Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, Who's Next?

Via BradBlog:

NYT: BE PREPARED FOR CHAOS ON ELECTION DAY; NEW MACHINES, LINES, CONFUSION
Wed Oct 18 2006 19:12:07 ET

With an unusually large number of tight races and dozens of states shifting to new electronic voting systems, election officials across the country are bracing for long lines and heightened confusion at the polls on Election Day, Nov. 7, the NEW YORK TIMES will front on Thursday.

"North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Mississippi and Missouri are among the states considered most likely to experience difficulties, according to voting experts who have been tracking the new technology and other election changes.

I've seen this before.  If the sky doesn't fall and machines don't come to life and eat small children or burst into flame destroying entire precincts,  which is what we're being prepared for, the elections will be called a success with only "minor glitches" which were the result of "human error."  Don't fall for it.  The fact is that no matter how smoothly the day goes, without a voter-verified paper ballot and a proper audit, you will not know whether your vote was counted and recorded accurately.   

Also, please take the time to read this BradBlog post about DeForest Soaries, the BushCo EAC Chair who is blowing the whistle about what a sham HAVA is and how unsecure and hackable electronic voting machines are:

In the unaired interview, conducted last August, Soaries says there are "no standards" for voting systems and that Congress and the White House "made things worse through the passage of the Help America Vote Act."

Due to underfunding and lack of attention to the EAC and the Election Reform it was supposed to oversee, Soaries says we now have an "inability to trust the technology that we use" to count votes in our American democracy, even as "we’re spending a billion dollars a week in Iraq."

"We know more today about how to build a machine to take pictures of rocks on Mars than we know about how to build a machine to safeguard the American right to vote," complained Soaries in the interview.

On Electronic Voting System standards — which HAVA mandated would be created by the EAC — Soaries blasts both the White House and Congress for failing to supply them with the needed resources to complete the mandate, both for the federal government and the states that were relying on them to do so.

"[T]he states were forced to comply and they were asking us for guidance. We were ill-equipped to provide guidance. We didn’t begin our work until January 2004 and we spent the first three months of our work looking for office space. Here we were, the first federal commission, responsible for implementing federal law in the area of election administration and for the first three months we didn’t even have an address. And we physically had to walk around Washington DC looking for office space. This was a travesty. I was basically deceived by the leaders of the House, the Senate and the White House."

Which, of course, is only what electronic voting activists have been saying for years.