National News

With a celebrity candidate and record-setting expenditures the race to represent Minnesota in the US Senate captured the nation’s attention even before the historically close margin was announced. An automatic, manual recount of the Minnesota U.S. Senate race that began could last until mid-December. As non-partisan, election integrity advocates in Minnesota, we welcome this attention and hope that one of the outcomes will be lessons learned that strengthen our democracy.

By Christopher Edley Jr., the Washington Post

Suppose in your neighborhood there are 600 registered voters per machine, while across town there are only 120 per machine. (That's a 5 to 1 disparity, which is what exists in some places in Virginia today.) On Election Day, your line wraps around the block and looks to be a four-hour wait, while in other areas lines are nonexistent.

by Elizabeth Heichler, PC World

U.S. jurisdictions using electronic voting systems this November would do well to implement routine post-election auditing and press for open-source software to help ensure fair votes in the future, said e-voting experts at the Technology Review EmTech conference on Thursday.

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003.

By VotersUnite.org

“As we approach the 2008 general election, the structure of elections in the United States — once reliant on local representatives accountable to the public — has become almost wholly dependent on large corporations, which are not accountable to the public,” states a report released today by VotersUnite.Org, entitled “Vendors Are Undermining the Structure of U.S. Elections.”

With less than three months before the presidential election, the hotly contested state, Ohio, along with others, continue to have problems with E-voting technology

by Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American
August 18th, 2008

This editorial is published in the August 3, 2008 New York Times.

Congress has stood idly by while states have done the hard work of trying to make electronic voting more reliable. Now the Senate is taking up a dangerous bill introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, that would make things worse in the name of reform. If Congress will not pass a strong bill, it should apply the medical maxim: first, do no harm.

Electronic voting has made great strides in reliability, but it has a long way to go. When reformers push for greater safeguards, they often argue that future elections could produce the wrong result because of a computer glitch or be stolen through malicious software. That’s being too nice.

The New York Times Editorial

Electronic voting is notoriously vulnerable to technical glitches and vote theft. By now, most states have passed good laws requiring paper records of every vote cast — an important safeguard. But that is not enough. States also need strong audit laws to ensure that machine totals are vigilantly checked against the paper records. That is the only way that voters will be able to trust electronic voting.

By John Washburn  
This article was posted at Washburn's World and is reposted here with permission of the author.