This is a still from a video I shot about how my vote didn’t count in the California primaries this year. Watch it now.

Here are the latest election irregularity stories I’ve come across since last week:

Voting machines weren’t tested
Checks would’ve found straight-ticket error, panel told

A test that local officials are required to perform would have almost certainly detected a programming error made by Harp Enterprises that rendered almost 80 of its E-slate machines incapable of tabulating straight-ticket voting on Election Day in Kenton County.
nky.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20081122/NEWS0103/811220364
Thanks to MikeAmundsen who posted a link to this on FriendFeed.

Concerns About CA’s Prop 8 Election Prompt Calls for Investigation, Official Complaints, Fraud Tips
Following reports of concerns from voters, election monitors, observers, and election integrity advocates about the voting equipment and procedures used during the November 4th election in which Prop 8 — a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality for all Californians — is said to have passed, Velvet Revolution is requesting that official complaints from citizens be filed with the CA Sec. of State, by Monday if possible. Any voters who may have witnessed unusual activity, or problems with voting equipment that may have affected the casting or counting of votes on Proposition 8, are asked to contact SoS Debra Bowen’s office as soon as possible. More details are posted here…
www.bradblog.com/?p=6692

Speaking of VelvetRevolution.us, here is a related story from their blog:

VR To California Secretary Of State: Investigate Proposition 8 Vote Count
VR has called on California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to order an immediate investigation into the accuracy of the vote count on Proposition 8, the ballot measure to amend the state’s Constitution by repealing marriage equality.

VR believes an investigation is warranted due to witnessed failures in election auditing procedures, complaints from voters and election monitors, equipment failures, and more, including:
www.velvetrevolution.us/#112608

Every Vote Matters in MN’s U.S. Senate Hand-Count. Every. Single. One.
Missing Ballots, Uncounted Absentees and the GOP PR Battle That May Trump Both…

Math/statistics/poll-wiz Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com predicts the race between incumbent MN Sen. Norm Coleman (R) and challenger Al Franken (D) could result in a 27 vote win for Franken. That’s right, just 27 votes.
www.bradblog.com/?p=6698

That last post links to another post at Politico which covers the Franken campaign’s contention that there are many missing ballots across the state. The post also claims to have possible photographic evidence of an uncounted ballot (suggesting more are uncounted):

Missing ballots concern Franken camp
Things are getting even dicier in the Minnesota Senate recount.

Al Franken’s campaign is contending that Minnesota election officials may have lost several dozen ballots across the state. Their basis for the charge is that the number of recounted ballots in certain counties does not match the total numbers of votes tallied on Election Day.
www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/1108/Franken_campaign_concerned_over_missing_ballots.html

The photo in question does not present any evidence as far as I can tell–it’s just a piece of paper sticking out of the back of what looks like a ballot machine.

You can follow the Minnesota recount fun on the state’s official unofficial recount results page here: electionresults.sos.state.mn.us/20081104/SenateRecount.asp

Here’s a little sumthin’-sumthin’ about the 2002 election–yep, some people just won’t let go! Especially when it comes to democracy! Go figure. Anyway, here you go:

Stealing Georgia - Let’s Hope Not Again
But How Would We Know? The State Uses 100% Unverifiable Voting Machines
America Needs to Wake Up to Election Reform…

Why Georgia? There’s strongly suggestive evidence that the 2002 senatorial election in Georgia was stolen. That was the first election in which Diebold DRE (Direct Recording Electronic, usually touch-screen) voting machines were used statewide. Republican Saxby Chambliss beat front runner Democrat Max Cleland, with an astounding 12-point reversal of the vote count compared to pre-election polls. A last-minute “patch” had been applied covertly by Diebold staff to multiple voting machines throughout the state.
www.bradblog.com/?p=6682

Catch a nice nutshell explanation of the Saxby Chambliss story in the following video clip from Stealing America (a documentary I helped make, in case you hadn’t heard ;P):

And here’s some of the aftermath of the Chambliss mess:

