By John Gideon on 3/26/2006, 4:29pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, of VotersUnite and VoteTrustUSA

The "DVN Top 5" is a feature in the weekly voting newsletter of VoteTrustUSA. The March 20 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 The BRAD BLOG!...

#5 �" The Associated Press reported that 1000 ES&S memory cards had been replaced in North Carolina. These cards are from the same batch that was found to be bad by officials in Summit County, Ohio. For their part the folks in Summit County have announced that ES&S has quit being cooperative with them. Apparently the company does not like negative print so the county reports that ES&S employees are now refusing to answer questions about status of work and about ballot printing. Summit County has decided that they may have to take ES&S to court to decide who is the customer and who is the contractor.

#4 �" Some voting machine vendors seem to have no problem touting their wares and then when they have customers, telling the customers that they cannot deliver their products in time for elections. AVS did this very effectively and now their customers are saying, "Nevermind!" as they turn to Diebold. Bradford and Carbon Counties have made up their minds to switch. Meanwhile ES&S is having troubles on the supply side too.
Lebanon
County expected to get their full compliment of voting machines but ES&S is oversold in the state and counties want some machines to be HAVA compliant. ES&S decided to take machines from Lebanon for the other counties and they told the county, "Either accept 50 percent of your order by 5 p.m. (Wednesday) or get nothing." That seems to be the typical cavalier ES&S statement.

#3 �" Nearly three weeks after the Texas primary and it is still in the news. Tom Green County was in the middle of a recount early this week when they found that the number of ballots they were printing from their Hart eSlate Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines was not close to the number of voters who had voted. The recount was stopped by the Secretary of State and the vendor was called in. The problems seem to have been fixed and, of course, Hart Intecivic is saying there were no "mechanical" problems (they don't mention software problems).
Also in Texas a candidate for Supreme Court Justice has announced that he is considering a challenge of his election in the state. He points to vote totals in some places in the state that are clearly not historically correct. This candidate has run in previous elections and has won in previous elections. This time he is running against a candidate who was selected by the Governor.

#2 �" This week saw a lawsuit being filed in California. Named in the suit are the Secretary of State and 18 county Registrars of Voters from the 18 Diebold counties in the state. The text of the suit can be found here.

#1 �" Two big state primaries and two big failures! This week it was Illinois with Cook County and the city of Chicago teamed with Sequoia Voting Systems to provide us with another elections debacle. As of Wednesday afternoon there were still 414 memory cartridges missing between the county and the city. The memory cartridges have the votes stored in them. Election judges were improperly trained and prepared for the work they were expected to do using a new voting system. But as much as Sequoia tried to deflect all of the blame on the election judges and the lack of training the city and county are looking at the machines and beginning to threaten not to pay what is still owed on contracts until something is done to fix the problems. As of this writing all votes have still not been counted.

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