Seattle Weekly: News: When It Doesn’t Add Up by Rick Anderson
Burton, the Ohio University prof, helped conduct an Election Day voter survey in Las Vegas. Nevada is the only state to use voter-verified paper ballot printers that issue receipts showing, in code, how a person voted and allowing subsequent online verification that the vote was counted. More than 81 percent of 362 Nevada voters said they favored the ATM-style receipt to take home with them, Burton says. Thirty percent also said they’d use it to check their vote on the Web. “As unhealthy as Florida 2000 was, it does have the effect to bring change,” says Burton. “We weren’t thinking about this before. I expect we’re going to see a more robust debate.”
CBS News | Picking The President By Mail | November 16, 2004 14:37:26 by James K. Galbraith
[I]t is an injustice, an outrage and a scandal — a crime, really — that American citizens should have to wait for hours in the November rain in order to exercise the simple right to vote.
The remedy is voting by mail, the system now in place in the state of Oregon. In Oregon, there are no election day problems, because there is no election day. Instead, ballots are mailed to voters at their registered address, filled out and returned, with a signature verification. Participation rates are high — 63 percent of the voting age population this year, against a national average of 53 percent. Fraud is virtually nil. And as the ballots are paper (they are read by a scanning machine), there is a verifiable paper trail.
Most voters in Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which should, in accordance with Mrs. Gordon’s civics lessons from sixth grade, have given Kerry the Electoral College majority and the White House. Trouble is, those votes won’t be counted.
So where are these uncounted, but winning, votes? When I went to sleep the night of Nov. 2, Kerry was down in Ohio by 136,000 votes. But over a quarter million ballots had yet to be counted. Those abandoned ballots, overwhelmingly Democratic, sit in two piles, one called “spoiled” and the other “provisional.”
The ugly, secret shame of American democracy is that 2 million votes are “spoiled” in presidential elections — tossed away untallied as “unreadable.” And the nasty part is that roughly half are cast by African-Americans. To learn of this astonishing Jim Crow thumb on the U.S. electoral scales, you have to hunt through the appendixes of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida 2000 race. The government’s demographers concluded that of the 179,855 votes “spoiled” in Florida that year, 54 percent were cast by blacks. All other credible studies tell us that Florida is horribly typical of the nation.
High-Tech Jim Crow: Stealing Ohio’s Vote
Verified Voting: Our Position on Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election
by Verified Voting Foundation
November 15th, 2004
In the aftermath of the Nov. 2 election, many people have promoted theories and statistical evidence of major fraud or errors. Our position on this is being distorted and misinterpreted, so we would like to take this opportunity to clarify it.
We do not believe that there is any more reason to look for problems in this election than in previous elections, but auditing of all elections should be routine. Citizens should be able to do some of these audits.
The way to encourage trust in a system is to have independent checks on a system. The best way to encourage trust is to make that system so open that anyone can check it.
We advocate the publication of detailed election statistics on the Internet, and the analysis of those statistics by members of the public. In the long run, this will result in a much healthier election system.
The current high level of scrutiny of the election is a very healthy thing.
Nationwide Election Incidents – EIRS 1.0.5
Nationwide Election Incidents [interactive map]