Monitors See Problems Over Vote Rules, Machines
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International election observers predicted problems with new rules and technology for Tuesday&#39;s US presidential election that were designed to avoid a repeat of Florida&#39;s counting fiasco four years ago.
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A panel was investigating complaints of  Afghan election irregularities on Thursday, further delaying  the start of counting in a historic poll overshadowed by  concerns over multiple voting.
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The AFL-CIO will monitor polls in battleground states on Election Day to guard against voting abuses, and is launching a new effort to educate voters about the process and their rights.
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U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein has asked the GAO to investigate whether problems with e-voting machines have been caused by fraud or mechanical failure.
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ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND - Poll observers in about 6 percent of Maryland's precincts recorded 201 problems with electronic voting machines during the Nov. 2 general election, according to a report released Tuesday by TrueVoteMD.org.
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Election observers have reported few instances of fraud, a key concern as officials begin tallying results.
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A look at problems at the polls in recent elections.
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BOSTON - Tens of millions of people will cast their votes Nov. 2 in one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in recent U.S. history. But voters across the U.S. will encounter different voting technologies and procedures, with many counties nationwide clinging to punchcard, lever machine and even paper ballots, and the transition to electronic voting moving slowly in many states.
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Kenya's election commission checks dozens of disputed results, amid unrest at claims of vote rigging.
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A series of tactical errors, with peculiarities in the voting process, prevented democracy advocates here from winning as many seats as expected in Sunday&#39;s legislative
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Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.
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While most experts appear to agree that electronic voting has real problems, few argue that they could completely undermine the November election.
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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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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - A computer crash that forced a pre-election test of electronic voting machines to be postponed was trumpeted by critics as proof of the balloting technology's unreliability...
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The widely publicized failure in Prince George's County to electronically transmit results from many polls after the Sept. 12 primary was compounded by a host of other errors, including failure to swiftly collect the data cards on which some votes are recorded and to properly secure voting machines.
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Officials are worried that the efforts of the political parties to promote absentee balloting could taint the general election.
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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.