OMG U GUYZ< CNN EVEN SAYS VOTE PROBLEMS IN OHIO NOW

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (AP) -- Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.

The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.

But there were also several dozen voters in six states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touchscreen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.

In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way Foundation, which helped form the coalition, called the summary screen problem "troubling but anecdotal."

He and other voting rights advocates said the disproportionate number of Democrats reporting such problems was probably due to higher awareness of voter protection coalitions.

"Overall, the problems of outright voter intimidation and suppression have not been as great as in the past," Neas said.

But the reports did highlight computer scientists' concerns about touchscreens, which they say are prone to tampering and unreliable unless they produce paper records for recounts.

Roberta Harvey, 57, of Clearwater, Florida, said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church.

After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection.

Election officials in several Florida counties where voters complained about such problems did not return calls Tuesday night.

A spokesoman for the company that makes the touchscreen machines used in Pinellas, Palm Beach and two other Florida counties, Alfie Charles of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., said the machines' monitors may need to be recalibrated periodically.

The most likely reason the summary screen showed wrong candidates was because voters pushed the wrong part of the touch screen in the first place, Charles said.

He said poll workers are trained to perform the recalibration whenever a voter says the touchscreen isn't sensitive enough.

"Voters will vote quickly and they'll notice that they made an error when they get to the review screen. The review screen is doing exactly what it needs to do -- notifying voters what selections are about to be recorded," Charles said. "On a paper ballot, you don't get a second chance to make sure you voted for whom you intended, and it's a strong point in favor of these machines."

The Election Protection Coalition received a total of 32 reports of touch-screen voters who selected one candidate only to have another show up on the summary screen, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a coalition member.

David Dill, a Stanford University computer scientist whose Verified Voting Foundation also belongs to the coalition, said he wouldn't "prejudge and say the election is going smoothly just because we have a small number of incident reports out of the total population.

"It's not going to be until the dust clears probably tomorrow that we have even an approximate idea of what happened," Dill added.
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I mean, padding the vote by 4,000 people in a place with only 600something voting is pretty severe. I wonder how much it was padded by in other counties? especially bigger counties?

"OOPSIE! Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Votes..."

let's not forget whent he CEO of the company that makes the machines said he'd deliver ohio's electoral votes to bush at a fundraiser last year!

yeah
that's it

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/2004-11-04-votes-lost_x.htm
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More than 4,500 North Carolina votes lost because of mistake in voting machine capacity

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. (AP) — More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.

Officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board.

Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.

"That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.

In a letter to county officials, he blamed the mistake on confusion over which model of the voting machines was in use in Carteret County. But he also noted that the machines flash a warning message when there is no more room for storing ballots.

"Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked," he wrote.

County election officials were meeting with State Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett on Thursday and did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

The loss of the votes didn't appear to change the outcome of county races, but that wasn't the issue for Alecia Williams, who voted on one of the final days of the early voting period.

"The point is not whether the votes would have changed things, it's that they didn't get counted at all," Williams said.

Two statewide races remained undecided Thursday, for superintendent of public instruction, where the two candidates are about 6,700 votes apart, and agriculture commissioner, where they are only hundreds of votes apart.

How those two races might be affected by problems in individual counties was uncertain. The state still must tally more than 73,000 provisional ballots, plus those from four counties that have not yet submitted their provisionals, said Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the state elections board.

Nationwide, only scattered problems were reported in electronic voting, though roughly 40 million people cast digital ballots, voting equipment company executives had said.
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despite its making up votes and not counting votes, WE CAN HAVE ABSOLUTE FAITH IN IT, RIGHT?

Why is D.C. concidered a state in the voting system? How many electoral votes do they get?

So since the electoral college is based on representation in congress, they get one electoral vote, I think.

Right? someone?

Do they even have a representative? Isnt it like Puerto Rico where they have 'observers'?

Ok, my bad.

DC has a "shadow" senator and representative (these people don't have a vote in Congress, but they do sit on committees and participate in other ways). We also have three electoral votes.

That's basically how it is in Wisconsin, thankfully.

It's 51.0-48.0. I don't know where you're getting your extra two %-age points from. It's the smallest margin of victory in the popular vote for a sitting president in history.

It may very be that no significant fraud took place, or that vote discrepancies were technical issues and not the result of interference or that none of this matters because Bush (pre-provisional ballot count) leads Ohio by 133k votes. But significant differences - well outside the sampling error - have shown up between exit polls in WI, PA, OH, FL and NH and the final results. Oddly, the Senate race results seem to pretty much match the exit polls.

Simplest explanation: the exit polls were wack (but why only in the swing states and why all in the same direction?)

Again, it could all be quite innocent (or mangling by CNN to make their exit polls look more credible).

It's not like D.C. residents are effected by the Federal government or anything.

Anyways, what's the problem? D.C. is staunchly Democratic.

I am kicking myself for doing absolutely nothing to try to eliminate the use of unreliable voting machines.

I heard Rahul Mahajan say in an interview that in Florida Republicans voted down having some sort of hard copy back-up to go with the electronic voting machines. I have not tried to confirm this or track down the details.

Now why wouldn't you allow people to make sure your voting system works perfectly, hm?

HMMMM!

In Perry County the number of Bush votes somehow exceeded the number of registered voters, leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent. Youngstown, perhaps to make up the difference, reported negative 25 million votes...