Voting issues, no news coverage

Found info raising issues around U.S. electoral process. See this Wikipedia website before it gets deleted...

Examples of issues

* The reliability and accuracy of electronic voting machines has not been established. In some cases they were designed without capability for paper trail or auditability, and cited expert computer scientists state that these machines had a very high potential to be tampered, citing such possibilities as the machines being reprogrammed on election day, fuindamental design flaws, gaps in security logs and the like. The election incident reporting system (EIRS (http://www.voterprotect.org)) has recieved many reports from voters and election officials of votes for Kerry being recorded as votes for Bush. In a letter to Bush dated Aug. 14, 2003 Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold (makers of electronic voting machines) wrote that he was "committed to deliver the next election's Electoral Votes to the president next year" [3] (http://www.iht.com/articles/519557.html). This event has further fuelled suspicions of fraud. Electronic voting machines are not generally designed to produce a paper audit trail, if there is a doubt as to whether the machine has accurately represented and counted votes, there may not be a way to independantly verify the election results. [4] (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65563,00.html) Because of this, some encourage the use of open-architecture voting machines.

* At least one voting machine began counting back down to zero when it reached 32000 votes; manufacturer ES&S are said to have known about (but not rectified) this issue for two years since the same problem had arisen in a previous mayoral election. (Broward Co., FL) [5] (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ibsys/20041105/lo_wplg/2439900)

* Voter suppression, intimidation, lost ballots, efforts to discredit citizens that may be validly registered. This has the aim of reducing turn out for people believed to support the other side.

More info from '2004 U.S. presidential election controversy'. Election monitors from elsewhere were asked to observe the U.S. voting process.

A small team of international election monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were invited to monitor the election. [snip]

Press comment by International Monitors:

"International monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures fell short in many ways of the best global practices. The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system. Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states and included citizens of 36 countries, ranging from Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia and Belarus."

(Link to come.)


CBC News article discusses some weaknesses and discrepancies in U.S. electoral system: 'Counting the Vote,' October 27, 2004.