Together with complaints beginning to surface about pre-poll electronic voting, this should ensure that whoever wins the White House in November will be dogged for months with claim and counter-claim about the legitimacy of their win.
If nothing else, media coverage of this looming dog fight should divert our attention from whatever gloomy new global financial crises rear up next month.
Black America Web reports:
Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has asked the Justice Department to turn over its investigations of possible voter fraud or suppression to the special prosecutor investigating the U.S. Attorneys firing scandal.
It's the latest move in the ongoing battle between the Democratic and Republican campaigns over who will be allowed to vote.
Part of the problem is the switch by states from locally managed voting lists to statewide database operations -- required under federal law -- that was designed to be more efficient has instead led to the flagging of discrepancies between voting registration information and other official records, sometimes because of mistakes outside of the control of voters.
The Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in 2002, was intended to upgrade voting equipment and procedures to streamline the registration and confirmation process following reported problems in the 2000 presidential race that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the election of George W. Bush.
The owner of a signature-gathering firm has been arrested on suspicion of voter registration fraud, authorities said Sunday.Mark Anthony Jacoby, who owns the firm Young Political Majors, is accused of registering himself to vote twice - in 2006 and in 2007 - using the address of a childhood home in Los Angeles where he no longer lived.
The Secretary of State's Office said Jacoby used the address to meet a state requirement that signature-gatherers sign a declaration stating that they are either registered to vote in California or are eligible to do so.
While The Wall Street Journal ran with this:
The U.S. Supreme Court quashed attempts to force hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters to undergo added scrutiny in Ohio, potentially dealing a setback to John McCain less than three weeks before the election.The unanimous decision set aside a lower-court order that would require election officials to examine more closely the legitimacy of many new voter registrations.
The Washington Post went thus:
Thousands of voters across the country must reestablish their eligibility in the next three weeks in order for their votes to count on Nov. 4, a result of new state registration systems that are incorrectly rejecting them. The challenges have led to a dozen lawsuits, testy arguments among state officials and escalating partisan battles. Because many voters may not know that their names have been flagged, eligibility questions could cause added confusion on Election Day, beyond the delays that may come with a huge turnout.
The Charleston Gazette weighed in with:
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.
"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.
When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."
Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.
When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.
On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.
Finally, Portfolio.com reveals:
The electronic voting machines used in 18 of New Jersey's 21 counties can be hacked into in as little as seven minutes and manipulated to alter votes or fix elections, a new report by a Princeton University professor shows.
The report, by Andrew Appel of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, was released Friday following a hearing in an ongoing lawsuit to void the machines as unreliable.
"The AVC Advantage is too insecure to use in New Jersey," Appel concluded of the machine he tested over the summer. "New Jersey should not use any version of the AVC Advantage that it has not actually examined with the assistance of skilled computer-security experts."
Appel, a computer expert, tested New Jersey's most often-used touch-screen voting machine over the summer after questions arose about the accuracy of vote totals on some machines used in the Feb. 5 presidential primary.
His tests involved two machines that were used that day, including one that malfunctioned, said Penny Venetis, a law professor at Rutgers School of Law-Newark and co-director of its constitutional litigation clinic. Venetis represents the Coalition for Peace Action and others who have sued to force New Jersey to scrap its 10,000 electronic voting machines and return to paper balloting.
"We want these machines to be decommissioned. Enough is enough," Venetis said.
No comments:
Post a Comment