Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

Concerns about military and overseas voters headline the national voting news. Senator Schumer held a hearing to discuss a report showing that, in 2008, nearly one-fourth of the absentee ballots requested by these voters (1) were undeliverable, (2) weren’t returned to the local elections office, or (3) were rejected due to a missing signature or failure to notarize. The report says these voters were disenfranchised but fails to mention that high percentages of absentee ballots sent to ordinary citizens go uncounted for the same reasons. Senators Inhofe and Cornyn are re-introducing a bill they hope will help military and overseas voters return their ballots to their local officials in a timely manner, while ensuring the privacy and secrecy of the ballots.

On a more local note: A voter registration database error assigned 12 voters in a Mississippi Democratic primary to the wrong Wards. With only a 2-vote margin between the two candidates in one of the Wards, the result of valid votes couldn’t be determined, and the party decided to hold a re-vote, which flipped the outcome....

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

The voter ID debate continues in Texas. Tennessee lawmakers are attempting to resurrect an old bill that would require a photo ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register, and would allow deployed troops to fax or e-mail their absentee ballots. ...

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

Government-issued photo ID requirements for voters have passed in some states and are being debated in several others (SC, TX, and WI in today’s articles). The debate centers on ensuring that only eligible voters can vote (pro), vs. concerns about disenfranchising eligible voters (con). But today’s two featured articles, when taken together, suggest that other important questions need to be asked. The first article tells of the breach of the UC Berkley computers and the possible loss of identity information for 16,000 students and alumni. The second tells of a proposal in the Philippine legislature to require fingerprint data (AFIX biometric information) for every voter to be stored in the voter registration database.

Is it far-fetched to speculate whether voter biometrics is the logical outcome of a drive for "strict voter ID"?

Other unasked questions in the U.S. Voter-ID debate are: What kind of identity information is or will be collected and stored as part of the election process? For how long? Under what safe guards? With the move to create centralized, computerized government-issued identities for people and require that identity be presented in order to vote, access to that identity and impersonating that identity are only going to grow problematic over time....

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

If you find yourself skimming through DVN and skipping articles that don’t sound relevant or interesting, you’re doing exactly what I did. But now that I’m reading almost every one while reviewing their suitability for inclusion, it’s become clear that headlines can be deceiving.

And not necessarily deceiving in the normal sense of being misleading or wrong. Specifically, in the context of DVN, some headlines have little probative value to assist readers in predicting their interest in the full story. We are therefore exploring different ways to better communicate the content, some of which you may have noticed (i.e., supplementary parenthetical key words or description). Alternatively we’re trying to draw attention to significant content in this introductory paragraph, such as e-voting being eliminated in Ireland.

But neither of those seems appropriate for the first story below on e-voting, so we now have option three: suggesting you open the link and take a look....

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

Riverside County, California public servants want to introduce a ballot issue to ask voters their opinion of electronic voting. But the watchdog group Save R Votes thinks it’s a waste of money. “"We don't doubt that people like electronic voting, but it is not safe, transparent or auditable," says Tom Courbat, the group’s founder.

Complaints from Georgia about the new citizenship requirement for voter registration are rebutted by Secretary of State Karen Handel, who argues that the law is necessary to prevent voter fraud. She claims discrimination by the federal government, arguing that it’s not fair that Ohio’s Secretary of State Jennifer Bruner can take actions favorable to her party without federal oversight, but Handel can’t do the same in Georgia. The debate about voter ID continues in Texas and South Carolina with some machine problems from Mississippi, Michigan, and Ohio....

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

Under the current Voting Rights Act, U.S. Department of Justice approval will be needed to implement a newly passed Georgia law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, a law which "opponents say would keep the poor, elderly and minorities away from the ballot box." Will a Supreme Court decision on the VRA nullify or uphold this law? The anticipated "stricter" Texas Voter ID law appears to be in progress....

Congratulations to the Florida activists who succeeded in killing a really bad bill! The debate on the Voting Rights Act and photo ID continues.

Happy Cinco de Mayo....

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

The recent international flavor of the Daily Voting News continues today. India also wrestles with questions of voter ID and accessibility for people with disabilities. In the Philippines, the bidding to select a single vendor for the Election Automation Process, touted to make future Philippine elections “fraud-proof”, began today.

Rest assured not everything is international news; there are domestic election stories as well....

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn

Mixed emotions accompanied the release of the first post-Gideon DVN - happiness to see John's important work taking some tentative new steps, sadness that he isn't here to do it. There also comes a profound realization of how much more went into the process than we ever appreciated. It feels like trying cook Grandma's signature dish based on the partial list of ingredients in collective memory. Thus, we're thankful for your encouragement and for those who surreptitiously spit their food into a napkin and convincingly said they were full but it was great.

Today's issue of the Daily Voting News contains some international flavor with thoughts on the Indian elections.

Domestically, the debate over photo ID continues in Texas and Mississippi as does the national debate on the Voting Rights Act....

Co-Editors: Dave Klein and John Washburn.

We are thankful for the opportunity to honor the work of John Gideon by continuing the Daily Voting News. We appreciate the encouragement expressed and patience during this transition under trying times. Because multiple days are covered in this issue of the DVN, news items within a given state are in chronological order; the date of publication appears in headline of the article for this issue only.

Voter participation issues (such as photo ID and caging) have been much in the news....

