From the Styx by Peggy Tibbetts

In the wake of last Friday’s decision by Judge Manzanares that Colorado’s voting machines were not properly secured and must be re-certified after the November 7 Election (see my post Vote By Mail 9/26), election officials and voters are stuck with ambiguity and uncertainty. Voters are advised to vote by mail. But that doesn’t address the problems with the voting machines.

The voter-advocate group, Citizens for Accurate Mail Ballot Election Results (CAMBER) challenged Colorado Secretary of State candidates, Mike Coffman (R) and Ken Gordon (D) to cooperatively or individually appoint a person or persons to begin work immediately on a plan to comply with Judge Manzanares’ orders. CAMBER Executive Director Al Kolwicz said, “If they wait until election results are decided and they take office before they begin development of a compliance plan, it is highly unlikely that the 2008 elections will be improved. There just won’t be enough time.” CAMBER warned the Secretary of State, the Legislature, and the Governor of the problems with voting machines back in 2004, when Colorado adopted HB04-1227, a bill requiring voter verified paper trails. The bill was enacted, and resulted in most of the problems heard by the court in last week’s trial.

Read CAMBER’s Call for Action here.

After serious problems with card activators in the August primary Denver is scrapping their voting machines.

Denver Shelves Part Of Voting System After Problem

Denver city election officials say key components of an electronic voting system won’t be used in the November election because of problems they caused in the August primary.

The decision, announced Monday, intensified a battle within city hall over whether the second-hand parts were lemons that should be returned for a refund.

The city paid $35,000 to buy 50 of the devices, called card activators, from Chicago, which sold them after a trouble-filled election in March. The devices produce cards programmed to make sure voters get the correct ballot on electronic voting machines, but they were blamed for loading wrong ballots in Denver’s primary.

It’s important to remember that no state is exempt from election fraud. For my readers outside Colorado, Mother Jones has published a hit list of the worst places to vote. The article was published before Judge Manzanares’ decision, now we can add Colorado to the list.

Just Try Voting Here: 11 of America’s worst places to cast a ballot (or try)
By Sasha Abramsky

News: Machines that count backward, slice-and-dice districts, felon baiting, phone jamming, and plenty of dirty tricks

We used to think the voting system was something like the traffic laws — a set of rules clear to everyone, enforced everywhere, with penalties for transgressions; we used to think, in other words, that we had a national election system. How wrong a notion this was has become painfully apparent since 2000: As it turns out, except for a rudimentary federal framework (which determines the voting age, channels money to states and counties, and enforces protections for minorities and the disabled), U.S. elections are shaped by a dizzying mélange of inconsistently enforced laws, conflicting court rulings, local traditions, various technology choices, and partisan trickery. In some places voters still fill in paper ballots or pull the levers of vintage machines; elsewhere, they touch screens or tap keys, with or without paper trails. Some states encourage voter registration; others go out of their way to limit it. Some allow prisoners to vote; others permanently bar ex-felons, no matter how long they’ve stayed clean. Who can vote, where people cast ballots, and how and whether their votes are counted all depends, to a large extent, on policies set in place by secretaries of state and county elections supervisors — officials who can be as partisan, as dubiously qualified, and as nakedly ambitious as people anywhere else in politics. Here is a list — partial, but emblematic — of American democracy’s more glaring weak spots …

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