US unprepared to handle election fraud: Congress
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The US government is ill-prepared to address allegations of voting fraud should they arise during next month's presidential and legislative elections, a congressional report concluded.
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A senior U.S. diplomat said on Tuesday some fraud was to be expected in Pakistan's elections on February 18 but the United States was working hard to ensure a poll that is "as free and fair as possible."
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(InfoWorld) - When the U.S. Congress adjourned in the early morning hours Saturday, it left a number of technology-related bills unfinished, including two bills addressingÂ fraudulent access to personal telephone records. Despite pressure from members of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, the full House failed to act on the Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act. The law would have allowed the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to seek civil penalties against businesses that obtain personal data under false pretenses. The committee has been looking into privacy concerns related to so-called pretexting since early this year, but the issue came to a head last month, whenÂ Hewlett-Packard revealedÂ it had used questionable investigative techniques in the surveillance of board members, employees, and reporters. With pretexting, private investigators or identity thieves pretend to be customers of mobile phone carriers or other companies in order to gain access to personal records such as call logs. Congress still has more time to act on the pretexting legislation or six related bills this year, however. After a month-plus break allowing lawmakers to focus on the Nov. 7 election, Congress will return for a lame-duck session Nov. 9. Democrats last week complained that the House Republican leadership had held up the pretexting legislation, but Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican and Energy and Commerce chairman, said he'd continue to push for the legislation. Congress alsoÂ failed to pass a wide-ranging broadband billÂ that would replace local franchise rules with a national system for telecom providers launching Internet Protocol-based television services in competition with cable TV. And although U.S. President George Bush called on Congress to pass legislation authorizing a controversial National Security Agency (NSA)Â surveillance program, two bills making it easier for the government to conduct surveillance without court-ordered warrants also stalled. One piece of Internet-related legislation did pass early Saturday. The Senate passed a bill providing money for seaport security, and added to the bill was a provision prohibiting U.S. banks and credit-card companies from processing payments to online gambling sites. A group of professional poker players had asked Congress to reject the bill, but a group of House Republicans pushed for the legislation, saying offshore gambling sites were breaking U.S. gambling-control laws. Bush had called for legislation to authorize the NSA program, which has listened in on the electronic communications of U.S. residents without court-ordered warrants, as a way to head off multiple lawsuits targeting the program. He has argued the program is necessary to help keep U.S. residents safe from terrorism. The HouseÂ passed one surveillance bill, but the Senate failed to act. The House bill would allow federal law enforcement officials to spy on U.S. residents for up to 90 days without a court order in the period after a terrorist attack. The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a civil liberties and privacy advocacy group, said it was happy to see the surveillance and broadband bills stall. Republicans supporting the surveillance bill were pushing it as a way to show they were focused on national security during the last weeks of the congressional campaign, said Nancy Libin, a staff counsel at CDT. "Now that they've gone home, I'm not sure what kind of priority it will be when they come back," she said. Several civil liberties groups had opposed the broadband bill as it lacked protections for so-called net neutrality. Net neutrality advocates want a law that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing service to Web sites offering competing content, and they have successfully halted the Senate version of the broadband bill, despiteÂ heavy lobbying from large broadband providers.
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Efforts are intensifying in Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic touch-screen voting machines used in federal elections to provide paper trails that could be checked in the case of a recount.
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WASHINGTON, Nov 24  - The United States cannot accept the results of the presidential election in Ukraine as &quot;legitimate,&quot; Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday, calling for a review of the tally.
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KABUL, Afghanistan - An independent commission will probe claims by all 15 challengers to interim leader Hamid Karzai that Afghanistan's first direct presidential election was marred by incompetence and fraud, a top official said Sunday.    The move to head off the attack on the vote's legitimacy came as workers began the long process of collecting ballots from Saturday's historic election, in which Karzai was a heavy favorite...
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Americans think Congress is doing a pretty lousy job, according to a poll released Friday.
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WASHINGTON With just weeks before the election -- there&#39;s concern that the rules on political fund-raising could be &quot;in chaos.
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Faced with pressures to deal with a spate of unanticipated natural disasters as well as with the election-year needs of dozens of key constituencies, Congress moved this week
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Democrats hoping to capture control   of the U.S. Congress in this fall elections called on Tuesday   for probes of the Bush administration's Iraq rebuilding effort,   which they likened to the government's botched response to   Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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Despite dismay from telecom firms and the Department of Justice, lawmakers on Capitol Hill appear ready to once again put their weight behind laws designed to crack down on pretexting.
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Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
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BAGHDAD: Iraq&#39;s interim Government has warned that US-backed elections due to be held in January are at risk because the United Nations has failed to assign enough officials to monitor the vote.
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Congress was surrounded by police, soldiers and towering concrete and metal barriers Thursday in advance of President Vicente Fox's state-of-the-nation address, which is shaping up to be a major showdown with protesters demanding a recount of the July 2 election results.
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Six days before Election Day, Florida is again struggling with questions about potential voting irregularities.
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Civilians and soldiers living abroad face an unwieldy system of absentee balloting that could prevent their votes from being counted.
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As the Electoral College prepares to certify President Bush's re-election on Monday, concerns persist about the integrity of the nation's voting system &#151; particularly in Ohio, where details continue to emerge of technology failures, voter confusion and overcrowded polling stations in minority and poor neighborhoods.