Several election officials in Clay County, Kentucky, have been arrested and indicted on Federal charges for alleged activities that many would refer to as "election fraud" but also come under the heading of conspiracy and racketeering. If  true, it is a very unpleasant story, and one that illustrates the real (though apparently rare) risks of elections being tampered with by insiders.

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The recent New York Times editorial "Still Broken" is well worth the read, especially for its significant focus on dysfunction in the voter registration systems — something that often gets second billing to recollections of hanging chad and recent vote-dropping voting machine stories.

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I’d like to call your attention to this week’s electile dysfunction news, which is about a mini-Minnesota situation in Fairfax County, Virginia. I think it’s instructive because it illustrates how some problems with "paperless" voting are actually quite similar to a more old-fashioned form of voting, "paper only" voting, and a mooted new-fangled kind of voting, Internet voting.

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I previously reported that "transparency" was key word for people’s positive response to our our recent DC demonstration of our digital voter registration system (DVRS). There is also a similar transparency issue with voting systems, and voting systems also have another transparency issue around paper ballots; and then there is the issue of open source. Here’s the how the 3-way connection works.

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We’ve quite a bit lately about a topic that is central to election confidence. One way of asking the question (which we heard this week at the Pew Center’s “Make Voting Work” Voting in America summit) is:

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As you might imagine, it is hard to choose from the many
events of Election Day 2008 to report and reflect on! But I thought that I’d
pick a handful of events that show just how vitally important it is the
election equipment be designed carefully – and the consequences of products
that aren’t, and vendors that don’t seem to care. I have to say, it’s
potentially dire, which is why I’ve picked as many as 3 events to support my
claims.

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With early voting continuing apace (often a slow pace with
long lines), so does the stream of news on election dysfunction, usually with
an e-voting system as a culprit. But today’s news from Knox County
TN shows how a seemingly
simple question can create some serious – but wholly unnecessary – confusion.

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The 2009 U.S.
Presidential election is now underway, with early voting having started in many
states. And pretty much right off the bat, we’re seeing problems with
reliability and reluctance. The story in New Jersey
is a familiar one writ large, but the contrast with Texas
and Florida
shows that often the same concerns– reliability and trust — lead to similar
reluctance about both using e-voting technology, and about avoiding it. The
kicker is the reluctance to avoid it, in Florida
– read on.

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Here is a follow-up to yesterday’s note on how Georgia provided an example of how black box devices undermine confidence and foster suspicion.

First, there is a recent New York Times article  A Tale of Three (Electronic Voting) Elections by Adam Cohen that provides some comparison of the Georgia incident with a couple others in which e-voting systems were apparently part of a suspect election result.

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As a sad example of suspicion arising from current e-voting systems, I’d like you to read a story that I don’t really know how to believe — which is my point.

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