‘Document Hold’ Served by OH Attorney to GA SoS in Advance of State’s U.S. Senate Run-off Election
Diebold Touch-Screen Memory Cards and Other Documents Sought for Retention as Allegations of Racketeering Scheme ‘to Corrupt Elections in the U.S. Over the Course of This Decade’ Spread to Encompass ‘02 and ‘08 Senate Races in the Peach State…
www.bradblog.com/?p=6696

There are PLENTY more stories on the news page over at VotersUnite.org which you can check out here: www.votersunite.org/news.asp

There’s also BradBlog.com which, by now, you know I recommend, too.

The short of it all is that democracy isn’t pretty or even easy. However, shouldn’t we make it simple if we can? Why bother with machines and technology if we’re just going to have to second-guess everything when the machines screw up? Why not take a week to let everyone vote and just take another week and have humans hand count the ballots once all the voting is done?

Sure, making everyone vote on a certain day and having the ballots mostly counted by the end of that day is SO much more dramatic, but which do you want? A democracy or a drama-cracy?

Why are we all being so childish about this?

When a guy with a logo like mine calls you childish, you know it’s bad!

Sorry about the lack of blog posts since Tuesday on the topic of voting irregularities–I needed a couple days off after all the election fun. I still have to do my election recap-post and talk about a few things I got wrong. It’s nice being wrong once in a while :) But that’s for another post. Here come the latest stories of irregularities, most of them from BradBlog.com. I did do find a few non-BradBlog-based stories that I found actually a little disturbing. Let’s get to those first:

Voting Problems Minimal on Election Day
For all of the worrying over voter fraud, voter suppression, and voting machine meltdowns, this year’s presidential election went surprisingly smoothly. That’s not to say that there weren’t any problems, but that simply problems weren’t widespread or severe enough to cause any doubt about the winner of the election.
www.switched.com/2008/11/07/voting-problems-minimal-this-election-day/
Switched.com is some sort of gadget blog–I’ve never heard of them before today, but they’re part of AOL’s network of blogs, so they’ve got to be reasonably accurate, I suppose. Sadly, this post, while factually accurate plays down the very problems it reports in the first paragraph of the post (excerpted above). So, voting problems not that big of deal? Then why are you covering them? I love this odd contradiction–there’s no story here, they just wanted to let us know that there was no story. Too bad there is a story here. And not everything is about the presidential races. Nice of the post to admit that there is still work to be done, though. Funny how he fails to mention the undecided races still out and about.

Again, this is about more than just the president.

Recount Reverses Results in Kent County District 29 Race
State Rep. Pamela Thornburg, a Republican lawmaker from Hartly who thought she lost her District 29 seat on election night, was told Thursday evening that she won.

Wright also noted that it seems that the problem with the scanners only occurred in the District 29 race and not with any other districts in the state.
www.wboc.com/Global/story.asp?S=9310325
See? It’s not just presidential elections that can suffer because of ballot machines gone screwy–and you should note that this story is about optical scanners–not touchscreen computerized voting. This is about the machine that scans the ballots and counts the votes. Yeah–if this kind of machine is fallible, can I just ask what’s so wrong with hiring people to do this counting? Sure, humans are fallible, too, but hiring people to count creates jobs and then we can hire an extra couple people to recount what the counters just counted. Sure, it will take longer, but that’s OK. As I’ve said before, I think our democracy is worth it.

Officials: State Experienced a Few Glitches on Election Day
Secretary of State’s Office reports county elections officials experienced no more problems than usual on Election Day despite worries about “vote flipping” on touch-screen voting machines.
www.statejournal.com/story.cfm?func=viewstory&storyid=46508
Wow, start your article up with a blurb like that and your readers won’t keep reading! Why should they if there were “no more problems than usual”? And what the heck does that even mean? “no more problems than usual”? So, usually votes don’t get counted and it’s cool? No big deal? What about in tight races like the Franken/Coleman race in Minnesota? Coleman is ahead of Franken by 239 votes. Certainly the usual number of votes uncounted in an election wouldn’t matter in a case like that, would it?