John Gideon wanted the stewards of democracy to have a summary of each day’s news concerning a broad range of issues regarding the integrity of elections in the U.S. and elsewhere, so he created and published the free newsletter, the ‘Daily Voting News’ [DVN].

Despite our recent loss of John, the value and need for DVN – his creation – remains unchanged. A working group has been established to determine the best way to continue this service. More information about the effort and opportunities for you to contribute to DVN will be coming.

Until a stable, workable plan is implemented, a few us will produce DVN using John's example as a guide. The first order of business is to produce a DVN covering the news of this latest week. Please bear with us as we assemble both the latest news and the new DVN team at VotersUnite.Org.

I’d like to thank John Washburn and Dave Klein for stepping in quickly to help re-instate DVN in John’s absence.

You can assist by sending suggestions and election-news stories to dvn-tips@VotersUnite.Org.

I'm sure that most, if not all, of you have heard of our loss of John Gideon. I'm also sure that you appreciated his faithfulness in providing you with up-to-the-day information about election issues.

He appreciated your faithfulness, too. Your work and personal engagement with him was a great inspiration to him and provided tremendous motivation for him to continue his work. Some of you expressed your gratitude to him in personal emails, which never failed to delight him. All of you expressed your appreciation by remaining subscribed to Daily Voting News. I don't say this lightly. He experienced your continuing subscriptions as appreciation for his work.

To state the obvious, John cannot be replaced. But DVN, John's personal brainchild and invaluable contribution to VotersUnite.Org, has become an essential resource in the election integrity community and beyond. I want to reassure you that I am working with other colleagues of John to figure out how VotersUnite can continue a form of DVN even in John's absence.
Hopefully, it will not be long.

Many tributes to John and his work have been posted on many sites. I am including links to three. Sharing our memories of John and even our sorrow in losing his active presence is one way to draw strength from this untimely loss.

• VotersUnite.Org: Celebrating the Life Of John Gideon
  http://www.votersunite.org/info/johngideon.asp
• Bradblog: In Memoriam: John Gideon, 1947-2009. Father, grandfather, husband, veteran, patriot, co-director of VotersUnite.Org, democracy advocate, blogger, friend ...
  http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7102
• NCVoters: Tributes to John Gideon, RIP National Election Integrity Hero (A collection of tributes from around the web.) http://ncvoters.blogspot...gideon-rip-national.html

Ellen Theisen
Director
www.VotersUnite.Org

Guest Blogged by Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org

[Updated: The bill has been defeated! See bottom of article for details.]

Even though reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), and dozens of computer security experts who strongly and unanimously warn of insurmountable threats to the privacy and security of ballots cast over the Internet, the Washington State legislature is proposing --- and fast-tracking --- a bill to allow Internet voting for its military and overseas voters (S.B.5522 in the Senate, and its identical companion H.B.1624 in the House).

Even though the U.S. Department of Defense canceled its Internet voting project (SERVE) in 2004 citing security concerns, and even though the DoD has still been unable to establish the secure and private Internet voting demonstration project that Congress mandated in 2002, the Washington State legislature is seriously considering a bill that would authorize the Washington Secretary of State to create an Internet voting scheme and declare it secure and private --- without any oversight or review by the legislature or the people...

Guest Blogged by Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org

Many jurisdictions are realizing their voting systems are horribly flawed and they want to get them fixed before November. But the new systems currently under test by the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) have so many defects that the manufacturers have to keep repairing them before testing can continue. Consequently the EAC has not certified anything yet.

Kudos to the EAC for this!

But Gracia Hillman, one of the EAC Commissioners, recommends a way around this “roadblock” for the jurisdictions using systems that are no good. She suggests a contingency plan that would allow the jurisdictions to use new and different systems that are no good, but at least they would comply with their state laws. Her ideas:

Unbelievable.

The systems are so bad they can’t meet the federal standards, so to get around this “roadblock,” Commissioner Hillman proposes to bypass the testing process.

She wants the EAC to bless new, defective systems for the vendors to sell to replace the old, defective systems that are currently in use.

But that’s what NASED (National Association of State Election Directors) did when it oversaw the voting system testing process, and the decade-long, widespread use of Premier/Diebold’s vote-losing software is one of the results.

After ten years of use in election after election, all across the country, Premier/Diebold’s vote-dropping software flaw has finally come to light — thanks to Butler County, Ohio’s Elections Director Betty L. McGary and Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner...

Guest Blogged by Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org

[Ed Note: Ellen appeared on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight this evening to discuss this report. The video is now posted here.]

As we approach the 2008 general election, the structure of elections in the United States — once reliant on local representatives accountable to the public — has become almost wholly dependent on large corporations, which are not accountable to the public. Most local officials charged with running elections are now unable to administer elections without the equipment, services, and trade-secret software of a small number of corporations (primarily Election Systems and Software (ES&S), Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold), though a few other corporations have a very small share of the market).

If the vendors withdrew their support for elections now, our election structure would collapse.

However, some states and localities are recognizing the threat that vendor dependency poses to elections. They are using ingenuity and determination to begin reversing the direction.

This week, VotersUnite.Org released a report [PDF] that examines the situation, how we got here, and steps we can take to limit corporate control of our elections in 2008 and reduce it even further in the future.

Case studies presented in our report give examples of the pervasive control voting system vendors now have over election administration in almost every state, and the consequences some jurisdictions are already experiencing. We discovered that such dependency has allowed vendors to...