Report: Fixes Saved 1M Votes in 2004
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Improvements to voting machines and election administration saved a million votes that otherwise would likely have gone uncounted in the 2004 elections, with states and counties that made the most comprehensive upgrades recovering the most votes, a new academic analysis says.
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BREAKING NEWS - Early this morning, Microsoft reported it had been notified that its Office Open XML format received a 74% positive vote in a preliminary ballot that could pave the way for its final ratification as an international standard.
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Unions and big communications companies spent more than &#36;1.1 billion in their efforts to elect lawmakers and influence the government over the past half-decade, according to a report released Wednesday.
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In one month, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney brought in a hefty $1.4 million-plus from donors to his Web site.
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November 6, 2004 â An  Open Source web based Survey tool is playing a key role in keeping track of voting irregularities in todayâs US Presidential Elections. PHPSurveyor (http://phpsurveyor.sourceforge.net), a PHP based online survey tool, is being used to gather data across the United States about all voting irregularities. In the first 10 hours of voting alone, over 13500 incidents had been recorded using the software. The tool was selected by the Verified Voting Foundation as part of their Election Incident Reporting System (http://www.verifiedvoting.org/eirs/) as one of three major system components â all of which are Open Source.    The Advokit tool provides a structure within which campaign leaders can match volunteers to tasks, and manage task completion. The MapServer tool displays clickable maps. PHPSurveyor is used to allow Verified Votingâs thousands of volunteers across the United States to enter voting irregularities and incidents online as the day progresses. Researchers can view the collected data in real time by mining down through a map of the US, viewing incidents at a Nationwide, Statewide, or County level.  PHPSurveyor developer Jason Cleeland said âIâm very excited that my tool is being used for a project of this scale and importance. Itâs an indication both of the success of Open Source as a development strategy, and itâs flexibility in allowing organizations to freely bend an existing project to new uses.â  âWhile PHPSurveyor is generally a tool for simple development and collection of survey responses online, the Verified Voting Foundations âTechWatchâ group of technologists have been able to integrate it with realtime reporting mechanisms that allow legal teams and press across the United States, and the world, to respond immediately to any problems in the Presidential elections as they occur.â  PHPSurveyor was first developed in 2003 by Jason Cleeland in response to his organisationâs need for a better way to run and record surveys. âPaper based surveys were effective, but required a large commitment in terms of staff resourcing,â Mr Cleeland said. âFor a non-profit organisation, finding the time for staff to perform the required data entry was a real problem. Yet at the same time, we had a constant need to run surveys of our members. Writing an online survey tool solved these problems. It eliminated the double-handling of the respondent completing the survey, and a data entry operator transferring that response to computerâ said Mr Cleeland. âInstead, the respondent completes the survey online, and the data is immediately available for review.â  From a relatively basic system, the tool quickly grew a wider feature set. âIt was the release of the software on Sourceforge as an Open Source GPL product that really broadened PHPSurveyors outlookâ said Mr Cleeland. âWithin a matter of weeks some IT developers from a public non-profit TV station in Dallas, Texas had started adding code and providing improvements. And since then, more ideas, suggestions, and improvements have flowed from all over the world on a constant and sometimes overwhelming basis.â  At the time of writing PHPSurveyor had collected over 23500 incident reports on the US Presidential election, with 13500 being entered in the 10 hours since voting commenced. âI expect that by the close of polls there will be around 30 to 35,000 entriesâ Mr Cleeland said, âand that by the time all the paper reports have also been collected the tool will have collected at least 40,000 responses. This is very exciting to watch â to see a tool that was intended to handle around 1000 survey responses, to one that can collect - in a very short time frame â over 40,000 indicates to me the benefits of opening source code to the world.â
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Thousands plan to take part this year in an online effort that lets backers of third-party candidates in swing states trade votes with people in less critical locations. But overall participation is lower than in 2000. By Joanna Glasner.
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Caracas, August 22, 2004âElectoral Council Board member Jorge Rodriguez announced yesterday that, âThe audit reached very positive results, which allows us to close this chapter of the electoral cycle,â without having detected substantial
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LOS ANGELES  - Buried under the  avalanche of year-end lists is one that won't make moviemakers  very happy. MovieMistakes.com has named and shamed its 15  favorite continuity errors of 2004.
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Adobe (Quote, Chart) issued a patch this week that helps prevent multiple flaws found in its products. The fixes clear up problems in Windows and Macintosh systems running Adobe Reader and Acrobat Pro versions
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Here is a month-by-month look at campaign 2004:
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Statisticians release an analysis debunking a previous Berkeley study that said President Bush received more votes than he should have in Florida counties that used touch-screen voting machines. By Kim Zetter.
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Last year some election watchers made a bold prediction that this presidential election would set a record: the first half billion dollar campaign in hard money alone.
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World&#39;s No.1 retailer makes half-million dollar contribution to help defeat a state ballot measure. LOS ANGELES  - Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
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Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org Voter Fund, two outside groups that played key roles in the 2004 presidential election, reached an agreement with the Federal Election Commission to pay nearly $450,000 for various violations.
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Of the 1.6 million votes counted, the Shiite Alliance took approximately 75 percent, according to a provisional breakdown by The New York Times of partial results.
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Election reforms helped lead to the lowest level of invalid ballots ever measured in a presidential or gubernatorial election in Florida last year, according to a report released Tuesday.
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The Massachusetts House of Representatives yesterday voted to fix a glitch in state environmental law that held billion-dollar implications for developers and land owners.