RNC May Challenge Integrity of ‘Computerized Voting’
On Tuesday, Forensicon, a Chicago computer forensic company, said that it was contacted last week by a security firm last week to assist the Republic National Committee (RNC) in challenging cases of “computerized voter fraud.”

The move seems to indicate a future move by the RNC to challenge certain voting results, in some contradiction to past RNC actions regarding electronic voting, which includes recent legal actions in Pennsylvania.
www.pubrecord.org/component/content/470.html?task=view
This is interesting considering that the more prominent electronic ballot machine companies are owned by Republicans. The head guy in charge of Diebold, back in 2004, got in trouble for actually admitting in a campaign fund-raising letter that he was determined to deliver Ohio to George W. Bush. Odds are he meant “by raising a lot of money” but it does seem like a bad idea to put it the way he did when you’re running a company that provides computerized ballot machines to a buttload of America.

‘Daily Voting News’ For November 05, 2008
As we suspected tabulation of ballots has revealed problems with voting systems from all of the vendors. Hillsborough Co Florida is rethinking their contract with Premier/Diebold for $6M after having big problems counting votes. Manatee Co Florida also had a problem with Premier. Palm Beach Co had bad memory cartridges from Sequoia. Counties in Pennsylvania and South Carolina had problems with their ES&S system. We also have a run-off for senator from Georgia and a recount for senator from Minnesota.
www.bradblog.com/?p=6639
The post goes on to touch on a HUGE number of problems from various corners of the US.

Al Franken’s Razor-Thin MN Senate Race Counted on Flawed Optical-Scan Systems
PLUS: Details on ‘What in the Hell Happened in Alaska’ and Georgia and Oregon…
www.bradblog.com/?p=6641
This is the story I touched on above–only this BradBlog post is a couple days old. And yep, those optical scan machines are the same kinds of devices that went wrong in the Kent County story above. The added fun here is that when Franken was still on Air America Radio, he was the only AAR host who didn’t want to talk about voting irregularities. Two words: eye ronic.

All Diebold Touch-Screen Systems Impounded by Judge in PA County
Straight-Party Ticket Votes Failed to Allow Voters to Review Names of Presidential Candidates Before Casting ‘Ballot’
Same Flawed, Hackable, Unverifiable Machines Being Used in GA Senate Race, Elsewhere…
www.bradblog.com/?p=6643
I’ll just take the first paragraph from the post since it explains things just right:

All 185 of the completely unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting machines used in Northumberland County, PA’s election were ordered impounded by a judge Tuesday night after complaints from both the Republican and Democratic parties. Officials from both parties had filed requested action following reports from voters that straight-party ticket votes were not showing voters the names of their selection for President on the summary screen near the end of the 100% faith-based touch-screen voting process.

Weeeee…?

SOMETHING SMELLS VERY FISHY IN ALASKA
Turnout Rate Reported as Lowest Ever in State, Down 11% From ‘04 Even With Both Palin and Obama on the Ballot
Hanging in the Balance in the Diebold State: Felon Ted Stevens’ U.S. Senate Race, Corrupt Don Young’s House Race & Much More…
www.bradblog.com/?p=6644
Check out this excerpt:

In Alaska, more people voted for George W. Bush in 2004 than for Sarah Palin on Tuesday despite an identical 61-36 margin of victory. Yes. Only four years ago 54,304 Alaskans got off their sofas and voted for Bush, but decided to sit home and not vote for Palin in 2008.

In turn, I have to ignore the 30,520 Alaskans who felt progressive enough in 2004 to vote for John Kerry, but weren’t inspired enough to get out and vote for Barack Obama.

It goes on, too–calling this “fishy” is understating it seriously. I’m going to try and keep an eye on this story–it seems like Alaskans got seriously shafted here.

