Groups Seek to Address Voting Troubles
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Despite President Bush's clear margin of victory in the 2004 presidential race, voting and civil rights advocates say the election did not go as smoothly as Americans might think.
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With the presidential election less than six weeks away, activists and security experts are ratcheting up concern over the use of touch-screen machines to cast votes.
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With voters jamming phone lines saying they haven't received absentee ballots in the mail, elections officials planned to mail out thousands of replacement ballots.
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Hard to keep up with the voting rights section of the Justice Department's civil rights division. Division chief John Tanner recently made some news with a fascinating analysis of how photo IDs for voters actually help minorities.
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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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After losing back-to-back presidential elections, Democratic leaders are trying to figure out how to make the party more relevant to mainstream Americans and keep it from slipping into perpetual minority-party status. And the task is daunting, many Democratic consultants and leaders agree.
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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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With less than six weeks to go before the Nov. 2 presidential election, voting activists said officials still have time to set up a paper trail as a counterweight to an e-voting system they portrayed as wide open to manipulation.
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Stung by voting problems four years ago, the Pentagon announced on Friday it was pressing to improve absentee balloting by the U.S. military and civilians overseas in what could be a close 2004 presidential 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.
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Outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma says a multilateral group is trying to find a solution to the presidential election controversy, a dispute that has sent tens of thousands of peaceful protesters into the streets of the
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Leaders on both sides of a contested election move toward  a new deal, but the impact of weeks of bloodshed may be more difficult to resolve
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KANSAS CITY, Mo.  - Two weeks before a tight  presidential election, tension among bitterly divided voters is  translating into a barrage of attacks on political targets that  can't talk back -- yard signs.
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The nation is girding for tomorrow&#39;s presidential election, worried about the integrity of the voting system, divided over the legitimacy of President Bush&#39;s election four
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Many states are facing legal challenges over possible voting problems Nov. 2. A look at some of developments over the weekend:
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Under pressure from state and local officials, Democratic leaders in Congress are slowing their drive to revamp the nationâs voting systems.
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A group focused on Hispanic health issues on Monday was announcing an effort to send more than a million text messages to cell phones to remind and encourage people to vote in the presidential preference contests.