DALE McFEATTERS: Where voting is not taken for granted
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(SH) - Maybe things aren&#39;t going so well in Iraq, but we must be doing something right in Afghanistan, which so often seems a sideshow in the war on terror.
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Statisticians release an analysis debunking a previous Berkeley study that said President Bush received more votes than he should have in Florida counties that used touch-screen voting machines. By Kim Zetter.
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After nearly 50,000 Michigan Democrats cast ballots over the Internet in February, academics eagerly sought election data that would help them determine what types of people voted online. But scholars around the country complain that they haven't been able to get statistics from the Feb. 7 caucus.
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Call it the law of unintended consequences. A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year, as happened in 2000, could wind up causing Election Day problems as infamous as Florida's hanging chads.
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Voters are sending mixed signals about how they want their communities to grow, embracing strict controls in some places and rejecting them in others.
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Critics say random post-election audits could alleviate the sort of concerns about voting accuracy that arose last week in N.H. This week it's Michigan's turn -- and once again, optical-scan machines are a major election presence. But the Secretary of State there says it's not going to be a problem.
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The big surprise of the 2004 election: For the most part, the voting went smoothly. By the close of polls across the country, despite heavy turnout, there were only scattered reports of equipment trouble and human error at the voting stations. And none were major.
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In a state that prizes undeclared voters, a small but potent group is deciding between two politically divergent candidates&#13;&#10;
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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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YARDLEY, Pa.  - Under the unwritten rules of U.S.  election politics, candidates and campaigns never publicly  doubt they will win.
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A county that switched this year from voter punch cards to an electronic scanner system still had hundreds of uncounted ballots Friday, holding up a congressional race and the balance of the state legislature.
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By LORI ARATANI, SETH BOENSTEIN, THOMAS FITZGERALD and WILLIAM DOUGLAS. From Spokane to Honolulu to Cleveland to Charlotte, millions of voters continued to steam into their polling places Tuesday, enduring
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If you think the country is divided and rancorous about the presidential contest, try polling a few experts about the accuracy and security of electronic voting.
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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.
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Ex-employees of company called Voters Outreach of America AKA America Votes claim that voter registrations in Las Vegas have been trashed.     The article recommends that people make sure they're registered to vote. If you're a victim of the fraudulent voter registration that is rife in the prelude to this election you should insist on your right to make a provisional (or affidavit) vote at the polls as guaranteed by the Help America Vote Act of 2002.    Voters Outreach of America has reportedly moved on to Oregon presumably to do the same thing.
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Some voters say machines indicated they had voted for a different candidate.
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The Bush and Kerry campaigns, along with a range of advocacy groups, are concerned with the integrity of voting technology -- particularly in the states where votes matter most. By Jacob Ogles.