Elections News Stories

Excerpts of Key Elections News Stories in Major Media

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Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she opened her mail [and] discovered three computer discs. The discs contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland's new electronic voting machines. An independent report commissioned by the state of Maryland...shows myriad other security flaws. Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines malfunction, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked. Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS — a touch screen version of the Diebold machine — showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election. Cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore [says] Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured. The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting." There is also the matter of computer glitches. In primary elections...machines malfunctioned in Texas, where 100,000 votes were added. In Maryland, screens froze and memory cards went missing. Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican running for reelection, advised residents to vote by absentee ballot because he had no confidence in the machines. Electronic voting machines were supposed to be the solution to the paper ballot problems from the 2000 presidential election. But to many critics, America's voting system has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.

A Florida law that bars exit polling near voting places violates the press' rights under the First Amendment, a lawsuit filed by The Associated Press and five television networks alleges. The lawsuits...contend that state laws that prohibit asking a voter a "fact" or "opinion" within 100 feet of a polling place is unconstitutional. The AP and the five television networks - ABC, CNN, CBS, Fox News and NBC - formed a consortium to collect exit-polling data in Florida and other states. The news organizations had also challenged a 2004 directive by Ohio's elections chief against exit polling within 100 feet of a voting place. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson ruled the verbal order by Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell before the 2004 presidential election violated the press' rights under the First Amendment. A federal judge ruled in 1988 that a Florida law prohibiting exit polling within 150 feet of polling places was unconstitutional.

Note: A university study of exit polls in the 2004 election showed strong evidence of elections manipulations. Could this be why certain powerful individuals want to limit exit polls?

Election results were held up for six days in Cuyahoga County last May, testing the patience of voters and damaging their confidence. Ohio's most populous county will hold its second election in November using touch-screen voting machines made by North Canton-based Diebold Inc. The first attempt at electronic voting during the May primary was marred by problems, including poll workers who were not prepared to operate the machines and memory cards that were misplaced or lost. Vote counts were delayed six days when roughly 18,000 improperly printed absentee ballots had to be hand-counted because they couldn't be scanned by Diebold's optical scan machines. The county...isn't alone nationally. In Cook County, Ill., results were delayed a week because of mechanical and human failures connected to new voting machines. At a recent meeting, where a kitchen timer ticks off each speaker's allotted five minutes during the public comment period, voter Daniel Kozminski of Solon questioned the integrity of Diebold's machines, citing various reports. He also scoffed at the board's refusal to post results from individual precincts on the Web to help verify vote totals. Diebold has defended its machines from several disparaging studies, including one by a Princeton University computer science professor which claims the company's machines are vulnerable to hacking. On the net - Black Box Voting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Note: Memory cards were lost? That would mean hundreds—if not thousands—of votes could go uncounted. Why is this not getting more press coverage? For more: http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Three Senate Democrats proposed emergency legislation today to reimburse states for printing paper ballots that can be ready at polling places in case of problems with electronic voting machines on Nov. 7. The proposal is a response to grass-roots pressure and growing concern by local and state officials about touch-screen machines. “If someone asks for a paper ballot they ought to be able to have it,” said Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Dozens of states are using optical-scan and touch-screen machines to comply with federal laws intended to phase out lever and punch-card machines after the hanging-chads confusion of the 2000 presidential election. Widespread problems were reported with the new technology and among poll workers using the machines this year in primaries in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio and elsewhere. Local and state officials have expressed concern that the new systems might not be ready to handle increased turnouts. Election experts fear that the lack of a paper trail with most touch-screen machines will leave no way to verify votes in case of fraud or computer failure. Last week, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland, a Republican, joined the skeptics, saying he lacked confidence in his state’s new $106 million electronic system and suggesting that state officials offer all voters paper ballots as an alternative.

Note: To sign an online petition supporting the move for paper ballots in case of problems with electronic ones, click here. For another great effort to clean up our elections, click here. And for lots more reliable, verifiable information on elections cover-ups: http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Almost half of all Americans believe the November elections have more influence than market forces. For them, the plunge at the pump is about politics, not economics. According to a new Gallup poll, 42 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections." Fifty-three percent of those surveyed did not believe in this conspiracy theory, while 5 percent said they had no opinion. The excitement—and suspicion—among U.S. motorists follows a post-summer decline in gasoline prices that even veteran analysts and gas station owners concede has been steeper than usual. The retail price of gasoline has plunged by 50 cents, or 17 percent, over the past month to average $2.38 a gallon nationwide, according to Energy Department statistics. That is 42.5 cents lower than a year ago, when the energy industry was still reeling from the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which damaged petroleum platforms, pipelines and refineries across the Gulf Coast. Fimat USA oil analyst Antoine Halff said there is no doubt that "the downturn in prices is welcome news from an electoral standpoint for the ruling party." But he scoffed at the notion that the U.S. president had the power to muscle around a global market.