BradBlog.com is the single best place to learn about election irregularities. Don’t wait for me to cover them–just head over there!

Those are all the stories I have for now. I’m sure there will be more.

So, I hope you have a good idea of why voting irregularities are still important things to pay attention to. In a presidential election like this one, with a massive landslide, it’s easy to see what the intent of voting Americans is. But in tighter races where every last vote counts, we need to have a system that does a much better, and much more reliable, job of counting votes.

Thanks for reading! Please pass this on to others!

If you haven’t noticed, a lot of the links in these daily “Democracy in Danger” posts I’ve been writing have sent you to BradBlog.com. The man behind the BradBlog is one Brad Friedman, a guy absolutely bent on protecting our democracy–but not by fighting terrorists or bailing out the banks, but by doing his best to call attention to voting problems.

Yep, voting is the most basic of rights we have in this country and is, quite literally, the way we make sure we get to keep all of our other rights. See, that’s the big myth our country is founded upon–the idea that there are certain inalienable rights granted to us by our creator. The reality is that our rights are actually granted to us by each other. That’s right–each one of us agrees that every human should be allowed to do certain things. You and I protect our own rights and the rights of each other. The way we make sure our government doesn’t take those rights away is by voting the right people into office. If the voting process itself is flawed someway, well, you can see how democracy can find itself in danger.

This is where Brad Friedman comes in. He has spent years covering voting irregularities here in the US. He’s done absurd amounts of research and dedicated nearly every post in his blog to presenting news and information regarding voting rights in America. Vote switching, voter caging and voter suppression in general are some of the specifics he covers. The man is an Internet superhero for voters across the country.

So, I don’t know if they give the Pulitizer Prize to bloggers, but if they do, Brad Friedman should get it for his dogged blogging on the topic of voting.

He is truly fighting the good fight and deserves to be recognized for it. Oh and he’s a fellow-independent–he goes after both parties for their tactics, even blaming the Democrats for not standing up for themselves as sections of America that are likely to vote Democrat have their votes threatened.

So, NOTE TO PULITZER PEOPLE: BRAD FRIEDMAN FOR THE PULITZER, PLEASE!

Brad Friedman is the Internet’s Edward R. Murrow for voting rights.

OK, now on to the news round up for today’s Democracy In Danger:

PA Counties Said Unprepared to Serve Voters, Meet Court Order for Emergency Paper Ballots
Election Official: ‘80 percent of Counties Do Not Have Emergency Ballots’…
www.bradblog.com/?p=6597
What this story boils down to is this: counties in Pennsylvania aren’t likely to have enough paper ballots should half of the electronic machines fail (as required by a recent directive). If that many machines fail, that means a huge number of people will be unable to vote with them. Think of this like not having enough lifeboats on the Titanic for everyone aboard.

Early & Absentee Voting Scandals in D.C. & L.A.
www.bradblog.com/?p=6594
It turns out that thousands of voters in DC never got their absentee ballots and will now have to vote in person. Meanwhile LA, “the world’s largest voting jurisdiction,” according to Friedman, has just a single early voting location. Well, if I were still an LA resident, you can bet I’d be heading over there right now to check it out. As it is, I don’t believe NYC does early voting, but I should look into it.

I couldn’t find anything new on voting irregularities as CNN.com this afternoon, so I checked out MSNBC.com instead and found a couple stories worth checking out. Here they are:

10 choke points for Election Day
What could go wrong? E-voting glitches, legal challenges and more
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27464554/
Sadly, while this article does talk about voting problems, it calls the intentional suppression of votes and illegitimate voters as “funny business,” also managing to make this a partisan issue, rather than pointing out that everyone should want all votes counted. The article goes on to show a serious lack of understanding of the challenges facing voters. The author seems to think of election laws as forces of nature, where the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) came down from On High, requiring states to use voter registration databases that can be matched to IDs. If there’s a typo in the database some “persnickety” states will not allow the voter to vote. The author of the article also seems to think “vote-flipping” is just a magical “phenomenon” that “will allocate your vote to the wrong candidate.”

