Various News Reports — 2004
Various News Reports — 2004| EJF Home | Where To Find Help | Join the EJF | Comments? | Get EJF newsletter |
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Chaos in Arkansas primary on ES&S machines
New Mexico: Did you erase your own vote? by Warren Stewart
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, election staff convicted in recount rig
Re-vote likely after electronic voting error in Alameda County, California
June 8, 2004 — Arkansans were involved in chaos during their recent primary election on May 18 th . Problems occurring on ES&S optical scanners were:
• Late ballots printed by ES&S in Nebraska — delaying state mandated early voting by as much as 5 days in some counties;
• Candidates names left off ballots in several counties,
• Running out of ballots in at least 10 counties (low voter turnout had been predicted yet counties still ran out of ballots);
• Accenture software froze — failed to print poll books and operate on ES&S machines,
• Polling places were moved and voters had to report to as many as five locations prior to voting;
• Voters were told to report back at later date due to ballot shortages (when they did report back — still no ballots and they were unable to vote),
• ES&S machines placed in incorrect precincts in 2 precincts — would not feed ballots through due to wrong ballot style;
• Ballots "swelling" due to humidity, therefore would not feed through the scanners;
• In 5 counties the voter party affiliation was not recorded — causing problems in run-off elections.
I will note that election officials and Election Commission officials report these problems as minor. Calls to election officials regarding these major problems remain unreturned. We are asking Arkansas voters to contact us if they experienced problems at the polls.
National Coalition for Verified Voting
Director of Legislative Issues and Policy
October 22, 2005 — In 2004, New Mexico once again led the nation in Presidential undervote rate. Undervotes are ballots cast without a vote for President, and New Mexico had 21,084 of them — 2.78% of the total ballots cast last November or one out of every 36 voters. New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron seems surprisingly untroubled by undervotes, commenting after the election that she doesn't "spend a lot of time on undervote issues, I'm just speculating that some voters are just not concerned with the presidential race." [1]
I never found this very convincing. However, recent testimony from the head of Automated Election Services (AES), the company that provides election services to most of the counties in New Mexico, may offer a more persuasive explanation.
The analysis [2] of the certified results of the New Mexico election that I undertook with Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org revealed that more than 80% of New Mexico's undervotes were recorded (or, more accurately, not recorded) on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines with the main culprits being the Sequoia Advantage and the Danaher Shouptronic — both "push button" electronic machines.
Particularly alarming were cases like Taos County, where optically scanned paper ballots were used in early and absentee voting, and DREs were used on Election Day. In early and absentee voting in Taos County, the presidential undervote rate was well below 1%, while on Election Day the undervote rate soared to almost 10%! Or San Miguel County, Precinct 14 where every single person who voted early (on paper) voted for one presidential candidate or another while 27% of their neighbors who voted electronically on Election Day apparently didn't vote for any of them.
In a recent deposition, Terry Rainey, CEO of AES explained that "if you go to a [push button] DRE machine and you walk in, the first thing you' re presented with is a list of political parties, and if I...say, yes, I'm a Democrat, and I push the button for Democrat, then that activates vote choices for all the Democratic candidates." Fair enough, most states in the country allow for "straight party voting".
But Rainey went on to explain, "if I decided I wanted to vote for Senator Kerry, and I push that button again, I have deselected my vote. And if I'm not aware that that's the case and I push the cast vote button, then I have lost my vote." He went on to speculate "that's why I believe it's so much higher in DRE counties. You don't see that...high level of undervoting in primary elections where the straight party option doesn't exist."
So if you were an occasional voter, or a voter who had registered for the first time (there were 187,000 new voters in New Mexico in 2004), or a voter with limited language or computer skills, or for any reason didn't understand how the straight party option functioned, you could easily have erased your own vote.
The presidential contest in New Mexico was decided by less than 6,000 votes and of course there is no way of knowing how many of New Mexico's 21,084 undervotes resulted from this appalling design flaw. New Mexico's presidential undervote rate in 1996 was 4.46%. In 2000, like 2004, it was nearly 3%. Perhaps if the Secretary of State were more concerned about undervotes, this problem could have been identified earlier.
1. 2004 vote count smoother, still some problems by Thomas Hargrove
2. Report and other analyses of the 2004 New Mexico election
January 24, 2007 (AP) — Two election workers were convicted Wednesday in Cleveland of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio's most populous county.
Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.
Prosecutors accused Maiden and Dreamer of secretly reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on December 16, 2004. They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.
Defense attorney Roger Synenberg has said the workers were following procedures as they understood them.
Ohio gave President Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Senator John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House in 2004.
Special prosecutor Kevin Baxter did not claim the workers' actions affected the outcome of the election — Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.
Maiden and Dreamer, who still work for the elections board, face a possible sentence of six to 18 months for the felony conviction. Sentencing is on February 26, 2007.
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
July 14, 2007 — A California judge is likely to order a Berkeley city initiative back on the ballot because of local officials' mishandling of electronic voting machine data, a public-interest lawyer arguing the case said Friday.
In a preliminary ruling Thursday, Judge Winifred Smith of the Alameda County Superior Court indicated she would nullify the defeat of a medical marijuana proposal in Berkeley in 2004 and order the measure put back on the ballot in a later election. A hearing on Friday morning in advance of a final ruling brought out nothing that indicated Smith would deviate from her preliminary decision, said attorney Gregory Luke, who is representing Americans for Safe Access. The medical-marijuana advocacy group is suing the county, assisted by the technology rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The case points to the dangers of electronic voting systems, which make it harder to ensure fair elections, Luke said. Electronic voting machines have been widely adopted in the U.S. since the disputed presidential election of 2000. Laws in California and some other states now require paper records of all votes, but the California law wasn't in place for the Berkeley election.
Both sides argued their cases before Smith on Friday in a last-ditch hearing on the proposed sanctions, according to Luke. The hearing brought out nothing new that suggested Smith would change direction, he said.
Americans for Free Access sought a recount of the vote on Measure R, which would have established procedures for opening marijuana dispensaries in Berkeley. It lost by fewer than 200 votes. A recount wasn't possible because the city didn't share the necessary voting records, in violation of election laws, Judge Smith ruled in April. In May, the county agreed to share some data.
The county reused voting machines from Diebold Election Systems Inc. without saving sufficient data to carry out a recount or review the election process, Luke said. Officials failed to save key evidence even after the suit was pending, he said. Data from the vote in question has only been found on 20 of the hundreds of machines used in the election, according to Luke.
In addition to ordering another vote on Measure R, Judge Smith's preliminary ruling called for the county to pay the $22,604 cost of the recount, as well as attorney's fees and the cost of a trip to Diebold offices in Texas.
Ordering a new vote is a rare move for a court, Luke said. "This is a very severe sanction...and it's warranted," he said Friday.
Luke expects a final ruling in the case within two weeks. The county could appeal to a higher court if the ruling goes against it, he said. Attorneys for the county were not immediately available for comment.
| EJF Home | Where To Find Help | Join the EJF | Comments? | Get EJF newsletter |
| Vote Fraud and Election Issues Book | Table of Contents | Site Map | Index |
| Chapter 10 — Voting Problems In The 2004 Elections |
| Next — Down For The Count In Riverside County, California by Andrew Gumbel |
| Back — Election Study Finds Widespread Ballot-Counting Problems by Thomas Hargrove |