There is little assurance your vote will count. As we've been reporting almost nightly...for more than a year, electronic voting machines are placing our democracy at risk. These machines time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error, and many of them have no voter-verified paper trail. Only 27 states have laws requiring the use of voter-verified paper trails. 15 states [have] no mandated requirements for safeguarding your vote. During the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine...added nearly 3,900 additional votes to Bush's total. Officials caught the machine's error because only 638 voters cast presidential ballots at that precinct, but in a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly? [In] the May primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio...the electronic voting machines' four sources of vote totals -- individual ballots, paper trail summary, election archives and memory cards -- didn't even match up. The report concluded that relying on the current system for Cuyahoga County's more than 1.3 million people should be viewed as "a calculated risk." Are we really willing to risk our democracy? A 2005 Government Accountability Office report on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears of watchdog groups and election officials. "There is evidence that some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." That is simply unacceptable. Congress and the White House need to immediately take steps to assure the integrity of electronic voting with paper trails that could be audited in any recount.

Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information on the various aspects of the elections cover-up, see http://www.wanttoknow.info/electionsinformation

An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections since the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat...of last week's Election Day debacle. In Maryland last Tuesday, a combination of human blunders and technological glitches caused long lines and delays in vote-counting. The problems, which followed ones earlier this year in Ohio, Illinois and several other states, have contributed to doubts among some experts about whether the new systems are reliable. What is clear is that electronic machines have their own imponderables. In Montgomery County, the breakdown came when election officials failed to provide precinct workers with the access cards needed to operate electronic voting machines. In Prince George's County, computers...failed to transmit data to the central election office. At least nine other states have had trouble this year with new voting technology. In Ohio, results from the May primary election were delayed for nearly a week in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) when thousands of absentee ballots were incorrectly formatted. Twenty-seven states require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail available for auditing during a recount, but an analysis of Cuyahoga County's paper trail...showed that a tenth of the receipts were uncountable. For several years, prominent computer scientists have taken aim at the electronic voting machines. In analyses of the software that runs widely used models of the machines...scientists have shown how they could manipulate the machine to report a vote total that differed from the actual total cast by voters. In the Nov. 7 election, more than 80 percent of voters will use electronic voting machines.

Note: For lots more critical information on elections, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel Wednesday to claims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnerable to hacking that could alter vote totals or disable machines. In a paper posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. About 80 percent of American voters are expected to use some form of electronic voting in the upcoming election. The AccuVote-TS is commonly used across the country, along with a newer model, the AccuVote-TSx. The machine Felten tested, obtained in May from an undisclosed source, was the same type used across Maryland in its primary election Tuesday, according to Ross Goldstein, a deputy administrator with the state's Board of Elections. Felten and graduate students Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman...say they designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong. The programs were able to modify vote totals or cause machines to break down, something that could alter the course of an election if machines were located in crucial polling stations.

Note: To see the full paper on Princeton's website along with an excellent video demonstrating how election results can easily be corrupted: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting. These machines have been used in several previous elections. As there was no paper trail for most of the electronic machines, we have no way of knowing if votes were manipulated. For more on this topic vital to our democracy, see our Elections Information Center at http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation.

New election machines, as mandated and funded by federal law, may create a new election debacle instead of correcting the old one. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which allocated $3.6 billion for all 50 states to update their voting systems. Some industry analysts suggest that the government implemented the new technology too quickly to the detriment of not only security and performance of the new machines, but the integrity of our democratic process. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at John Hopkins University...performed an analysis of voting machines produced by Diebold. But his recommendation that the machines not be used in elections fell on deaf ears. NOW traveled to Oakland County, Michigan on Primary Day, where election workers encountered more than a few frustrating snags, even when demonstrating the machines for us. In one instance, it took five attempts for the machine to accept a ballot. We also checked in on other states. What we found were alarming scenes of computer and human error, poor results validation, nonexistent contingency plans, and extreme vulnerability to tampering. In half of 37 primaries held this year, there were technical problems associated with the new HAVA-mandated technology. These included an extra 100,000 votes recorded but never cast in Texas, which was blamed on a programming error [and] ballot counting malfunctions in Iowa that declared losing candidates as winners.

