A Look Back at the Most Notable Stories from the Week That Was In Our Continually Crumbling Democracy...
By John Gideon on 12/18/2005, 6:33pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, of VotersUnite and VoteTrustUSA

As an introduction, the "DVN Top 5" is a feature that I have been providing in the weekly voting newsletter of VoteTrustUSA. The December 13 edition can be found here. The selection of what will be the "Top 5" for each week and where it goes on the list is all mine. The fact that you may disagree with my choices is great because it shows that you have been reading the DVN articles that I've posted throughout the week here on BRAD BLOG!...

#5 - This has been a busy week for Diebold. First their CEO announced his resignation. Then two days later Scott+Scott, LLC announced that they had filed a securities fraud class action suit against the company.

#4 – The Election Assistance Commission announced that they had adopted the 2005 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. Unfortunately these new guidelines do not take effect until Dec. 2007.

#3 – A judge in North Carolina delayed acting on a lawsuit challenging the certification of three voting machine vendors Wednesday because he needed more time to familiarize himself with details of the case.

"The lawsuit, filed by California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of a Winston-Salem activist, asks the court to block the approval of what it called "unqualified voting systems."", as reported by the
Associated Press

#2 – The county council in Volusia County, Florida decided to ignore misinformation from some and facts from "citizen patriots" as they voted 4 to 3 in favor of getting rid of their Diebold voting machines so they can have a voting system that is voter verified, auditable and recountable. The county has made a deal with ES&S who will lease the county DREs until such time as the AutoMARK is state certified and then they will allow the county to trade in the DRE's for the AutoMARK. As reported by BradBlog

#1 – As reported in the Miami Herald and other media sources across the nation, "A top election official and computer experts say computer hackers could easily change election results, after they found numerous flaws with a state-approved voting-machine in Tallahassee." Ion Sancho, the election chief in Leon County, Florida and two computer experts working with BlackBoxVoting.Org were successful in changing the results in a mock election on the counties Diebold Optical-scan machines. The results of this test caused Sancho to go to his county council and get them to agree to dump their Diebold voting machines. They will follow the plan from Volusia County (#2 above).

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