Isn’t that neat? He calls it “misallocation” due to “miscalibrated” touchscreens–instead of calling it what it is: faulty technology. Once again, I fall back to my position that if my iPhone touchscreen doesn’t need calibration, why does American democracy’s touchscreen?

I think I’m going to have to tear that article a new one in a separate post. It serves well as an example of how the MSM (MainStream Media) thinks our democracy is not important. Why else would author, Alan Boyle, use words like “persnickety” to describe the states that take the HAVA seriously?

Here’s the other MSNBC.com article:

Voter registration smashes records
States say 188 million have signed up to vote — but experts add caveats
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27459551/
This article, while not directly reporting on voting irregularities, does provide a symbolic warning for all of us to expect MAJOR voting issues on November 4. Even if half of those 188 million new voters actually show up to vote on Tuesday, that means 94 million more people will be showing up at polling places compared to previous years. That’s a lot more pressure than those poling places are likely used to. Already (see above) we see that Pennsylvania won’t have enough paper ballots should more than 50% of their electronic ballot machines crash. This is going to be the messiest damn election EVER. Geh–that article is written by Alan Boyle, too. Sheesh–doesn’t MSNBC.com have anyone else on board to write about elections?? HEY! MSNBC.com! I’m looking for work! Why not hire me? I seem to know WAY more than this Boyle guy when it comes to elections!!

:P

Voter machine erratically switches selection
Equipment picks Ralph Nader when John McCain is chosen
worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=79565
This is more coverage of that video that shows a West VA election official demonstrating how sometimes touchscreen machines need to be recalibrated. The funny thing is, even after he recalibrates it, the machine still switches to a candidate other than Obama when Obama is touched.

Video spurs concerns over West Virginia voting machines
www.timeswv.com/westvirginia/local_story_304194135.html
Here’s more coverage of the video. However, this time it seems like West VA officials are claiming it doesn’t show anything wrong at all. The article refers to comments made by DepSecO’State Sarah Bailey who apparently explained that:

…the machines allow voters to select a straight ticket and then depart from that for individual races. She said Secretary of State Betty Ireland plans to complain about the video to the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

I’ve just watched the video again and I think I see what Bailey means here. For some odd reason the official touches the button for “straight Democrat” and Obama lights up–but then, without saying anything, he inexplicably hits the “Nader” button. Then he does something else, the screen flashes and then he sees the Nader choice and apparently forgets that he, himself just pressed it seconds ago. So, it’s possible that the machine works fine.

Of course, this still doesn’t excuse why an uncalibrated machine was actively taking votes during early voting. It also doesn’t explain why voting machines are so crappily made that they have touchscreens that need to be calibrated when technology as ubiquitous as the iPhone doesn’t. It also doesn’t excuse the fact that there is no way to prove you voted one way or another with an electronic ballot machine. You simply must trust the technology to not fail.

W. Virginia Gives E-Voting VP an Award While Machines Malfunction
A day after West Virginia secretary of state Betty Ireland held a press conference to address vote-switching problems with touchscreen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software, she presented an award of merit to an ES&S vice president, who had abruptly and mysteriously left the company in May after 11 years of service, according to the Charleston Gazette.
blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/w-virginia-give.html
This just shows you how absurd our leaders can be. Giving awards to people for designing generally untrustworthy machines that can’t provide absolute proof that a citizen voted one way or another.

So, that’s it for today regarding election irregularity news. I’ll post more later if anything new comes along, but today is Halloween so I may not hear about it until tomorrow. Either way, I’ll be posting about voting irregularities when ever I think it’s necessary.

Concerned about your vote counting? You should be. Check out this documentary I helped with. It talks about how a growing pile of evidence suggests that (at the very least) our election system is deeply flawed. Here it is in its entirety compliments of the filmmakers and Vimeo.com:

Head over to StealingAmericaTheMovie.Org to buy this movie on DVD.