Midterm elections get report card
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The midterm elections were either a resounding victory for voters or a spectacular fiasco, a study released Wednesday concluded simultaneously.
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Highlights of the latest campaign finance reports that presidential candidates filed with the Federal Election Commission. The reports cover April through June. Reports already are available for Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney and Democrat Bill Richardson; more were expected to be available Sunday.
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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.
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Political State Report, brought to you by Temple Stark, is dedicated to giving its readers thoughts and facts about politics and politicians in all 50 states, and DC.
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Almost two-thirds of colleges received an A or B in the first Black Coaches Association &quot;report card&quot; that evaluated the process they used to hire a new head football coach.
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Some statistics on American life as Election Day nears, compared with four years earlier.
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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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Election results from the Northeast, at a glance:
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Editor and Publisher - NEW YORK In the final stretch of the 2006 midterm elections, famed reporter Tom Edsall started his day with a virtual information overload Â reading no less than 10 blogs to keep abreast of the 24-hour coverage of Senate and House races across the nation. It's as if he's been doing it for all 65 years of his life Â instead of for the first time. In reality, neither he nor anyone else in politics had even heard of a blog during the last midterm election Â and since then, it's hard for many reporters to remember the time when they were considerably less connected.
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A team looking into the problems encountered at the Scottish Parliament election in May is due to report.
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The following is a summary of recent campaign fundraising activity by the six major national party committees, comparing their efforts in the current 2005-06 election cycle with those in other recent cycles. The data was prepared by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, and were presented Tuesday by a panel of experts on campaign finance.
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Presidential candidates began filing second quarter financial reports with the Federal Election Commission on Friday. Here's a look at the highlights from their filings:
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Urged on by Democratic lawmakers, the Government Accountability Office plans to investigate the way votes were counted in the presidential election. The office cautions, however, that it is powerless to act if irregularities are found.
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Inside the battle for a critical chunk of votes
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Congress started wrapping up its work Thursday ahead of a five-week stretch of campaigning before the midterm elections:
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A newspaper's review of ballots cast in three north Florida counties where registered Democrats heavily outnumber Republicans showed just what officials reported: The counties' voters did on Election Day as they often do, voting for a Republican for president.
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A new national &quot;report card&quot; for public and private colleges gives Massachusetts top marks for the number of its students who go to college and for how well