Site security gets a recount at Rock the Vote
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Grassroots movement to register younger voters leaves publishing tools accessible to outsiders.
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A report that a voting company employee dismantled an election computer before Ohio's recount last week has a congressman calling for an FBI investigation into vote tampering. But an election official behind the report says her words are being misinterpreted. By Kim Zetter.
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A polling place that served two adjoining precincts counted hundreds of votes for fringe presidential candidates Nov. 2, apparently because poll workers didn't instruct voters to use only the machines for their precinct, a newspaper reported Friday.
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Rock the Vote uses music and popular culture to get young people involved in politics, so it's probably no surprise that the group is using Facebook to reach plugged-in voters.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.K.'s trial of e-voting and e-counting technologies during last month's local elections resulted in crashed computers and technicians scratching their heads while posing new concerns about the systems' security and reliability, a new report has concluded. In one area of England, a manual recount performed after e-counting equipment was abandoned because of delays turned up a raft of uncounted votes, said Jason Kitcat, e-voting coordinator for the Open Rights Group, which deployed observers to polling sites in England and Scotland. The group, which has been critical of e-voting and e-counting, has submitted its 64-page report to the U.K. Electoral Commission, which will publish its own report on the trials on Aug. 3. The Department for Constitutional Affairs, which oversaw the pilot programs, said it welcomed the role of observers but would reserve comment until the Electoral Commission publishes its report. The Electoral Commission also did not comment. The U.K., which embarked on a voting modernization program in 2000, held trials in 13 administrative areas in England. Scotland replaced manual counting with e-counting technologies for the first time. The government has backed e-voting technologies, including postal voting and Internet voting, to increase voter participation. Open Rights Group volunteers watched how polling stations conducted e-voting, but much of the process was opaque due to the nature of how e-voting machines work, Kitcat said. The majority of polling stations experienced technical problems, ranging from laptop problems to unreliable electronic registers, the report said. Employees of vendors whose equipment was deployed refused to interact with observers, Kitcat said. "No one would really say what was going on," Kitcat said. "It was all so mysterious." However, observers did identify potential security problems. The report includes photographs of PC workstations and hubs with open ports, a possible security risk. "Network hubs were left on the floor with power and network connections loose," the report said. "In one case in Edinburgh, a hub was observed in easy reach of attendees, with ports free lying beneath a table providing an opportunity for unauthorized access to the e-counting system's network." E-counting scanners proved finicky due to incorrect paper sizes, scanner sensitivity and trouble in handling low-quality perforations on ballots. The most curious error in e-counting occurred in a ward in Breckland, England, where voters were give two ballots: one each for district council and parish elections. Officials tried an electronic count, but came up with far fewer district ballots than parish ballots when the two counts should be roughly the same, Kitcat said. A manual recount turned up about 56 percent more district council ballots. "We haven't been given an explanation by the election official or suppliers," Kitcat said. In Scotland, observers noted that election officials could log into the e-counting software merely by scanning a bar code on their identification badges, which the Open Rights Group cited as another security concern. Some election officials were positive about using new election technologies, but "the lack of general technical understanding and knowledge about the e-counting and e-voting systems across election staff was perturbing," the report said. Â
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Recount Begins in Wash. Governor&#39;s Race; Republican Dino Rossi Led by 261 Votes in First Count. Govs.-elect Matt Blunt of Missouri, left, and Dino Rossi of Washington, confer during a break at the Republican
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Republican Party leaders yesterday laid the groundwork for a possible challenge of Democrat Christine Gregoire&#39;s victory over Dino Rossi in the hand recount for governor, claiming a number of irregularities in the way King County handled ballots.
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As random selection placed registered entrants on a ballot that is expected to be several pages long, officials worried that violence aimed at preventing the election is surging.
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Some members discover itâs tough to erase all their information from the site.
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Republican Rep. Deborah Pryce won re-election Monday by a margin so slim that a recount will be required.
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November 6, 2004 â An  Open Source web based Survey tool is playing a key role in keeping track of voting irregularities in todayâs US Presidential Elections. PHPSurveyor (http://phpsurveyor.sourceforge.net), a PHP based online survey tool, is being used to gather data across the United States about all voting irregularities. In the first 10 hours of voting alone, over 13500 incidents had been recorded using the software. The tool was selected by the Verified Voting Foundation as part of their Election Incident Reporting System (http://www.verifiedvoting.org/eirs/) as one of three major system components â all of which are Open Source.    The Advokit tool provides a structure within which campaign leaders can match volunteers to tasks, and manage task completion. The MapServer tool displays clickable maps. PHPSurveyor is used to allow Verified Votingâs thousands of volunteers across the United States to enter voting irregularities and incidents online as the day progresses. Researchers can view the collected data in real time by mining down through a map of the US, viewing incidents at a Nationwide, Statewide, or County level.  PHPSurveyor developer Jason Cleeland said âIâm very excited that my tool is being used for a project of this scale and importance. Itâs an indication both of the success of Open Source as a development strategy, and itâs flexibility in allowing organizations to freely bend an existing project to new uses.â  âWhile PHPSurveyor is generally a tool for simple development and collection of survey responses online, the Verified Voting Foundations âTechWatchâ group of technologists have been able to integrate it with realtime reporting mechanisms that allow legal teams and press across the United States, and the world, to respond immediately to any problems in the Presidential elections as they occur.â  PHPSurveyor was first developed in 2003 by Jason Cleeland in response to his organisationâs need for a better way to run and record surveys. âPaper based surveys were effective, but required a large commitment in terms of staff resourcing,â Mr Cleeland said. âFor a non-profit organisation, finding the time for staff to perform the required data entry was a real problem. Yet at the same time, we had a constant need to run surveys of our members. Writing an online survey tool solved these problems. It eliminated the double-handling of the respondent completing the survey, and a data entry operator transferring that response to computerâ said Mr Cleeland. âInstead, the respondent completes the survey online, and the data is immediately available for review.â  From a relatively basic system, the tool quickly grew a wider feature set. âIt was the release of the software on Sourceforge as an Open Source GPL product that really broadened PHPSurveyors outlookâ said Mr Cleeland. âWithin a matter of weeks some IT developers from a public non-profit TV station in Dallas, Texas had started adding code and providing improvements. And since then, more ideas, suggestions, and improvements have flowed from all over the world on a constant and sometimes overwhelming basis.â  At the time of writing PHPSurveyor had collected over 23500 incident reports on the US Presidential election, with 13500 being entered in the 10 hours since voting commenced. âI expect that by the close of polls there will be around 30 to 35,000 entriesâ Mr Cleeland said, âand that by the time all the paper reports have also been collected the tool will have collected at least 40,000 responses. This is very exciting to watch â to see a tool that was intended to handle around 1000 survey responses, to one that can collect - in a very short time frame â over 40,000 indicates to me the benefits of opening source code to the world.â
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Some voters say machines indicated they had voted for a different candidate.
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Touch-screen voting machines in the Sunshine State insist 18,000 voters had no preference in a congressional race won by fewer than 400 votes. A recount is under way, but that just means printing a hard copy of the contested ballots. By Kim Zetter.
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With all the votes tallied after a recount in the roller coaster race for governor, Christine O. Gregoire, the Democrat who had trailed in the campaign and in a previous
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. Tens of thousands of recently found ballots in a Florida county are reversing one outcome in Tuesday&#39;s election.
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Both presidential candidates have claimed victory in Sunday's vote. A recount begins Wednesday.
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Officials in Florida are once again up in arms over recount procedures. The latest imbroglio follows a controversial ruling on touch-screen voting machines that was delivered days before a statewide primary. By Jacob Ogles.