It's hard to believe that nearly six years after the disasters of Florida in 2000, states still haven't mastered the art of counting votes accurately. The most troubling evidence comes from Ohio...whose electoral votes decided the 2004 presidential election. A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland...recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast. Investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised. Some of these problems may be explored further in a federal lawsuit challenging Ohio's administration of its 2004 election. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell...has been criticized for many decisions he made on election matters that year. New York's Legislature was shamefully slow in passing the law needed to start adopting new voting machines statewide. Now localities are just starting to evaluate voting machine companies as they scramble to put machines in place in time for the 2007 election. Because of a federal lawsuit, New York has to make the switch a year early.

Note: Why has the media barely mentioned the federal lawsuit challenging Ohio's administration of the 2004 election? This was the state that determined the winner. For more on elections cover-up, click here.

You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives. I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p. So why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century? The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to computerize voting. While computers are very proficient...we should not rely on computers alone to count votes in public elections. The people who program them make mistakes. They are more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. Even an event as common as a power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a magnetic card that holds votes to permanently lose its data. In a 2003 election in Boone County, Ind., DREs recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer than 6,000 registered voters. Consider one simple mode of attack...called overwriting the boot loader. In overwriting it an attacker can, for example, make the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a completely fabricated result. To stage this attack, a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to the computer's memory card slot. DREs have a transparency problem: You can't easily discover if they've been tinkered with. It's one thing to suspect that officials have miscounted hanging chads, but something else entirely for people to wonder whether a corrupt programmer working behind the scenes has rigged a computer to help his side.

Problems with elections in Ohio's most populous county are so severe that it's unlikely they can be completely fixed by November, or even by the 2008 presidential election, a report commissioned by Cuyahoga County and released Tuesday says. A nonprofit group hired to review the county's first election with new electronic voting machines found several problems with the May 2 primary. "The election system in its entirety exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences, especially in the event of a close election," wrote Steven Hertzberg, director of the study by the San Francisco-based Election Science Institute. The report, part of a $341,000 review ordered by county commissioners, suggests that the county revamp poll worker training, develop a plan to ensure all electronic votes are counted in the case of a manual count and consider adding machines to avoid long lines that might scare voters away. Mark Radke, director of marketing for Diebold subsidiary Diebold Election Systems...blamed inadequately trained poll workers, saying the totals didn't always add up because some changed memory cards without also changing the paper receipt rolls.

Note: Interesting that the electronic voting machine makers are blaming the poll workers for vote totals that didn't add up.. Interesting also to note that no mention is made of the serious problems in this county during the 2004 presidential election. For more reliable information: http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Computerized voting was supposed to be the cure for ballot fiascos such as the 2000 presidential election, but activist groups say it has only worsened the problem. Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers and prone to temperamental fits of technology that have assigned votes to the wrong candidate. About 80 percent of American voters will use some form of electronic voting in the November election. New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study last month that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge" and a PC card. Diebold spokesman David Bear said his company's technology "has proven to be more accurate" than punch cards. The company's former CEO, Wally O'Dell, authored a 2003 Republican fundraising letter that promised, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Bear said there has been no evidence in any election of hackers breaching electronic security measures. However...Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action...said, "We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent," he said. In the state's biggest county, home to Albuquerque, touch-screens machines purchased from Sequoia lost 13,000 votes.

Note: For lots more on elections problems, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota. The state uses electronic voting machines. The experts...concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome. The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting. The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits. Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines.

Most of the electronic voting machines widely adopted since the disputed 2000 presidential election "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections," a report out Tuesday concludes. There are more than 120 security threats to the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems, the study by the Brennan Center for Justice says. For what it calls the most comprehensive review of its kind, the New York City-based non-partisan think tank convened a task force of election officials, computer scientists and security experts to study e-voting vulnerabilities. Together, the three systems account for 80% of the voting machines that will be used in this November's election. Lawsuits have been filed in at least six states to block the purchase or use of computerized machines. Election officials in California and Pennsylvania recently issued urgent warnings to local polling supervisors about potential software problems in touch-screen voting machines. Among the findings: Using corrupt software to switch votes from one candidate to another is the easiest way to attack all three systems; the most vulnerable voting machines use wireless components open to attack by "virtually any member of the public with some knowledge and a personal digital assistant;" even electronic systems that use voter-verified paper records are subject to attack unless they are regularly audited; most states have not implemented election procedures or countermeasures to detect software attacks.

