Black Box Voting

Disaster averted.  West Virginia  found an error in how their machines counted certain straight ticket voting choices just in time to correct it. 

Tuesday October 14, 2008 Day before early voting, glitch found with machines 

...County Commission President Kent Carper said the problem is in the section for Supreme Court candidates.

If a person votes a straight party ticket, then deviates from the party in the Supreme Court section, the machine still counts the vote as a full straight ticket, Carper said...

Commissioner Dave Hardy said that the pre-election testing did its job:

"The system worked," Hardy said. "We did the test, it was timely reviewed by the Secretary of State's office and they identified the problem and we're fixing the problem."...

Straight ticket voting complicates elections around the country. The risk of increased miscounts is greater.  The failure of voters to follow states' specialized instructions can result in huge undervotes. 

Both North Carolina and South Carolina historically suffer unusually high undervotes in presidential elections because, by state law, voters who mark the "straight-party-ticket voting" option must also vote separately for president. Every four years, tens of thousands of voters in both states apparently forget to do this.

A simple mistake can flip the results of the election.  It all has to do with the way the ballots are set up for the computers that count them. Its all about checks and balances, and having the public come to pre-election testing to make sure many different ballot styles are tested.  Now that we are past that point in many states, we will have to rely upon voter education (for instructions), for activists to check polling place results against reported results, and for post election audits.  Just get involved and learn what your state does.

Will your vote count in 2008?  Find out by listening in on the conference call with some of the top national experts on the US voting issues.  Thursday, October 16,  at 12 PM eastern you can dial in and join the conference call lead by Lawrence Norden, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Susannah Goodman, Common Cause, director of election reform and Pamela Smith, Verified Voting Foundation, President.

# Watchdogs Ask: Is America Ready to Vote?
Last update: 2:23 p.m. EDT Oct. 14, 2008

WASHINGTON, Oct 14, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Report
Assesses 50 States on Ability to Address Voting Machine Problems on
Election Day

With millions of Americans expected to confront an array of voting
technologies on Nov. 4, election experts from the Brennan Center for
Justice, Common Cause and Verified Voting will release on Thursday a
50-state report card that grades every state on its preparedness to
respond to Election Day voting system problems like broken machines,
software malfunctions, or long lines that result from voting equipment
breakdowns or misallocation of machines.

As the authors will explain in a conference call on Thursday, October
16, 2008 at 12PM EDT, some states still have not adopted laws and
procedures to effectively address an election system meltdown, even as
the country has invested billions of dollars to improve its voting
technology.