DOJ Probes Fla. Voter Intimidation Claims
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The Justice Department is investigating accusations that Florida law enforcement officers intimidated elderly black voters during a probe of voting fraud last spring.
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MIAMI  - The bizarre disappearance of tens of thousands of ballots has fueled worries over Florida&#39;s ability to avert a repeat of the chaos of 2000, when Americans were kept guessing for 36 days who won the election.
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A bogus letter circulating in South Carolina, purporting to be from the NAACP, threatens the arrest of voters who have outstanding parking tickets or failed to pay child support. The NAACP said Friday the letter is a scare tactic and called for an investigation.
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MIAMI Election tensions are on the rise in hotly contested Florida, where charges of voter intimidation are flying and thousands of absentee ballots are being re-issued in one big county.
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Los Angeles Times - TALLAHASSEE, Fla. &#8212; In this humid Southern capital, Florida Secretary of State Glenda E. Hood is feeling the political heat. Lawsuits allege she has disenfranchised poor and minority voters. Critics claim that she's creating a partisan atmosphere.
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A sample of some of the calls Florida residents are receiving prior to Tuesday's Republican primary.
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The Justice Department is dispatching a record number of federal poll watchers around the country on Election Day but is taking care to avoid perceptions of voter intimidation, officials said Friday.
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The Florida Democratic Party accused Secretary of State Glenda Hood of violating federal law when she told elections supervisors across the state that they should reject incomplete voter-registration forms.
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Florida is already teeming with lawsuits charging the state and its county elections supervisors with voter disenfranchisement.
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A lawsuit filed in Florida state court Tuesday alleges that electronic voting machines in a portion of Florida's 13th Congressional District were improperly maintained and selected, causing problems in the House race there.
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The disappearance of tens of thousands of ballots has raised new questions about Florida's ability to avert a repeat of the 2000 debacle, and fueled protests in the battleground state.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, United States  - The disappearance of tens of thousands of ballots has raised new questions about Florida&#39;s ability to avert a repeat of the 2000 debacle, and fueled protests in the battleground state.
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Ignoring advice from state election officials to junk Florida's felon no-vote list because it's inaccurate, Gov. Bush puts the list in play, according to a newspaper report. The same database wrongly disenfranchised 2,500 voters in 2000, most of them Democrats.
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The Justice Department is sending out three times as many poll watchers on Election Day as it did in 2000, assigning some to Florida and other closely contested states in the presidential election.
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When the Senate Judiciary Committee considers legislation Thursday aimed at punishing voter intimidation, it is expected to strip language that would allow private parties to bring lawsuits to block deceptive voting practices.
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Voters displaced by hurricanes or given flawed instructions should be allowed to cast ballots outside their designated precincts, critics of Florida's provisional ballot law told the state Supreme Court on Wednesday.
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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.