The politicalization of government…..now there’s something GW was good at.

For at least four years, since the 2004 presidential election, when a veteran, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was the Democratic Party nominee, the Department of Veterans Affairs has blocked efforts to help U.S. soldiers register to vote at its facilities in all 50 states.

“This is politically motivated voter suppression,” said Scott Rafferty, an attorney based in Washington, D.C., who has fought the VA in federal courts since 2004 over the right to assist homeless people, including veterans, register to vote at a shelter on VA property in Menlo Park, Calif. “Now the political motivation might be different that the veteran running for president is a Republican.”

The issue has resurfaced, not merely on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, but because the VA — whose public affairs office did not answer telephone calls nor return requests to comment Monday — apparently has also stonewalled requests by U.S. senators for an explanation.

More at Alternet.com

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

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Yep, they sure did!

A team of university computer experts who examined the machines after the election suggested the problem was voter confusion over a poorly designed ballot that had drawn complaints from voters. The District 13 race was listed at the top of the second page of the ballot without the same type of header that preceded other races on the ballot.

“GAO acknowledges the possibility that the large undervote in Florida’s 13th Congressional District race could have been caused by factors such as voters who intentionally undervoted or voters who did not properly cast their ballots on the (voting machines), potentially because of issues relating to interaction between voters and ballot,” the government report said.

Does it matter whether undervoting was caused by a faulty machine or a “poorly designed ballot”? The fact remains… there was undervoting! Are republicans that hard-up for power that they’re happy to accept that so many voices weren’t heard on that day? Are they really that thrilled that democracy got thrown under the bus?

If republicans were TRUE Americans, they would want all votes to be counted. But they don’t. And they’re not. And they sicken me.

This ties in very well with my previous post.

If the only problem with using punch cards is hanging chads, wouldn’t it make more sense to stay away from computers and improve upon the puncher?

At Florida Polls, Touch Screens and Crossed Fingers

MIAMI — There will be no “hanging chads” this time around in Florida. The punch-card voting that plagued the 2000 presidential election in the state is long gone.

But with Florida’s primary on Tuesday, some in the state are bracing for more potential ballot trouble because the new electronic touch’screen machines in much of the state have aroused doubts of their own.

Florida legislators voted essentially to ban them earlier this year, after confusion in a 2006 congressional contest in Sarasota wound up in court. But the next set of machines will not be ready until the general election in November, forcing election officials to press the controversial machines back into use one more time.

Another thing congress is ignoring. Of course, they have much more important issues to deal with, such as steroid use in sports.

A company, whose head is the former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party and is on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign steering committee, has won a contract from Diebold to deliver its voting machines on Election Day to precincts in 14 Maryland voting districts. I filed this story on the deal for Wired’s front door.

The trucking firm, Office Movers, is owned by the family-run Kane Company, whose CEO and president is John M. Kane, chairman of the Republican Party in Maryland from 2002 until December 2006 and pictured at right with President Bush. Last November, Kane joined the steering committee for Republican presidential nominee candidate Mitt Romney, who won Tuesday’s primary in Michigan.

Diebold Election Systems (now called Premier Election Solutions) has a statewide contract in Maryland. Its paperless touch’screen machines are the only machines used at Maryland polling locations (absentee and provisional ballots are cast on the company’s optical’scan system). According to Diebold’s state contract, the voting machine vendor is in charge of delivering its machines from warehouses to polling places on Election Day and with picking up the machines after the election.

More at Wired

Is there nothing a republican won’t do to steal an election? Barring Americans from voting is about as low as one can go. And yet, “bringing them democracy” is republican validation for the Iraqi war.

Take for example the Indiana voter identification law which is headed to the Supreme Court next week:

The mainly Republican backers of the law, including the Bush administration, say state-produced photo identification is a prudent measure to cut down on vote fraud - even though Indiana has never had a prosecution of the kind of fraud the law is supposed to prevent.

