Ask your election officials: Are you following e-voting issues in the news

[kster]

A blogger who has been obsessively tracking the growing number of electronic voting horror stories around the country -- stories largely ignored by the national media -- offers an annotated list of questions to help election officials learn from others’ mistakes.

By Brad Friedman
[email protected]

Electronic voting has suffered from continuing and epidemic failures across the country in the primary elections so far in 2006. And the private companies receiving billions of federal dollars from the Help America Vote Act as local governments “upgrade” their election systems have time and again proven their inability to properly service election officials and fulfill contractual obligations.

Even this early in the election season, machines from all of the companies have proven to be disastrous for the few states that have already had primaries or have them scheduled just around the bend.

Q: Since Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), the largest voting machine company in America, has failed in at least half a dozen states so far -- including Texas, Oregon, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri and Arkansas -- to provide ballots, programming or even machines in some places in time for the start of elections (and as specified by their contracts), what specific plans do you have in place to provide a back-up voting system if they, or one of the other vendors, fail to supply ballots, machinery and/or programming in time for your election this year?

Monumental, yet scandalously under-reported failures by ES&S this year alone have led to investigations, official hearings, election contests, legal actions or threats thereof in all of the states named above, and several more are likely to take similar actions soon.

See, from Indiana:

http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00208