Note: For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on elections manipulations:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation

Nov. 2, 2004...the exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. The discrepancy [was] beyond the statistical margin of error. The media largely ignored this exit poll discrepancy. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman of the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign...used the power of his office to affect turnout and thwart voters in heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohio have been documented. In the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean: "More than a quarter of all Ohio voters reported problems with their voting experience." 64 percent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan systems. According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office investigation, such systems contained flaws that "could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to...the integrity of the voting process." The report also indicated that for rural and small-town precincts...the difference between the exit poll results and the official count is three times greater in precincts where voters used machines than in precincts using paper ballots alone.

The blogosphere has been abuzz. But in the days since Rolling Stone magazine published a long piece that accused Republicans of widespread and intentional cheating that affected the outcome of the last presidential election, the silence in America's establishment media has been deafening. In terms of bad news judgment, this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous "Downing Street memo," the London Times story that was initially greeted by the U.S. media with a collective yawn. Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone mega-essay is titled "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" While Kennedy's article perhaps gives far too much weight to suspicious discrepancies between exit polls and the final election outcome, it meticulously asserts and documents questionable methods of purging voter rolls, intentionally created long lines at Democratic polling places, court-defying practices regarding registrations and provisional ballots, a phony terrorist alert on Election Day and final tallies in some counties and precincts that...simply don't make sense. Three Cleveland-area election officials have been indicted for illegally rigging the recount. Kennedy's 11,000-word article was Rolling Stone's cover story. But for the most part, national and regional newspapers, the major networks and news services have behaved as if the article was never published. But Kennedy's article is not just old news rehashed. Its 11,000 words, not counting the 208 footnotes, most of which contain Web addresses for links to source information.

Note: To read Kennedy's detailed allegations on the Rolling Stone website:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

In a country that spends so much time extolling the glories of democracy, it's amazing how many elected officials go out of their way to discourage voting. States are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups to register new voters. Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration efforts in the state. The Legislature did this by adopting a law that seems intended to scare away anyone who wants to run a voter registration drive. Since registration drives are particularly important for bringing poor people, minority groups and less educated voters into the process, the law appears to be designed to keep such people from voting. In Washington, a new law prevents people from voting if the secretary of state fails to match the information on their registration form with government databases. There are many reasons that names, Social Security numbers and other data may not match, including typing mistakes. The state is supposed to contact people whose data does not match, but the process is too tilted against voters. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on volunteers who slip up in registration drives. Protecting the integrity of voting is important, but many of these rules seem motivated by a partisan desire to suppress the vote, and particular kinds of voters, rather than to make sure that those who are entitled to vote [can] do so.

A a report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines for an organization called Black Box Voting. Hursti found unheralded vulnerabilities in the machines. Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever documented. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that, if it contained malicious code, could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate. Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems. If it so happens that someone not supposed to use the machine—or an election official who wants to put his or her thumb on the scale of democracy—takes advantage of this fast track to fraud, that's not Diebold's problem. "When you're using a paperless voting system, there is no security," says David Dill, a Stanford professor who founded the election-reform organization Verified Voting.

The League of Women Voters has been signing up voters ever since women won the right to vote in 1920. But now, for the first time in the League's storied history, a branch of the organization has shut down its operations to protest a new Florida law that the League claims will have a chilling effect on voter registration -- in a state that already has one of the nation's most notoriously dysfunctional election systems. The League's Florida branch acknowledged that it had recently ceased efforts to register voters because of what it calls the law's draconian fines against organizations (other than political parties) for submitting forms late. The League of Women Voters of Florida joined several other pubic interest and labor groups, including the Florida AFL-CIO, in challenging the constitutionality of the law, which went into effect Jan. 1. They are asking the U.S. District Court to immediately suspend the fines -- which the groups say could bankrupt their voter registration budgets. The challenged law imposes civil fines of $250 for each voter registration application submitted more than 10 days after it is collected, $500 for each application submitted after any voter registration deadline, and $5,000 for each application [not] submitted. Plaintiffs are strictly liable for these fines, even if their inability to meet the statutory deadlines results from events beyond their control, such as the destruction of applications in a hurricane."

Note: For more on serious risk of election fraud, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation and see this week's Newsweek article "Will Your Vote Count in 2006?"

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.