ACLU Sues Ohio Over E-Voting Changes

Suit Argues Tabulating Votes At Central Location Could Lead To Increased Error, Tossed Ballots

(CBS/AP)  A federal lawsuit filed Thursday seeks to block Ohio's biggest county from moving ahead with plans to switch to a paper voting system for the March 4 presidential primary.

The American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit argues that the system to be put in place in Cuyahoga County violates voters' constitutional rights because it doesn't allow them to review their ballots and correct errors.

In most counties with optical scanners, cast ballots can be immediately counted at the precinct level, allowing a voter to make a correction if a ballot is rejected due to a mistake, such as voting for too many candidates, the ACLU said.

But a centralized vote tabulation would not give voters in the precincts notice of ballot errors - and the opportunity to correct mistakes that could invalidate their votes, the ACLU alleges. The suit says it is therefore unconstitutional and violates the Voting Rights Act.

With more than 1 million registered voters, Cuyahoga County plans to send paper ballots filled out by voters to a central location - the Board of Election's warehouse near downtown Cleveland - to be scanned and counted.

Cuyahoga elections have been a major concern for Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner due to persistent problems adjusting to the touch-screen voting system supplied by Premier Elections Solutions. The county is hurriedly switching from electronic touch-screen machines to the new system after prodding from Brunner, a Democrat who considers optical-scan voting to be more secure.

The ACLU lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court names Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections and the county's three commissioners.

A message requesting comment was left Thursday with Jeff Ortega, a spokesman on Brunner's staff.

Brunner authorized a study last year that helped her conclude touch-screen voting can be manipulated. As a result, she wants all 57 counties that use touch screens to switch by November - at an estimated cost of $31 million.

Brunner's edict came in the shadow of the many voting problems reported in Ohio on Election Day 2004, which included questions about the accuracy of vote totals in precincts using electronic machines. Sen. John Kerry conceded the election to President Bush after narrowly losing Ohio's 20 electoral votes, despite exit polls showing he had carried the state.

Some counties in Ohio are balking at switching systems. Fulton County announced last week it would not comply. Elections officials in Union County say they don't have the money. Franklin County is expressing concerns.

Keith Cunningham, the director of the Allen County Board of Elections, said, "The changes being proposed by Brunner are at such a late date, and so abrupt that all of the counties that these decisions affect are struggling with them," he said. "You simply can't turn the election system on a dime."

Earlier this week, the Ohio Republican Party invited Republican elections board members from around the state to gather at a private meeting Tuesday to discuss "the party's response to the Secretary of State's voting proposals," according to an e-mail from a party official obtained by The Associated Press.

The e-mail said, "Your efforts to keep the information above confidential are appreciated."

Jason Mauk, political director of the Ohio Republican Party, sent the e-mail. He said the meeting was an effort to gather feedback from Republican elections board members.

"I don't think it's any secret that Ohio has election boards made up of partisan members and we believe it's important to communicate with those people on the boards who are affiliated with the Republican Party," Mauk said.

The private Republican meeting injects partisanship into a debate over voting technology that shouldn't be political, Brunner said Monday.

"This is not about political gamesmanship," Brunner said. "It's about doing what's right for the voters of Ohio of both parties."

When asked whether Democrats were holding a similar meeting, Brunner said, "Absolutely not."

Other States Grappling With Electronic Voting

A New Jersey congressman hopes to introduce a bill in the House that would offer $600 million to voting districts across the nation that convert to paper ballots or put in audit systems in time for the November presidential election.

The bill, dubbed The Confidence in Voting Act of 2008, seeks to fix what many critics fear is a potential problem with paperless electronic voting machines - a lack of voter-verified paper records.

The bill, to be introduced Thursday, would provide incentives for states to provide verified, audited balloting for the general election, but would not mandate standards for all states.

Voters in all or parts of 20 states, including New Jersey, now cast ballots electronically without backup paper verification, said New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt, who has sponsored the bill in the House.

"Millions of Americans will be voting on unreliable electronic machines without paper ballots. There will be questions that cannot be resolved because there is no way of determining a voter's intention. All you have is an electronic memory," said Holt, a Democrat.

Holt said he crafted the emergency bill because the House has not approved his earlier measure that mandated the use of backup paper ballots and audits in time for the presidential election.

Researchers have found in tests that the machines could be corrupted with magnets or handheld electronic devices, are vulnerable to hacking, and have issues with software reliability and security.

The New Jersey Legislature gave its Division of Elections until Jan. 1 to retrofit 10,000 electronic voting machines in the state with paper printers. But lab tests found flaws with the retrofitted printers, so the Attorney General declined to certify the newly configured machines and missed the deadline.

The Legislature then extended the deadline until June 3, meaning New Jerseyans will cast ballots in the Feb. 5 presidential primary without paper backup, and election officials won't be able to audit disputed election results.

In Colorado, Republican and Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill Wednesday allowing Secretary of State Mike Coffman to retest and possibly recertify the electronic voting machines he disqualified last month.

The measure (House Bill 1155) allows Coffman to test the equipment after they have undergone software upgrades or other changes. However, it specifies that he can't relax the standards and must explain any decision to recertify a machine.

Lawmakers working on how this year's election should be handled are leaning toward using paper ballots but some electronic voting machines must be available for handicapped voters and anyone else who wants them under federal law. In addition, some of the optical scanners needed to count paper ballots were among those machines decertified last month. Coffman has said there are some proposed changes that he would like to test on the machines.

