to smoke detectors, recently concluded that paperless electronic voting is unacceptable. The agency’s scientists said that for electronic voting to be trustworthy, it must be “software independent,” meaning there has to be a means apart from the machines’ own software to prove that the vote tallies are correct.

The obvious way to do this is a voter-verified paper record. The institute allowed that there could be other ways, like a video or audio record of votes cast, but those technologies remain unproven.

--MORE--

End seen for voting machines without a paper trail

Related
No touchscreen voting without paper
---
December 8, 2006

Changes Are Expected in Voting by 2008 Election

By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted, including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail, federal voting officials and legislators say.

New federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines obsolete, the officials say. States and counties that bought the machines will have to modify them to hook up printers, at federal expense, while others are planning to scrap the machines and buy new ones.

Motivated in part by voting problems during the midterm elections last month, the changes are a result of a growing skepticism among local and state election officials, federal legislators and the scientific community about the reliability and security of the paperless touch-screen machines used by about 30 percent of American voters.

--MORE--

By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW

WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY VOTING MACHINE?

Written by ADAM COHEN

Monday, 04 December 2006

To the long list of recent Election Day horrors from butterfly ballots to six-hour lines, add “vote flipping.” In Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey and other states last month, there were reports — some confirmed by election officials — that when voters touched the screen for one candidate, the machine registered it for another. One Florida Congressional race, in which the Republican won by fewer than 400 votes, is in the courts because paperless electronic voting machines may have failed to register as many as 18,000 votes. This year’s election had voters across the country once again asking why voting machines are so lousy. Their technology is similar to A.T.M. technology, but when was the last time your A.T.M. flipped a $200 withdrawal into a $200 deposit? Voting machines, unlike home electronics, are not sold in a competitive consumer market, which is ruthlessly unforgiving of low quality. The officials who buy them generally do not know much about technology. They listen to sales pitches from vendors who relentlessly push the most expensive models. Sometimes, well-connected lobbyists apply pressure. The process is rife with conflicts of interest, from free meals to future jobs with the manufacturers. Since quality is not the deciding factor, it’s not surprising there isn’t a lot of it. Voters who complain about their own machines don’t often get a chance to compare them with other options. But New York’s boards of elections are replacing the old lever machines, and I recently went to demonstrations the city held to allow the public to try out the five finalists. There are many important things about a voting machine you can’t tell from a quick inspection. But what was clear was almost all disturbing. Here are the ratings: Avante Touch-Screen (no stars) This is one of two A.T.M.-like touch-screen machines in the running. Even if they were reliable, touch-screens would not be practical for populous areas. Configured to hold New York’s ridiculously large ballot, this five-foot-wide, 280-pound machine is so expensive, at about $8,000, that there might be only one per polling place, and lines could extend for hours. One machine I sampled cut off parts of words. And the bottom half of the name of one of the political parties was missing. A bigger problem is that this machine appears to run afoul of a New York law requiring that all voting machine computer code be given to the state. It runs on Windows, and Microsoft keeps its code secret. Sequoia Touch-Screen (no stars) Like the Avante, this machine should be ruled out simply because it is a touch-screen. But there is a lot more to dislike. The paper records produced by a voting machine should be secured in a lockbox. On this one, they fall into a small bag that could easily be snatched. Not that a thief would need to bother. The bag has a zipper on the bottom. Like Avante’s, this touch-screen runs on Windows, which probably means it cannot satisfy New York’s code-sharing law. Sequoia Optical Scan (no stars) With optical scans, many voters can fill out paper ballots at the same time. They are then fed into an optical scan reader, which goes very quickly. Unfortunately, this machine has other problems. Instead of blackening an oval next to their choice, voters connect a broken arrow. I have filled in thousands of ovals, but I had never before connected a broken arrow. As we saw with the butterfly ballot in 2000, the voting machine is not a good place to ask voters to acquire new skills. New York law requires that candidates of the same party be listed in a single column, to make it easier to vote by party. This machine scatters candidates of the same party all over the ballot. Diebold Optical Scan ★ When I fed my ballot into this machine, it jammed twice. The sales representative expressed shock, but this is a frequently heard complaint. Even a balky optical scan is better than a touch-screen, but how hard is it to make one that doesn’t jam? Diebold has been the most infamous name in elections since its chief executive wrote that he was committed to helping deliver Ohio to President Bush, in an election in which his machines were counting the votes. The company has a long list of misdeeds, including installing unapproved and uncertified software in California. ES&S Optical Scan ★½ This seemed like the best of the five machines on display, but that wasn’t saying much. ES&S machines were used in Florida’s 13th Congressional District, where they are still looking for the 18,000 votes that may have gone missing. New York’s official testing agencies notified election officials last week that none of these five machines fully meet the state’s standards. New York has been the slowest state to adopt new voting machines, and the fact that the manufacturers were displaying products that still did not comply with state law says a lot about the basic level of competence in the industry. No one in New York has much patience for more delay. But if it comes down to waiting longer or sticking voters with illegal or unreliable machines that will undermine democracy for years to come, officials should wait, and insist on better machines. New Yorkers, and all Americans, deserve better choices than the voting machine industry is offering.

