Florida to replace missing absentee ballots
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Election officials in Florida said Thursday they will send new absentee ballots to voters in one of the state&#39;s most populous counties amid outcry over disappearance of thousands of ballots.
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A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Duval County to install special voting machines for blind and disabled voters in time for the November election.
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Tensions have been mounting in the runup to the presidential election as Florida politicians trade accusations over claims of fraud, missing absentee ballots and concerns that thousands
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New absentee ballots will be sent to voters in one of Florida&#39;s most populous counties to replace thousands that disappeared in the run-up to Tuesday&#39;s US elections, an election official said on Thursday.
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Ralph Nader, blamed by many Democrats for their 2000 election loss, will be on Florida ballots in the US elections.
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla.  - A Florida judge ordered  county elections officials on Wednesday to issue absentee  ballots without the name of independent presidential candidate  Ralph Nader, a possible blow to President Bush in the  battleground state.
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THE STRATEGY: Politicians are reaching out to voters who have already applied for absentee ballots.
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Preprinted absentee ballots that list resigned Rep. Mark Foley as a candidate will not include an explanation that he withdrew from the race, election supervisors said.
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A Florida judge ordered county elections officials on Wednesday to issue absentee ballots without the name of independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, a possible blow to President Bush in the battleground state.
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FORT LAUDERDALE (Florida), Oct. 28. - Tens of thousands of postal ballots have gone missing in Florida, sparking concern over irregularities in the poll campaign.
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Officials in one Missouri county are reprinting absentee ballots for the Nov. 2 general election after discovering that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were left off.
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RIVIERA BEACH, Florida Nov 2  - Anger over the lost votes of 2000 is still simmering in this mainly black town of south Florida, where voters turned out massively Tuesday, many vowing they would not be disenfranchized again.
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After a series of tests on e-voting machines, a U.S. government auditor still doesn&#39;t know what contributed to 18,000 unmarked ballots in a Florida congressional race in 2006.The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) checked the firmware and the ballot display and ran calibration tests on a sample of Election Systems &amp; Software (ES&amp;S) iVotronic e-voting machines, the agency said in a report released Friday. Those tests, combined with others done by the GAO and state of Florida, &quot;have significantly reduced the possibility that the iVotronic [machines] were the cause of the undervote,&quot; said the report, authored by Nabajyoti Barkakati, acting chief technologist for the GAO&#39;s applied research and methods division.The GAO believes the ES&amp;S machines have been adequately tested, the report says. &quot;Given the complex interaction of people, processes, and technology that must work effectively together to achieve a successful election,&quot; other factors, including intentional undervotes or ballot interaction problems, may have caused the undervote, the GAO said.Democratic candidate Christine Jennings lost by 369 votes in the 2006 13th Congressional District race, but more than 18,000 people who cast votes in other district races failed to have votes recorded in the congressional race. About 4,000 more votes were recorded in the Sarasota County Southern District Hospital Board election than in the House race.Jennings is again running for the congressional seat this year.The GAO report &quot;leaves most of the major questions unanswered,&quot; said the Verified Voting Foundation, an advocacy group critical of e-voting machines. The GAO report didn&#39;t address potential problems with touch-screen sensitivity and low batteries, or reports of undervotes in other races, the foundation said in its own report , based on a leaked copy of the GAO report.&quot;The GAO report leaves us with almost as many questions as before, and the most important one -- what caused the ... undervote problem -- is left unanswered,&quot; the foundation report says. &quot;The nature of the complex voting system in question, and the difficulty in auditing such a system, may mean such questions will remain indefinitely, but it is clear that more can and should be done to resolve the outstanding issues.&quot;The foundation suggested auditors could conduct more tests, including tests of touch-screen sensitivity and a check for software bugs beyond the GAO&#39;s check that the software matched versions certified by Florida.&quot;As someone who&#39;s interested in what happened in this election, my questions aren&#39;t answered,&quot; said David Dill, the foundation&#39;s founder and a computer science professor at Stanford University. &quot;I don&#39;t think we&#39;re going to get any idea about what happened in that election without a lot more investigation.&quot;The GAO report &quot;cannot be interpreted as a clean bill of health for the machines,&quot; Dill added. &quot;They did three little tests ... out of a spectrum of a lot of things, and they aren&#39;t the most important things to look at,&quot; he said.ES&amp;S, in a statement, said the GAO report shows its machines &quot;performed well&quot; in the election. GAO&#39;s findings echo studies by Florida State University and the Florida Department of State, both saying there was &quot;no evidence&quot; of ES&amp;S machine malfunction, the company said. &quot;The collective findings of these and other tests demonstrate that Sarasota County&#39;s voting system performed exactly as it was designed to function,&quot; the company said.The Election Technology Council, a trade group representing ES&amp;S and three other e-voting vendors, said the report suggests that a paper ballot to accompany the e-voting machines wouldn&#39;t necessarily solve problems. The Verified Voting Foundation and other groups have pushed for printouts to be used with e-voting machines.Elections include people, processes and technology, said David Beirne, the council&#39;s executive director. &quot;Paper is not a magic bullet,&quot; he said. &quot;It can provide an additional layer of verification for the voter, but it alone is not going to satisfy all of the stakeholders, which is why it is important to look at all of the circumstances surrounding an election to determine its overall performance.&quot;The GAO report shows the need for assurance tools that verify the operation of the e-voting machines&#39; software, Beirne added.
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With polls showing nearly equal numbers of Florida voters for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the election's outcome may again hinge on a Florida recount. And the more that Floridians learn about how voting machines work, the more they question whether the 15 counties with paperless voting systems can accurately count and recount votes.
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla.  - Florida's top court on  Wednesday allowed the inclusion of independent presidential  candidate Ralph Nader on absentee ballots, but told the state  not to mail any of the ballots until it had made a final  decision on the validity of Nader's candidacy.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.  - Fears that thousands of  absentee election ballots had gone astray in a hotly contested  Florida county appear to have been allayed on Thursday when  officials said a far small number were missing.
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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.