In a written statement, state Reps. David Balmer, R-Centennial, and Rosemary Marshall, D-Denver, and Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon said they were working with their colleagues, county clerks, Coffman, the governor and citizens to develop "a reliable, paper-based voting system."

"We'll need a certain amount of electronic voting machines to comply with federal law. But we believe that the votes cast in 2008 should be recorded on paper," they said.

They introduced the bill along with Sen. Steve Johnson, R-Fort Collins.

Coffman requested the bill so he could avoid a lengthy appeals process and focus on fixing problems with the machines.

"The bill definitely moves us in the right direction," he said.

In New York, a federal judge approved the state's latest plan for bringing the state into compliance with federal voting laws.

New York is years behind deadlines to comply with the Help America Vote Act, which was enacted after the contested 2000 presidential elections to ensure better accuracy and access for the disabled.

U.S. District Judge Gary Sharpe ordered the state Board of Elections on Wednesday to follow through with the plans it gave him to meet the requirements of the law.

If the state acts on the agreed timeline, voting machines accessible to the disabled will be available in every polling place around the state by this fall's federal elections. The state would then follow up by replacing all pull-lever machines by the fall 2009 state elections.

Sharpe, who is overseeing a 2006 U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against the state, has expressed frustration with the state's "paralysis" on the issue until now. He had considered appointing a special master to step in, and at one point threatened to jail members of the elections board on contempt charges.

HAVA requires New York to replace mechanical pull-lever machines that were introduced more than a century ago with high-tech machines. The pull-lever machines don't create an adequate paper record and they don't allow voters to "audit" their vote to ensure accuracy.

It also requires the state to provide at least one machine accessible to the disabled at each polling place.

Voting rights advocates, and advocates for the disabled who have long been frustrated with New York's failure to comply with HAVA, were relieved Wednesday by the judge's decision.

"So, progress at last," said Susan Dooha, executive director of nonprofit The Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York. "The next step is accessible sites and materials for the public. We invite the BOE (elections board) to roll up its sleeves and work with us to make this a success."

One reason New York has fallen so far behind in meeting the HAVA standards is that the state created more stringent requirements for voting machines than the federal government did. No machine has successfully met the standard and been run through the appropriate tests to reach certification.

The federal government has argued that the state's strict rules are no excuse for noncompliance.

But some voting advocates have said New York's high standards and long delays have given the state the benefit of learning from other states' mistakes with the newer, high-tech machines.

For example, states including California, Ohio and Florida have found that touch-screen voting machines are inadequate.

"This state has the opportunity to do this right," Bartoletti said. "And even given the judge's rulings, we should be opting for not making the same mistakes that other states made and getting a secure machine that doesn't take us down the road of the failed technology of the past."

[mcvet]

I like it!!

[watcher269-2009]

Good otherwise the votes will end up like the White house emails;

These LAW breakers should be hanged

Very, very late last night, just before midnight, the Bush administration submitted a filing in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, our lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve and restore millions of missing emails. We first documented the massive loss of White House e-mails in our April 2007 report, WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act.

With this new filing, the White House has admitted that although it has long known about the missing emails, it did nothing to recover them, or discover how and why they went missing in the first place. The missing emails are important historical records that belong not to the Bush administration, but to the American people. As a result, the public deserves a full accounting and hopefully, now that the matter is before a federal court, we will get one.

The White House has now admitted that it does not have an effective system for storing and preserving emails. This is no mere technicality; it is this failure that led to the likely destruction of over 10 million email. What the White House has not explained is why it abandoned the electronic record-keeping system used by the prior administration %u2014 a system that properly preserved White House email %u2014 but did not replace it with another effective and appropriate system.

[inventagod]

Yeah, Dubya, we all realized you stole the elections...

[gunownerdan]

These new electronic voting machines are very dangerosu to freedom and liberty. They can easily be hacked, controlled by a virus, or even secretly programmed with invisible computer code.

[gunownerdan]

These new electronic voting machines are very dangerous to freedom and liberty. They can easily be hacked, controlled by a virus, or even secretly programmed with invisible computer code.

[ne_patriot7]

"The changes being proposed by Brunner are at such a late date, and so abrupt that all of the counties that these decisions affect are struggling with them," he said. "You simply can''t turn the election system on a dime."


I bet I could take a template of a ballot to almost any printer in my area and have 20 million copies done in a few weeks.

So much for that argument.

[youngat64]

There are a lot more problems with our election system than electronic ballots. I live in Washington state and we are going to an all mail election system. How are they going to determine that several hundred thousand ballots were filled out and submitted by the registered voter that the ballot was mailed to. How do you determine a voters intention, is the criteria that it agree with the examiners political opinions? Ballots mailed to retirement homs, assisted living, are they filled out by the voter or someone else after having the voter sign (I know a person that fills out his parents ballot because they have sever alzheimers). The first step is to return to in person voting with photo ID (in Washington a state issued ID card is easy to get). Mail in ballots would have to have the signature witnessed or notarized.

[rowdytexan2]

Vote on paper, yes!!!!! This bill should have been enacted right after the first election was stolen!

Return the *** machines and demand a refund, then put that money into printing ballots.

I have a Dell printer I use to print out 20,000 invoices a day. What''s the big hold up printing ballots? The paper costs a couple of dollars a ream, and the toner costs about $250 for 120,000 invoices.
How much does one of those freaking rigged machines cost?

[lilvinnyb]

For all those soooo upset about the missing emails. lets not forget the missing "rose lawfirm records"....which mysteriously re-appeared after being "missing" for 2 years in the Clinton white house.