The Democratic party is again facing questions about its handling of the primary process in some precincts in New York City, where initial "unofficial" tallies reported zero votes for Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, rival of local junior senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the party's presidential nomination. The undercounts appear to represent severe distortions of the actual tally, and occurred in areas where Obama's support rivaled Clinton's.
The question has been raised by several party leaders as to how any candidate could be expected to have received zero votes and why the problem was not corrected sooner. Some have suggested the extreme error points to the unlikelihood of wrongdoing, while others allege some sort of conspiracy to steal enough votes to add one or two delegates to the Clinton tally. There is no evidence of any campaign operatives being involved.
The New York Times has reported that its own review of election night tally reporting "found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district."
Their report also found that some of these contests were close enough that one or two votes could sway the precinct. "In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136. In an even more heavily black district in Brooklyn — where the vote on primary night was recorded as 118 to 0 for Mrs. Clinton — she now barely leads, 118 to 116."
The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has issued a statement regarding reports of voter-registration irregularities in Louisiana that allegedly led to the denial of the vote to hundreds of people. The Obama campaign website published the following:
The Obama campaign submitted an urgent request for assistance to the Secretary of State’s Division of Elections today, after receiving widespread reports from Democrats across Louisiana who reported that they were not allowed to vote because their party affiliation had been switched. Hundreds of Louisiana democrats went to the polls to vote in today’s presidential primary and found that they were now on registration lists as Independent or Unaffiliated voters.
The outcome of the voting in Louisiana appears to be a win for the Illinois senator, but his campaign has been vehement in pushing for greater access to the polls for would-be voters, and took issue with the manner in which voters' party registration was allegedly switched without their knowledge.
The investigative blogsite, Bradblog, has published this summary of a wave of irregularities in the primaries held in recent days:
Georgia: Widespread bottlenecks for voters as problems occur with Diebold's new e-pollbook system and the state's new Photo ID restrictions. Voters waited in line for up to two hours in some places.
New Mexico: 17,000 (11%) forced to vote on provisional ballots in Democratic Caucus as previously registered Democrats find they are no longer on voter rolls recently privatized by voting machine company ES&S.
Arizona: We've begun receiving reports from voters and local officials of polling places where some 40% of voters were forced to vote on provisionals, after state registration system outsourced to ES&S. [UPDATE: One such report is now published here, from a poll worker who reports that of 1291 ballots cast at her polling place, 540 --- some 41% --- were forced to vote provisionally.]
California: Various reports of voters registered for one party to find they were switched to another, or not registered at all. Confusion about how to handle non-partisan voters in Los Angeles County leads to nearly 100,000 votes which may not be counted properly.
Problems with electronic voter-registration records, with the management of these systems by private contractors, and especially where non-verifiable touchscreen machines have been used —leaving no physical record of voter intent, only a potentially (and in many cases to date proven to be) flawed electronic "tally"— are occurring in a disturbingly high number of places, and irregularities are already threatening to undermine the overall integrity of the 2008 election process across the United States.
As the most widespread presidential primary vote in US history took place yesterday, across the continent and beyond (American Samoa also voted), there were glitches, confusion and unjustifiable waits in states across the country. Three examples stand out: touchscreen machines failing in New Jersey, a suspiciously confusing ballot in Los Angeles, and multiple irregularities in Georgia, where long waits, questionable ID laws and more failing Diebold machines made voting a serious challenge by any rational standards.
In the case of Georgia, the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) —who won the state convincingly— has requested an investigation into irregularities that may have prevented some from casting votes, including the up to 90-minute waits reported and isolated cases of voters then being directed to alternate polling locations and an alleged campaign of phone calls to elderly voters telling them they could vote by phone (a lie, apparently designed to prevent their voting).
In New Jersey, Governor Jon Corzine was forced to stand idle while his touchscreen voting machine did the same. Two touchscreen machines at the "Hoboken Fire Department Engine Company No. 2 on Washington Street would not work for about 45 minutes as the polls opened", according to a report by Brad Friedman, sourcing the Associated Press. Gov. Corzine was forced to wait at least 45 minutes while the problem was repaired. The votes were non-verifiable electronic votes, and FOX News reported that there were no provisional ballots made available at the polling place.
New Jersey is home to Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat, who is the leading proponent in Congress for voter-verified paper trails for all touchscreen machines. He has two bills currently pending debate, which would mandate a nationwide voter-verified paper trail standard. Some complain that more appropriate legislation would be to ban all touchscreen machines outright, due to their numerous vulnerabilities to computer error, human error and tampering.
In Los Angeles, perhaps the most serious irregularities occured. On a registration form that precedes the ballot itself, and that requires voters to select their party affiliation or non-partisan affiliation, selecting "Independent" had the effect of registering the voter, likely inadvertently, as a member of the "American Independent" party, making them ineligible to vote in the Democratic primary.
Independent or unaffiliated voters eligible to vote were required to select either "Decline to State" —which grammatically does not mean there is no party affiliation—, or otherwise "DTS" or "Non-partisan", all of which appear unrelated to the interest of an independent voter interested in choosing a Democratic candidate of preference.