The opponents, mainly Democrats, view voter ID a modern-day poll tax that disproportionately affect poor, minority and elderly voters - who tend to back Democrats. Yet, a federal judge found that opponents of the law were unable to produce evidence of a single Indiana resident who had been barred from voting because of the law.

As the article states, “Indiana has never had a prosecution of the kind of fraud the law is supposed to prevent”, then why would opponents need to produce any evidence that someone had been barred? But if this judge did want proof of voter disenfranchisement, maybe he should try reading the following:

Even without an ID, indigent people can cast provisional ballots, then show up within 10 days at county offices and sign a form attesting to their vote.

But the Marion County Election Board, which includes Indianapolis, said just two of 34 voters who cast provisional ballots because they lacked voter ID showed up at county offices to validate their vote in the 2007 municipal election. Their signatures all matched those on file, but could not be counted because of the photo ID requirement.

This whole fiasco really pisses me off. And I think it’s criminal. My vote won’t count in the primary. I have the right to vote, but it won’t count. What’s wrong with that picture?

From the Sun Sentinel:

Florida Democrats, bitter and frustrated since the 2000 election, lost another battle today, this time in federal court in Tallahassee, where a judge upheld the national party’s decision to strip the state of its nominating delegates to the 2008 national Democratic convention.

Already angry about Republican gains in Florida and the disputed election of President Bush, Democrats are mad at their own national party and disappointed by the court.

“There are few issues in this country as paramount as protecting Americans- right to vote and have that vote count. If the parties will not change on their own, then Congress will do it for them,– South Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings said after the ruling. “We will not stand idly by as the DNC tries to silence our voices.”

Hastings and Florida Senator Bill Nelson plan to pursue their legislation to create a rotating regional system of primaries to ensure that Florida gets its turn to influence the selection of nominees.

Next year we’ll have the second presidential election since the horribly botched one in 2000. Can we expect better? An answer comes from the highest election official in the most populated state in the Union. Worried about a string of reported vulnerabilities, Debra Bowen, California’s secretary of State, had asked computer scientists at the University of California to conduct a “top to bottom” analysis of the thousands of touchscreen electronic voting machines in use in the Golden State. Next year millions of voters will use these systems, manufactured by the industry’s largest suppliers, not only in California but in many other states as well.

What did the study reveal? “Things were worse than I thought,” says Bowen. “There were far too many ways that people with ill intentions could compromise the voting systems without detection.” Some of those security holes could, in theory, allow a dirty trickster with access to a single machine to infiltrate the central vote-counting system and covertly toss an election to the wrong candidate.

More at MSNBC

from The Pew Research Center

If 90% feel an obligation to vote, can you imagine what it would be like to have a 90% turnout on Election Day? - JS

Nine-in-ten Americans continue to see voting as a duty, and most say they feel guilty when they do not get a chance to vote. The vast majority that agrees that it is their “duty as a citizen to always vote” includes 96% of Republicans, 91% of Democrats and 88% of independents. More than two-thirds of Democrats (71%) and Republicans (68%) also say that they personally feel guilty when they do not get a chance to vote. Independents, by comparision, are somewhat less likely to feel guilt about not voting (60%).

Remember Ion Sancho and the grief he?

Reversing an unofficial policy of denial, the Florida Secretary of State’s office has conducted an elections study that confirmed Tuesday what a maverick voting chief discovered nearly two years ago: Insider computer hackers can change votes without a trace on Diebold optical’scan machines.

The study by Florida State University found that, despite recent software fixes, an ”adversary” could use a pre-programmed computer card to swap one candidate’s votes for another or create a ”ballot’stuffing attack” that multiplies votes for a candidate or issue.

A Diebold spokesman, Mark Radke, said the company is confident it will upgrade the ”minor” software glitch by an Aug. 17 deadline the state has set. If it doesn’t, Secretary of State Kurt Browning said his office would eventually ban the use of optiscan Diebold machines in Florida, where 25 counties, including Monroe, use its fill-in-the-blank systems.

More at the Miami Herald