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A nonpartisan organization tracking election reform across the United States released a report Wednesday warning that 10 states are likely to experience severe problems on November 7 because of electronic voting machines and new voter identification laws that could call into question the results of some races.
"The November 7 election promises to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 election - a divided body politic, an election system in flux and the possibility - if not certainty - of problems at polls nationwide," the report says.
Electionline.org issued a 75-page report, "Election Preview 2006: What's Changed, What Hasn't, and Why," which claims that a handful of the midterm election's hotly contested campaigns in states such as Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Florida and Indiana may face particular trouble because of the transition to electronic voting machines. The machines have been proven unreliable in choosing the right candidate, as demonstrated by numerous tests cases in the years that the machines have replaced paper ballots.
"This was supposed to be the year - and the election - when the voting process nationwide was more secure, more technologically advanced and more trusted by the citizens and candidates participating," Electionline.org said in a summary of its report. "Yet as the mid-term elections approach, machine failures, database delays and foul-ups, inconsistent procedures, new rules and new equipment have some predicting chaos at the polls at worst and widespread polling place snafus at best."
The disastrous 2000 presidential election led Congress to pass the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, which was signed into law by President Bush in October 2002. The law was supposed to overhaul the electoral process and make it easier for people to choose which candidates to vote for. Instead, the law will force most states to switch from paper balloting to a fully computerized system - one that is currently rife with programming flaws and is incapable of being audited.
Computerized voting and the technological problems related to the system had already been realized before hanging chads became a household phrase. In November 1998, an election in Hawaii was held using state-of-the-art computers designed by Electronic Systems & Software, a company with close ties to Republican lawmakers in Washington, DC.
Seven of ES&S's 361 voting machines used in Hawaii on Election Day in November 1998 malfunctioned (five units had lens occlusion, one unit had a defective cable and one unit had a defective "read head"), which led to Hawaii's first-ever statewide election review and a first in the history of the United States. Hundreds of people who used the machines complained mightily to local election officials that the candidates they picked did not register in the computerized system.
Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) was part owner and former chairman and chief executive of ES&S, the company that made all the equipment that counted the votes during his last two runs for office, yet he failed to list his ties to the company on federal disclosure forms.
Serious voting irregularities are predicted again in Maryland, which just suffered through a fiasco in the September primary. Diebold, one of the main manufacturers of electronic voting machines, allegedly wrote a computer code specifically for Maryland that was corrupted and caused problems with the electronic poll books, according to Linda Lamone, the state's election director.
"The most recent and vivid example of what can go wrong during an election using electronic machines was Maryland's September 12 primary," the Electionline.org report says. "There, a combination of human error and technical problems had voters in the state's most populous county casting provisional ballots and voting on scraps of paper and even campaign literature after an election official forgot to include machine activator cards with materials that went out to more than 200 precincts. In precincts where the machines were started up on
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