California Restricts Voting Machines

New York Times:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- California's secretary of state placed rigorous security conditions on voting equipment used in dozens of counties and limited the use of two of the most widely used machines statewide....

University of California computer experts found that voting machines sold by three companies -- Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems -- were vulnerable to hackers and that voting results could be altered.

Bowen said she had decertified the machines for use and then recertified them on the condition they meet her new security standards. When asked what would happen if the companies failed to do so, Bowen responded, ''I think they will.''...

The additional security requirements she imposed included banning all modum or wireless connections to the machines to prevent them from being linked to an outside computer or the Internet. Each machine that must be recertified also has a lengthy list of additional conditions it must meet, many of them highly technical.

She also required a full manual count of all votes cast on Diebold or Sequoia machines to ensure accuracy.

Bowen said the study revealed some vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to manipulate the systems ''with little chance of detection and with dire consequences.'' Her review also found that the machines posed problems for disabled voters.

Justice Department Actions Expected to Draw Congressional Scrutiny

: By Greg Gordon,
McClatchy Newspapers

The ways in which the department's Civil Rights Division has enforced the 2002 Help America Vote Act and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act go to the heart of allegations that the Bush administration has used the unit to suppress the votes of poor minorities.

The Help America Vote Act required states to upgrade voting machines and to create central, computerized databases of registered voters by Jan. 1, 2006. The National Voter Registration Act became known as the 'motor voter' law because it required motor-vehicle and public assistance agencies to register voters, but one provision directs states to scour registration records for ineligible names, such as those of dead people or voters who had moved away.

Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section, said that Hans von Spakovsky, a former division counsel, directed him in early 2005 to start what Rich called 'an initiative' to enforce the provision requiring states to maintain accurate registration lists.

Department spokeswoman Magnuson said 'there was no initiative' and that the agency was merely enforcing the law.

Rich said the department changed priorities under the motor voter law 'from expanding registration opportunities - the primary purpose of the statute - to unnecessarily forcing jurisdictions to remove voters from their voter rolls."

"Aggressive purging of the voter rolls tends to have a disproportionate impact on voters who move frequently, live in cities and have names that are more likely to be incorrectly entered into databases," said Rich, who's now an attorney with the liberal-leaning Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Primarily, he said, this means poor, minority voters. ...

The problem with the purges, said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Campaign at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, is that government lists are rife with typos and "so much of it is done secretly ... which opens the possibility for manipulation or error."

Will Electronic Voting Reform Create New Ways to Steal Elections?

From Truthout:

... While some of these problems have become well known, it is important to note that it wasn't flawed technology in Florida that kept Democrat Al Gore from the White House. More pivotal to the vote count were partisan decisions by then Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, a Republican, who allowed overseas ballots - allegedly from the military - to be counted, even though many lacked postmarks and those were suspected to be fraudulent. Amid that controversy the Supreme Court intervened, stopping the recount and declaring George W. Bush the winner.

'Florida was a great case of our eyes being off the target,' Campbell said. 'We were looking at butterfly ballots (punch cards). But it was the absentee ballots that came in after the election that Katherine Harris certified that gave the election to George W. Bush. I bet plenty of grieving military families don't realize it was absentee ballots that brought us the war in Iraq.'

In short, political manipulation of the process - on top of flawed election machinery - was the determining factor in Florida's presidential election in 2000, and for that matter in Ohio in 2004, in Illinois in 1960, and in other earlier presidential elections. ...

In more than two centuries of American elections, Gumbel said politicians and the public have often been swayed by arguments that technical improvements in election machinery would bring clearer and fairer elections. "There has been an illusion that if you fix the technology, the rest will be fine," he said. "In the book, I repeatedly show that when the stakes are high, and one party can do things, things will happen."

As Republican Rep. Peter King, R-NY, famously told filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi a year before George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004, "It's all over but the counting, and we'll take care of the counting."

Supreme Court race to dominate campaign finance reform hearing

From Wisconsin Radio Network:
By Jim Dick

A state senate committee takes up campaign finance reform today with the latest Supreme Court race in mind.
One advocate for clean government called the recent state supreme court race 'a cash soaked-special interest-contaminated smear fest.'

Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Surely Wisconsin Manufacturing & Commerce has our interests in mind, and knows what's best for us.