Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
By John Gideon on 12/5/2008, 4:34pm PT  

Today we have three articles about an amazing story of transparency in elections and what can happen when that transparency exists.

With the assistance of Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich, the Humboldt Co elections office partnered with local advocates to duplicate all paper ballots after they were originally counted. The images of those ballots were then put on line for research by the public. In conjunction with the “Humboldt Election Transparency Project” software was written that allowed researchers to recount the ballot images. This recount was just completed after the election was certified. The results of that recount were the discovery that a batch of 197 ballots that had been fed into the county’s Diebold optical scan machines were deleted after the totals were input on the GEMS software.

The county went back and checked and verified this problem. It then took the county several phone calls to Diebold/Premier to discover that the vendor knew about this problem and had known about it since 2004. It is reported that they neglected to notify the county and, according to one article, the state was never notified of this problem.

Carolyn Crnich and the advocates of Humboldt Co are to be congratulated for excellent work. Diebold/Premier, on the other hand, needs to be investigated for violations of the Help America Vote Act Section 301(a)(5) by the Dept. of Justice....

**"Daily Voting News" is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in "Daily Voting News" may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**

                 

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