Protesters demand new election for District 13 congressional seat

Article published Dec 4, 2006

STAFF PHOTOS / ROB MATTSON

Danielle Neetz, second from right, goes over voter statistics with fellow Volusia County resident Jack Wrightington during a rally at Sarasota's Bayfront Park.

External Links

• Special Section: District 13 election

By DOUG SWORD
doug.sword@heraldtribune.com

SARASOTA -- Arguments about ballot design, machine error, statistical probabilities and the like don't sway Bertie Lou Gentile, one of more than 500 people packing Bayfront Park on Sunday calling for a revote in the 13th Congressional District race.

The 77-year-old Nokomis resident has a simple reason for believing that 18,000 people didn't all intentionally skip the congressional race Nov. 7.

"When you get more votes for the hospital board, you know something's wrong," Gentile said.

She was referring to election results showing that fewer people voted in the congressional race between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings than in the race for a county hospital board seat.

Gentile and her husband, Don, didn't fit the profile of the "hundreds of outsiders" that the Buchanan campaign said in a press release Saturday would be bused in by liberal special interest groups.

Several groups, though, did bring members to the rally, including People for the American Way, Common Cause and Voter Action, which has filed suit in Tallahassee for a revote. Grass-roots groups from Pinellas County and Miami, which are lobbying for an end to touch-screen voting in their locales, also brought members. But there were also many local Democrats attending the rally.

"We want hope! Give us the revote!" thundered the Rev. Charles McKenzie, the Florida coordinator for the RainbowPUSH Coalition.

The crowd at Bayfront Park joined in -- "Give us the revote!" -- as McKenzie chanted the phrase.

"We cannot stand idly by while 18,000 citizens are victims of massive disenfranchisement," he said.

Rally-goers sported buttons calling for "Paper not Vapor," and waved signs reading, "Honk for a revote," "Revote to Revive our Trust," and "Touch my screen, no one will ever know."

The rally was advertised in 300,000 e-mails to Common Cause members, who can respond and get photos and comments from the demonstration, Chellie Pingree, president of the national group, told the audience.

"What you do today makes a huge difference," Pingree said. "We are here to stand behind you to call for a revote."

Jennings has filed suit asking for a revote or to have the election overturned and for the court to declare her the winner. In a court filing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Charles Stewart said the odds were 5 million to one against such a large undervote occurring by chance.

The Buchanan campaign, though, argues that there is no evidence that electronic voting machines malfunctioned.

While the contested congressional race provided the spark for the rally, Jennings and Buchanan were infrequently mentioned by speakers, who focused on what they called the unreliability of voting systems that don't provide a voter-verified paper ballot.

Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned

Paper Systems Should Be Included, Agency Says

By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 1, 2006; A01

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

Voters in Maryland cast ballots on electronic machines that produce no paper record of each vote; in the District and Loudoun County, voters can choose between using such machines and optical-scan systems. Other Northern Virginia jurisdictions, and many counties across the state, use electronic voting systems exclusively.

NIST's recommendations are to be debated next week before the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, charged by Congress to develop standards for voting systems. To become effective, NIST's recommendations must then be adopted by the Election Assistance Commission, which was created by Congress to promote changes in election systems after the 2000 debacle in Florida.

If the commission agrees with NIST, the practical impact may not be felt until 2009 or 2010, the soonest that new standards would be implemented. The standards that the Election Assistance Commission will adopt are voluntary, but most states require election officials to deploy voting systems that meet national or federal criteria.

State election officials in Maryland and Virginia declined to comment yesterday on the NIST report, which they were reviewing.

