Associated Press


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ettled_election


Doubts Persist About Election Results

9 minutes ago

By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer

As the Electoral College (news - web sites) prepares to certify President Bush (news - web sites)'s re-election on Monday, concerns persist about the integrity of the nation's voting system — particularly in Ohio, where details continue to emerge of technology failures, voter confusion and overcrowded polling stations in minority and poor neighborhoods.

Few mainstream politicians dispute Bush's victory, and the incumbent's 3.5 million-vote margin nationwide was wider than any of the reported problems, which included insufficient or incomplete provisional ballots and, in some places, brazen partisan shenanigans.

But that is not stopping a disparate assortment of personalities — prominent among them Democratic congressman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the Rev. Jesse Jackson (news - web sites) and presidential candidates of the Green and Libertarian parties — from questioning the accuracy of certified results and demanding investigations.

Of greatest concern is the extent of disenfranchisement in the critical swing state of Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes guaranteed Bush's victory.

"It's critical that we investigate and understand any and every voting irregularity anywhere in our country, not because it would change the outcome of the election but because Americans have to believe that their votes are counted in our democracy," John Kerry (news - web sites) said this week, after calling for a statewide recount in Ohio.

The nation's voting system, despite improvements since the 2000 Florida fiasco, remains a locally administered patchwork whose lack of national uniformity distinguishes the United States from many other democracies.

Although most complaints have come from Democrats and the third-party candidates, Republicans and bipartisan groups acknowledge problems. The Government Accountability Office is investigating election problems. Rep. Bob Ney (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio and chairman of the House Administration Committee, will oversee an inquiry next year.

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, created in 2002, is also scrutinizing the outcome. It plans to publish in January the government's first report on the voting, which will serve as the basis for congressional recommendations and reforms.

"We definitely did not have a glitch-free election," said EAC chairman DeForest Soaries Jr., a Bush appointee.

Rev. Jackson and other activists want wholesale changes in the U.S. voting process, ideally before the 2006 midterm elections. Jackson says the most distressing problem appears to be the lack of nationwide standards. No federal agency enforces regulations when states or counties fail to comply with internal procedures.

Without national standards, he said, some poor counties have inferior equipment and insufficient numbers of voting machines to support dense populations.

"What we really need is a federal standard for elections, and we need a constitutional, individual, federally protected right to vote," said Jackson, president of the Chicago-based Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

Grassroots activists say politicians who refuse to discuss voting concerns will lose respect — and votes.

"If the Democratic leadership doesn't step up, why do they think that the activists on the ground — the people who collected millions of dollars, made phone calls and registered people to vote — would do it again in 2008?" said Don Goldmacher of the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club of Oakland, Calif.

Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, has conceded that a recount would likely alter the vote tally somewhat. But he adamantly dismisses allegations of fraud.

"This was an election where you have some glitches but none of these glitches were of a conspiratorial nature and none of them would overturn or change the election results," Blackwell said on Monday when he certified the results.

In the last five weeks, activists have documented thousands of voting problems across the nation. The citizens' lobby group Common Cause received 210,000 phone calls to a hot line that logged complaints.

Electronic errors were so grave in Carteret County, N.C., that election administrators will hold a special election in early January to determine the next agriculture commissioner. Paperless touch-screen voting machines there failed to retain 4,438 votes during early voting before Nov. 2. The Democratic incumbent lost by just 2,287 votes out of about 3 million cast statewide.

In six states, including Florida and Texas, about three dozen voters complained that they selected Kerry on touch-screen machines but were shown as having voted for Bush until they revised their electronic ballot. Equipment manufacturers blamed the problem on miscalibration.

In New Orleans, poorly trained poll workers told thousands of voters to come back later in the day because they couldn't turn on new electronic voting equipment when polls opened.

And in a Franklin County, Ohio, a precinct where 638 voters cast ballots, a computer recorded 3,893 extra votes for President Bush. The error was corrected in the certified vote total, and local election workers have been unable to reproduce the error.

Conyers, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee (news - web sites), began examining Ohio's problems in a hearing this past week attended by eight Democratic lawmakers.

Among his concerns was that voters in urban, minority and Democratic precincts waited in lines up to eight hours — even though in Youngstown, election administrators had extra voting terminals stored in a warehouse. Conyers also charged that a "campaign of deception" directed some Democrats to wrong polling places, where they were forced to cast provisional ballots.

Last week, Conyers sent a letter to Blackwell asking him to cooperate in a Democratic investigation of "substantial irregularities" in Ohio, which certified a 119,000-vote margin for Bush. That is some 17,000 votes fewer than Blackwell's original estimate of 136,000.

The margin shrank primarily because of the Franklin county glitch, and the addition of overseas and provisional ballots. Provisional ballots — meant to address concerns of voter disenfranchisement — were cast by voters who showed up at the wrong precinct or without proper identification on Nov. 2.

