Vote fraud update

The following was published in Cleveland Plain Dealer recently:

A state regulatory board on Tuesday approved a new Diebold touch-screen voting machine for Ohio voters, although the device lacks all the state's requirements.

The AccuVote-TSX slid in under a state-imposed certification deadline set for Friday -- even as Diebold competitor Election Systems & Software continued to fight the time constraint in a courtroom across town.

Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's top aide on the state's voting-machine conversion, Judy Grady, told ES&S lawyers during a deposition filed in the case that she set the divisive deadline to accommodate funding and deployment deadlines -- as well as her own vacation schedule.

A simple question arises: If the Republicans are not engaging in systemic vote fraud, then why are the rules stretched to accomodate Diebold?

What Went Wrong: The Conyers Report is finally going to receive some part of the attention it has always deserved. On May 6th, Academy Chicago Publishers formally published this report under the title "What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election." Gore Vidal provided the introduction, praise be unto him.

By all means, buy the book. But more than that: Call bookstores and ask if they have a copy. Call libraries and ask if they have a copy. Reader inquiries of that sort will help increase the work's visibility.

More votes than voters in Miami-Dade. Strange, isn't it, how all those "glitches" keep piling up...? (Note: I'm linking to Brad Friedman's replication of this story because the Miami Herald requires a sign-in process.)

A study by a member of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition found frequent discrepancies between the number of votes cast and signatures collected by poll workers in the November general election.

The study, expected to be released next week, found that workers at dozens of polling places submitted counts of signatures to elections officials that did not match the number of votes recorded on the touch-screen machines.
...
[b]ecause the iVotronic touch-screen machines do not use paper ballots, elections officials may never know for sure -- highlighting a continuing issue with the machines.

As I have often pointed out, even paper would not completely end controversy.

The study found that there were 5,917 cases where there were more votes than signatures.
...
In at least one case, the problem appears to have been the machine. At precinct 816, the Church of the Ascension, the number of signatures was 945, a figure verified on the machine. But the number of reported votes that day was 1,116.

After testing the machine, its maker, Election Systems & Software, told the state Division of Elections that an internal memory bank failed but the votes were recorded

.Ask yourself: How often do "internal memory banks" fail on your computer? Your computer that you use every day, as opposed to every election day?

Bill Maher, Gore Vidal (again!) and Al Franken: I missed the recent edition of Maher's show, which apparently included a discussion relevant to the vote-fraud debate. A transcript should soon be available here. I'll post an excerpt when I can...

Internal correspondence... I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but you may appreciate a chance to get a look at actual internal memos involving state elections directors, secretaries of state, legal counsel and others, spanning the 2001 - 2004 period. Most of this stuff is dull, but there are, I hear, a few intriguing data nuggets just waiting to be uncovered.