Alice P. Miller, executive director of the District's Board of Elections and Ethics, said through a spokesman that she would not comment because she is a member of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee.

NIST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote "is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections." The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

Fears about rigging have animated critics for years, but there has been no conclusive evidence that such fraud has occurred. Electronic voting systems have had technical problems -- including unpredictable screen freezes -- leaving voters wondering whether their ballots were properly recorded.

Computer scientists and others have said that the security of electronic voting systems cannot be guaranteed and that election officials should adopt systems that produce a paper record of each vote in case of a recount. The NIST report embraces that critique, introducing the concept of "software independence" in voting systems.

NIST says that voting systems should not rely on a machine's software to provide a record of the votes cast. Some electronic voting system manufacturers have introduced models that include printers to produce a separate record of each vote -- and that can be verified by a voter before leaving the machine -- but such paper trails have had their own problems.

Printers have jammed or otherwise failed, causing some election directors to question whether a paper trail is an improvement. Maryland state elections administrator Linda Lamone, in an undated video snippet that her critics have circulated on the Internet, says that voter verification is unnecessary. "I'm not going to put this paper on my machines -- it'll be over my dead body, because I just don't think it works. It really is a false sense of security," she said.

For critics of paperless electronic voting, the report is vindication. "I think I got it right," said Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist who has long questioned the security and reliability of some electronic voting systems.

Linda Schade, a founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote, said, "These strong statements from a credible institution such as NIST add yet another voice to the consensus that paper electronic voting as used in states like MD is not secure. We hope that the [Election Assistance Commission] formally adopts these improved standards."

Even critics of paperless electronic voting have grown disenchanted with the practical problems of adding printers to electronic "touch-screen" voting machines.

"Why are we doing this at all? is the question people are asking," said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrustUSA, a group critical of electronic voting systems. "We have a perfectly good system -- the paper-ballot optical-scan system."

Federal agency is set to recommend decertification of all touch screen voting

November 29, 2006
Feds to Toughen E-Voting Standards?
By Michael Hickins

A federal agency is set to recommend significant changes to specifications for electronic-voting machines next week, internetnews.com has learned.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is recommending that the 2007 version of the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) decertify direct record electronic (DRE) machines.

DREs are currently used by more than 30 percent of jurisdictions across the U.S. and are the exclusive voting technology in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina.

According to an NIST paper to be discussed at a meeting of election regulators at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., on Dec. 4 and 5, DRE vote totals cannot be audited because the machines are not software independent.

In other words, there is no means of verifying vote tallies other than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to begin with.

The machines currently in use are "more vulnerable to undetected programming errors or malicious code," according to the paper.

The NIST paper also noted that, "potentially, a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

It recommends "requiring SI [software independent] voting systems in VVSG 2007."

The NIST is also going to recommend changes to the design of machines equipped with paper rolls that provide audit trails.

Currently, the paper rolls produce records that are illegible or otherwise unusable, and NIST is recommending that "paper rolls should not be used in new voting systems."

The lack of software independence has reared its ugly head in Sarasota's Congressional race, where 18,000 fewer votes were cast than in other races on the same ballot.

A recount was futile in that election because Sarasota uses a DRE-type machine.

This has provoked concerns that someone tampered with that election.

County officials told internetnews.com that the machines themselves are now being examined by a team of computer security experts and that they will finish their work by Friday.

Congress has also been on the case.

Hearings were held throughout the summer and fall, and legislation was introduced that would require the use of some form of voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT).

These efforts have gathered steam in response to reported machine malfunctions during the March 2006 primaries, as well as studies by the Brennan Center and Princeton University professor Ed Felten, as well as pressure from advocacy groups such as VotersUnite.org.

But evidence is emerging to the effect that paper trails may not be of much help.

For instance, a study of the 2006 primaries in Ohio commissioned by Cuyahoga County, Ohio, showed that the results of that election could not be verified despite the presence of VVPAT.

The study concluded that "the election system, in its entirety, exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences, especially in the event of a close election."

Many former advocates of VVPAT, including John Gideon, executive director of VotersUnite, now favor requiring that all votes be recorded on paper ballots.

"DREs are unacceptable as voting devices and ... the addition of a VVPAT on a DRE is only a placebo to make some voters feel more comfortable," Gideon said in an e-mail.

Computer scientists and election experts such as Roy Saltman disagree with the idea of going back to paper ballots. "If you insist on paper you're tying elections to an old technology," he told internetnews.com.

