Friday, November 05, 2004
The Invisible Bush 'Voters'
Machine
Error Gives Bush Thousands of Extra
by John McCarthy (5 Nov
2004, Associated Press)
Group
Finds Voting Irregularities in South
by Doug Gross (5 Nov 2004, Associated Press)
A
national voting rights group said Friday it documented hundreds
of voting irregularities affecting poor and minority voters in
seven Southern states -- from long lines and faulty equipment
to deliberate voter intimidation.
"While the
Election
Day 2004: A Fragmented, Underfunded System
Continues to Frustrate Thousands of Voters
Common Cause (5 Nov 2004)
Common Cause disagrees.
Common Cause monitored Election Day on the ground and by telephone, with the help of nearly 200,000 voters from 50 states who called the 1-866-MYVOTE1 alert line the organization ran with a consortium of groups.
We
had more than 1,000 monitors at polling places nationwide, with
a concentration in
We collected 1,700 voters' stories through our website, and have an unprecedented amount of non-partisan data on what happened to voters on Election Day.
This much is clear: Voting in 2004 was more problematic than in 2000. Thousands of people waited in lines as long as eight hours to cast a ballot. Many more thousands were turned away at the polls due to registration issues and still thousands more who requested absentee ballots never received them.
“There may not have been fighting in the streets, and an election decided in the courts, as some officials feared,” said Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause. “But that can’t be our standard for a successful election. Issues like voters being left off registration lists, tens of thousands of absentee ballots never received and lines that snake for blocks are just as large impediments to voting as hanging chads, and they must be addressed.”
Common Cause ... Report (PDF) / Press Release (HTML)
E-voting
irregularities raise eyebrows, blood pressure
USA Today (3 Nov 2004)
Concern over electronic voting technology was not assuaged Tuesday as glitches, confusion and human error raised a welter of problems across the country, even while e-vote watchdogs prepared to file suits challenging the results derived from the controversial machines.
[...]
BlackBoxVoting.org, the site organized by e-voting activist Bev Harris, announced early Wednesday that it plans to conduct what the site describes as the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history, requesting internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships using electronic voting machines.
According to a release posted on the site, "Such a request filed in King County, Washington on Sept. 15, following the primary election six weeks ago, uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; 'trouble slips' revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists."