US/voting

About

This article is about voting in the United States, various related issues and proposed solutions.

This page is in need of updating. It mainly needs to be organized a bit better.

Issues

Gerrymandering is a problem which significantly reduces the fairness of many elections in the US.
There have been repeated allegations of election fraud recently, especially in the 2000 and 2004 elections; Diebold and several other companies have been implicated.

Opinions

David Brin:
- Gerrymandering by David Brin: 9-part article about the evils of gerrymandering
- The Electoral College: a surprisingly easy fix: a proposed solution to the current winner-takes-all voting

News

2006-09-21 Former Diebold Consultant Admits Company Altered Software for '02 GA Election
2006-02-01 ...Ohio GOP guts election protection
2006-01-04 Voting machine source code must be available for review in Wisconsin; North Carolina also apparently has an open-source voting machine law, but reports are that citizens are having to file suit for it to be enforced (somewhere in The Independent within the past month or two; I don't have time to look just now).
2005-12-18 (NY Times editorial) The Business of Voting
2005-11-14 Has American democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005's referenda defeats? by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Online Journal Contributing Writers

Leads

The following has been shamelessly copied from here without further checking (yet) (it's late and I should probably be doing something else anyway):

20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA

80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html (article in Rolling Stone says "Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic.")
There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on v otes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm
ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
Diebold is based in Ohio. http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm
Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm
Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years. http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio. http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother. http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm
Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation. http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm

Links

Electoral Vote: tracks voting projections and results

things to read up on

11-22-2005: Updates on felons - Jeffrey Dean and John Elder

voting reform initiatives