Doug Jones of the University of Iowa suggested that election officials consider implementing new technologies that enable independent auditing of votes.

He pointed to a system devised by Ted Selker, co-director of the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project. "The state of the art systems aren't even on the market."

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3646231

Midterm Elections Show Voting Flaws: Voters In 25 States Had "Serious Problems"

November 26, 2006

Experts Concerned as Ballot Problems Persist

By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW

Excerpt

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/us/politics/26vote.html

When Votes Disappear: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE

The New York Times Company

OP-ED COLUMNIST
When Votes Disappear
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: November 24, 2006

Do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we’re in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?

Excerpt

"The problem is that the official vote count isn’t credible."

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An Electronic Canary

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, November 24, 2006; A41


Americans can be grateful that Sarasota County is in Florida and not in Montana or Virginia.

There's nothing wrong with Sarasota, a lovely place. But if the voting snafus in the contest for Florida's 13th District had hung up either of this year's two closest Senate races, we still would not know which party had won control of the Senate.

Supporters of new voting technologies have been patting themselves on the back, saying there were no big voting problems this year. Let them go to Sarasota.

Here's the story so far: The official vote count in the battle for -- you won't believe this -- Katherine Harris's seat put Republican Vern Buchanan 369 votes ahead of Democrat Christine Jennings out of roughly 238,000 votes cast.

But in Sarasota County, there was an "undervote" of more than 18,000 -- meaning that those voters supposedly didn't choose to record votes in the Buchanan-Jennings race. Jennings carried the county 53 percent to 47 percent.

The Sarasota undervote in the congressional race amounted to nearly 15 percent. Kendall Coffey, Jennings's lawyer, has pointed out that in the other four counties in the district, the undervote ranged from 2.2 to 5.3 percent. Put another way, roughly 18,000 of the 21,000 undervotes in the contest came from Sarasota County.

It's hard to believe that Sarasota's voters had a different view of the race than voters everywhere else in the district, considering that the undervote on the county's absentee ballots, cast on paper, was only 2.5 percent. The upshot: Any reasonable statistical analysis suggests that only 3,000 to 5,000 of Sarasota's undervotes were intentional, meaning that 13,000 to 15,000 votes were probably not counted.

If you believe that these machines operated properly, then you must also believe that I missed my true vocation as an NBA center.

Imagine if 18,000 votes had just disappeared in either of the key Senate races. Or imagine a presidential election in which the electoral votes of Florida were decisive and the state was hanging in the balance by -- to pick a number that comes to mind -- 537 votes. And, by the way, in 2000 we could at least see those hanging and dimpled chads. In this case the votes have -- poof! -- simply disappeared.

Despite the Sarasota problem, the state Elections Canvassing Commission certified Buchanan's "victory." Jennings has gone to court to demand a new election.

But there is good news here: This is a problem in just one congressional district. Control of the House does not depend on how this race turns out. It is therefore in the interest of both parties, not to mention the country, to be simultaneously aggressive and judicious in figuring out what went wrong in Sarasota and to use that knowledge to fix the nation's voting system before a major disaster strikes. Sarasota is the canary in the electronic coal mine.

On Tuesday, Judge William L. Gary decided not to move the case along quite as fast as Jennings had requested. That will prove to be an excellent decision if the delay is part of an effort to collect every bit of information we can on Sarasota's machines.

Jennings's lawyers have asked the judge to give her campaign full access to at least eight of the voting machines and their software -- a fair request. If the taxpayer-supported companies that sell this equipment are not willing to be 100 percent open about how their machines and their programming work, they should not be allowed to record and count the people's votes.

And if anyone still needs evidence that all electronic systems should provide verifiable paper trails so real ballots are available in the event of a recount, let them go to Sarasota.

If the courts punt, Congress, which has a right to judge the credentials of its members, should get to the bottom of this. It may be asking the impossible, but Democrats and Republicans should not make this a fight about which party picks up one more seat. Instead, they should conduct a joint inquest into this contest to provide a basis for bipartisan legislation creating national standards for improving our voting systems.

The U.S. Supreme Court has insisted that "[h]aving once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another." Thousands of voters in the 13th District have an interest in demanding that the system live up to those words, which came from the decision in a little case in 2000 called Bush v. Gore.

postchat@aol.com

postchat@aol.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR2006112300965.html