Any independent voter who selected Independent (capital "I") and not DTS or the related option, will have no vote counted in the California primary. The Los Angeles city attorney Rocky Delgadillo has requested an inquiry into the problem, which could disenfranchise literally hundreds of thousands of Californians. The specific problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is no logical reason for voters to select the bubble, since they have requested the Democratic ballot and are either officially registered or not with any given party.
Delgadillo issued a statement saying "I urge the Secretary of State and County Registrar to do everything within their power to ensure that every vote is counted, and to carefully weigh voter intent against this confusing Los Angeles County ballot design. [...] Los Angeles' non-partisan voters must not be disenfranchised because of a confusing ballot design."
As many as 776,000 voters with no party affiliation were expected to go to the polls in Los Angeles County, a number in itself far higher than most states' overall primary electorate. The mass confusion could certainly cause a huge drop in the number of ballots counted, according to Los Angeles County election rules.
[ You can find more on voter-verified paper trails and the all-votes-count standard at VerifiedVoting.org, which also hosts a map showing which states still use unverifiable paperless touchscreens, and which states require paper trails, manual recounts, and what level of the legislative process pending legislation may be at, at present. ]
20 January :: Electronic voting machines in Horry County, South Carolina, have reportedly failed in 100% of its precincts, creating the real possibility that South Carolina's Republican primary vote cannot be confirmed by any official means; with the machines used already known to be vulnerable to hacking and malfunction, "Late in the week poll workers picked up the iVotronic machines that they are using today. They took them home on voting machine "sleepovers" and then set up the poll sites for today's primary", reports Brad Friedman for the investigative blog BRADBLOG... John McCain declared winner of South Carolina Republican party primary, outpacing close challenger Mike Huckabee 33% to 30%, despite reports of serious problems in touchscreen voting machines, unknown numbers of voters "turned away" at polls... Hillary Clinton has been declared winner of the Nevada caucuses, with Barack Obama finishing second (50% and 45% support among caucus-goers, respectively), in the run for the Democratic nomination; Mitt Romney has reportedly taken 40% more than his nearest rivals, finishing with 55% to Paul and McCain's 13% support... The annual Davos Economic Forum has been overshadowed by concerns of growing international economic instability, and fallout from the subprime mortgage lending crisis that hit US banks in the summer of 2007; The Financial Times reports "Even Klaus Schwab, the founder of the Davos meetings, sounds downbeat: 'The discussions in Davos will certainly be very dominated by the economic challenges we have at the moment — the aftermath of the subprime crisis, the transfer of capital from energy-consuming to energy-producing countries, inflationary tendencies'"... A team of economists in Britain has suggested the EU should implement a broad-based carbon tax in order to spur market adaptation to renewable fuels, instead of setting specific targets for the use of biofuels and renewable energy; the report suggests that specific funding for a transition to the widespread use of biofuels would be "a form of state support for an environmentally and economically harmful activity designed to consolidate existing price support mechanisms for vested interest groups, most notably farmers"... MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews has apologized for "callous" remarks about Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), in which he suggested she was elected in New York because her husband, fmr. pres. Bill Clinton, "messed around"; Matthews explained that his intention was to highlight that she performed well under pressure and gained respect in the public eye and among elected officials...
Across the United States, problems are being discovered with what are supposed to be the state of the art in balloting technology: digital touchscreen voting machines. Security questions were raised initially when the machines were widely distributed, by a handful of companies, with no hard-copy record of voters' intent, which led to a nationwide movement calling for "verified voting", or voter-verified paper trails.
State after state has accepted that the absolute standard for a truly reliable voting and vote-counting process must be a process where voters can actually see the official record of their votes, verify that their votes were recorded correctly, and where those hard-copies can then be checked by both machine and by human intervention, if such a recount is needed. Florida and California have both scrapped their touchscreen machines, amid mounting concerns about reliability and security.
A team of researchers at Princeton University has demonstrated the ease with which the machines can be hacked and thousands of votes shifted or stolen, leaving little or no trace and with no means by which to return to any record of "voter intent" (a standard which most states require constitutionally). Allegations of suspicious interactions between company executives at Diebold and other voting machine manufacturers or maintenance firms has raised fears that the machines have already been used to sway the outcome of past elections (Ohio in 2004 is one possible case).
In southern California, San Diego election workers were permitted to take the machines home with them on the eve of elections, leading to what is possible the most severe security breach in US elections since the 2000 debacle in Florida raised real concerns about the legitimacy of the vote-counting process. Instances of votes for one candidate actually being recorded for another are infamous and disturbingly frequent.
"In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics. Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices 'flip' from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish."
So, even where the "paper trail" is implemented, to shore up the technology against its own inherent flaws, there are problems with the quality of the manufacturing or maintenance, it would seem, leading to the possibility that votes are simply erased, lost, or never recorded. Roughly one-third of the electorate will cast their votes in November 2008 on touchscreen machines, unless action is taken to prevent this unproven technology from interfering with voters' ability to express their choice.
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