Out of Ohio's 156,977 provisional ballots, about four in five, or 121,598 ballots, were ruled valid.

http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&...tnG=Search+News

I still want to know how the military vote went, no one has told me a thing about it. Out of 156,977 provisional ballots, only 121,598 were valid? Come on. This is BS.

Now CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/10/...n.ap/index.html

Electoral College set to certify election
Doubts persist about integrity of nation's voting system
Friday, December 10, 2004 Posted: 5:32 PM EST (2232 GMT)

(AP) -- As the Electoral College prepares to certify President Bush's re-election on Monday, concerns persist about the integrity of the nation's voting system -- particularly in Ohio, where details continue to emerge of technology failures, voter confusion and overcrowded polling stations in minority and poor neighborhoods.

FOX should come out and admit that it was election fraud:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,141199,00.html

Government Must Do More to Prevent Future Voter Fraud
Friday, December 10, 2004
By Norman Willox
While Americans this year were fortunate to avoid the drawn-out legal battles of the preceding presidential election, the close margins in some key states and concerns over inconsistent election standards illustrate the continued risk of having election processes that vary from state and state, and often from county to county.

With future close elections likely, our democratic process is particularly vulnerable to voter fraud (search) and abuse that we are not yet doing enough to stop.

Voter fraud has a long and storied history in the United States. However, the opportunities to commit fraud expanded substantially in the 1990s as a result of the federal motor-voter law that allows driver's license applicants to self-affirm their eligibility to vote with no more than a check mark and a signature.

This lack of safeguards has resulted in extremely inaccurate voter rolls in many states. Individuals who are deceased or who have moved are in many cases simply kept on the rolls, providing an opportunity for fraudsters to exploit simply by assuming different identities.

Furthermore, states do not share or coordinate their voter rolls. Therefore, there’s no way for a state to know that the John Smith who showed up at an Orlando polling place is the same John Smith who voted with an absentee ballot in his home state of Pennsylvania. Allowing voters to register on the day of the election, as some states do, only exacerbates this problem.

Recognizing that there were serious issues to address after the last election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (search) that mandated the creation of the Election Assistance Commission (search) to conduct public studies that would examine the myriad weaknesses of the federal electoral system and develop best practices and standards for voting systems to guarantee the integrity of elections.

Not surprisingly, the Commission made the determination that verifying a voter’s identity was a crucial component of its overall mandate to restore trust in the way that elections are conducted and administered in the United States.

In many ways, the challenge we now face is similar to one resolved years ago by financial institutions, credit issuers and insurance companies. In order to verify the identity of individuals opening new accounts, these businesses worked to develop systems to perform what’s known as “information-based identity authentication.” (search)

These systems perform an independent assessment of what a person represents about his identity, based on an analysis of available information. The applicant provides information that is checked against proven information tools to ascertain if it is real (not fictitious) and if combinations belong together (e.g., linked names and addresses). Using a well-tested analytical model based on historical data, the system can then provide a score that indicates the likelihood that the person is who he claims to be.

Automated identity authentication at the time of voter registration would be a good place to start. After a registration application is submitted online or by a grassroots organization, states could use an information-based identity authentication system to ensure that the applicant is legitimate and screen out false or stolen identities.

In addition, the identity authentication process could easily be expanded by individual states on a case-by-case basis to screen for other eligibility criteria, such as age, citizenship and residency requirements. Combining advanced analytical processes and tools along with policy-based, information-driven technology, it is possible to put in place an identity management system that provides authentication, security and enhanced privacy protections.

Putting such a system in place would allow for the standardization of state voter lists, eliminating many opportunities for fraud and abuse. The next step would be to develop a system for states to share information on voters, ensuring that principle of “one person, one vote” is not undermined by would-be fraudsters.

States already possess much of the information that would be needed for such a system, in the form of motor vehicle databases. However, these systems could only be truly effective when combined with the kind of information and tools that power predictive models used in the insurance or mobile phone industries to verify the identity of applicants. There are numerous examples of this technology already in use in a way that safeguards society’s interests, while protecting the privacy of individual citizens.

Ultimately, the principle of democratic governance is at stake in voter fraud and abuse. While information-based identity authentication will not provide a magic bullet to solve the problem of voter fraud, it does provide one vital component of a comprehensive system to ensure that elections are carried out in a fair and accurate manner.


Norman A. Willox Jr. is the chief officer for privacy, industry and regulatory affairs at LexisNexis.

To continue the information flow we must be on our best behavior. Would help to write this reorter.

I went to the AP website www.ap.org and have determined that their email name foremat is first initial last name @ap.org, so RACHEL KONRAD shold be rkonrad@ap.org