Ala. Voter Registration Beset by Backlog
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Counties across Alabama struggled to deal with a backlog of thousands of last-minute voter registrations as the state's longtime head of voter registration quit Wednesday less than two weeks before Election Day.
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Registration for overseas absentee voting in Iraq's national election has been extended by two days because the turnout so far in the weeklong campaign has been running far behind expectations, organizers said Saturday.
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WASHINGTON - Voting security advocates in the U.S. are bracing for a repeat of problems in the upcoming general election that could rival Florida during the 2000 presidential race.
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Voter registration by Iraqis living outside their country has been far below expectations &#151; perhaps due to apathy or fear of reprisals &#151; but it has shown signs of increasing, prompting organizers to extend it for two days, they said Saturday.
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More than a million people who want to vote in November's general election probably won't get the chance because of a delay in processing applications to become U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
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New voters are flooding local election offices with paperwork, registering in significantly higher numbers than four years ago as attention to the presidential election runs high and an array of activist groups recruit would-be voters who could prove critical come Nov. 2.
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record surge of potential new voters has swamped boards of election from Pennsylvania to Oregon, as the biggest of the crucial swing states reach registration deadlines today.
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More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.
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Thousands of Floridians who think they're registered to vote could be turned away at the polls Nov. 2 because their voter registration forms weren't completely filled out, officials said Friday.
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Absentee voters in the most populous county of a critical state in the presidential election are complaining about a ballot layout that they say might prompt some people to choose the wrong candidate, or none at all.
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Frustration gripped voters in some Florida counties Monday as those who decided to take advantage of early voting had to endure long lines, malfunctioning machines and few people who could answer their questions.
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Many voter rights' advocates are fighting to decertify electronic voting machines, arguing they're not reliable. But one bloc is behind the new equipment -- disabled voters who say the machines give them privacy.
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With election time just around the corner, Alachua County is gearing up by following suit with many other Florida counties. Early voting is now taking place in an attempt to get more voters out to the polls due to such a tight race for the presidency.
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As the primary season continues, observers of the electronic-voting scene ask whether it's possible to tally the ballots efficiently while restoring Americans' faith in the process. Random, mandatory audits of cast ballots show promise, but even after demonstrated successes, not everyone's on board.
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By Heather Civil, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach  Feb. 8--Touch-screen voting machines, once touted as a way to cut back on the stacks of paper produced during elections, may end up making paper trails of their own.   Gov.
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New voters are signing up in record numbers across the United States as state deadlines to register to vote expire this week, but it is unclear which party will benefit from the influx.
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(InfoWorld) - A coalition of voting rights groups on Monday called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic voting machines to have printers attached as a way to audit the touch-screen results. But the lack of a paper trail for many e-voting machines was only one problem among many during the 2006 U.S. elections, said speakers at the Elections: Looking Forward conference, sponsored by Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other groups. Many of the problems attributed to e-voting machines were caused by a lack of training for poll workers or administrative mistakes, said Efrain Escobedo, director of voter engagement at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Poll workers observed by his group didn't know how to change the paper in machines with paper trails or didn't know how to reboot machines, he said. Participants in the event also described several other problems not related to e-voting: poll workers demanding photo identification when it wasn't required by law, polling places lacking voting materials in languages other than English, polling places inaccessible to disabled people, and long lines. But several speakers called on Congress to pass the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, which would require paper trail printouts with touch-screen e-voting machines. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced the bill Feb. 5, after a similar piece of legislation failed to pass during the 2005-06 congressional session. The Holt bill has 183 cosponsors, close to half of the House of Representatives. Congress needs to act in the next six to eight months for the legislation to affect the 2008 elections, said Ralph Neas, president and chief executive officer of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. Neas pointed to the 2006 vote in Sarasota Country, Florida, where e-voting machines did not record a vote from more than 18,000 people in a congressional race decided by less than 400 votes. "Sarasota was a disgrace," Neas said. "Eighteen thousand votes ... inexplicably disappeared into cyberspace. But it's a teachable moment. We've got 18,000 faces now that we can put on the problem." Not all speakers agreed that Congress should move ahead immediately with paper trails. Many visually impaired voters were able to vote without assistance on touch-screen machines for the first time in 2006, said Christina Galindo-Walsh, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. Paper trail printouts would again create a two-tier voting system in which some disabled people don't have access to the same information as other voters, she said. Galindo-Walsh and Jim Dickson, vice president for government affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities, also said it was too late for Congress to mandate paper trail ballots by the 2008 presidential election. E-voting machine vendors wouldn't be able to produce enough printers by 2008, Galindo-Walsh said. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, mandated standards for voting machines, and those standards are just being completed now, Dickson added. Those standards still need to be tested, and new machines meeting those standards need to be built, he said. "Either you lower the standards for the election equipment, or you live with the timeline that looks like 2010," he said. "You cannot have it both ways." But many voters now question e-voting systems, added Melanie Campbell, executive director and CEO of the Coalition for Black Civic Participation. "The reality is voters are losing confidence in the system," she said.