The New York Times reports: Concerned that voting machine breakdowns could cause long lines on Election Day, particularly in minority neighborhoods, several groups filed a lawsuit on Thursday to force Pennsylvania election officials to provide paper ballots when half the machines in a precinct have failed.

The top election official, Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro A. Cortés, has directed poll workers to provide paper ballots to a precinct only when all of its touch-screen voting machines are broken.

The lawsuit was filed in Philadelphia by the Pennsylvania N.A.A.C.P.; the Election Reform Network, a nonpartisan group; and a coalition of individual voters. It asks a federal judge to declare Mr. Cortés’s directive unconstitutional on the grounds that it puts an undue burden on residents who may have to wait hours to vote.

Mr. Cortés said that current safeguards should ensure an efficient election and that forcing a change could confuse poll workers who had already been trained. -- Lawsuit Is Filed Over Ballot Rule in Pennsylvania - NYTimes.com

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Computerworld reports: Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner will be under the national spotlight next month, overseeing what's expected to be the state's largest-ever turnout for a presidential election. It will also be her first as the state's chief election official.

The stakes will be just as high as they were for her Republican predecessor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, four years ago, when the narrowly decided state election was marred by charges of questionable results and complaints that some residents, largely in minority areas, were forced to wait hours to cast their votes.

This year, denizens of the Buckeye State who mistrust touch-screen systems will be allowed to vote on a paper ballot if they prefer. The directive to allow "paper or plastic" came in the wake of Brunner's landmark 2007 "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing" analysis, otherwise known as EVEREST, in which "critical security failures" were found in every system tested by several teams of both corporate and academic computer scientists and security experts.

Ohio officials discovered in March that some voting systems manufactured by Premier Elections Solutions Inc., a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., dropped votes as they were being uploaded to a main server. Because the problem is in the tabulator system, it affects votes cast on both Diebold's direct recording electronic (DRE) systems, which are usually touch screen, and paper ballot optical-scan systems. The same central tabulators will be used in more than 30 states next month. -- Q&A: E-voting security results 'awful,' says Ohio secretary of state

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An AP report begins: Hawaii voters for the first time must pick a political party when voting in this year's primary election, a requirement that election officials hope will result in fewer ballots being thrown out.

But members of both the Democratic and Republican parties worry that voters could get confused during the Sept. 20 primary, resulting in their votes not being tallied correctly. ...

Voters in Hawaii, as in most states, have always only voted for one party's candidates in primary elections, which are used to narrow each party's candidates to one per race before the Nov. 4 general election.

The 2008 election is different because voters will have to choose a political party before filling out the rest of the ballot. In previous years, voters were handed ballots color-coded by party; this year, everyone fills out the same white ballot. -- The Associated Press: Hawaii ballots add pick-a-party box

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A New York Times report begins: Flaws in voting machines used by millions of people will not be fixed in time for the presidential election because of a government backlog in testing the machines’ hardware and software, officials say.

The flaws, which have cast doubt on the ability of some machines to provide a consistent and reliable vote count, were supposed to be addressed by the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that oversees voting. But commission officials say they will not be able to certify that flawed machines are repaired by the November election, or provide software fixes or upgrades, because of a backlog at the testing laboratories the commission uses. ...

As a result, machine manufacturers and state election officials say states and local jurisdictions are forgoing important software modifications meant to address security and performance concerns. In some cases, election officials in need of new equipment have no choice but to buy machines that lack the current innovations and upgrades.

The federal government does not require that states use machines that the commission certifies, but most states depend on the commission to approve new machines and software, and at least 10 states have rules or laws requiring federal certification. -- Officials Say Flaws at Polls Will Remain in November

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An AP report begins: A voting-rights group has asked a judge to order tougher enforcement of anti-fraud measures in San Diego County for November's presidential elections, saying officials failed to investigate lapses in ballot security during February's primary.

"We goofed!" was the explanation a poll worker offered for why the total number of ballots cast at one precinct did not match the number of signatures in the voter log book, according to documents in the lawsuit filed in San Diego Superior Court.

Election workers at county headquarters accepted unsealed and unsigned boxes of ballots for processing, according to statements from volunteers who observed the February tally. A troubleshooting log indicated dispatchers told poll workers not to worry about missing seals after the county ran out of the red locking tabs. -- The Modesto Bee | Group seeks tighter ballot security in San Diego

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The Washington Post reports: The voting-machine wars in Ohio continue.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is assuring voters in the battleground state that November's tally will be accurate even as she asserts -- in court filings yesterday -- that there is a problem with the touch-screen machines to be used in half of the state's 88 counties.

Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold, said in May that its machines had some problems tabulating votes. But the company has contended in court filings that it had fulfilled its contract to deliver an electronic system.

During the May primary, Brunner said officials in Butler County, north of Cincinnati, realized that 150 votes were dropped when they were being transferred from memory cards. When Brunner looked into it, she found that the software problem had come up in 11 counties. No vote was lost, she said, because local officials had caught the discrepancies. -- Ohio Sues Over Trouble With Voting Machines - washingtonpost.com

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Raw Story reports: A leading cyber-security expert and former adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he has fresh evidence regarding election fraud on Diebold electronic voting machines during the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial and senatorial elections.

Stephen Spoonamore is the founder and until recently the CEO of Cybrinth LLC, an information technology policy and security firm that serves Fortune 100 companies. At a little noticed press conference in Columbus, Ohio Thursday, he discussed his investigation of a computer patch that was applied to Diebold Election Systems voting machines in Georgia right before that state's November 2002 election. ...

Spoonamore received the Diebold patch from a whistleblower close to the office of Cathy Cox, Georgia’s then-Secretary of State. In discussions with RAW STORY, the whistleblower -- who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation -- said that he became suspicious of Diebold's actions in Georgia for two reasons. The first red flag went up when the computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds. The source states that Cox was not privy to these changes until after the election and that she became particularly concerned over the patch being installed in just those two counties.

The whistleblower said another flag went up when it became apparent that the patch installed by Urosevich had failed to fix a problem with the computer clock, which employees from Diebold and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office had been told the patch was designed specifically to address. -- The Raw Story | GOP cyber-security expert suggests Diebold tampered with 2002 election

Hat-tip to TalkLeft for the link.

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The Montgomery Advertiser reports: Online voting is inevitable, Alabama s Secretary of State Beth Chapman says. ...

On Thursday, Chapman hosted the third meeting of the recently created task force on military and overseas voting. Chapman chairs the group founded by Gov. Bob Riley at her request.

At the meeting, three vendors briefed task force members, military members, state officials and residents on the capabilities of their systems. Currently, they are the only companies facilitating state and national elections worldwide. It was the first time they had assembled in one place, Chapman said.

She wants to have online voting available for military members and residents overseas in time for the 2010 election cycle. -- montgomeryadvertiser.com | Montgomery Advertiser

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The Miami Herald reports: A small Panhandle county that is home to one of the world s largest air bases is embarking on a sweeping experiment in Internet voting that could transform elections in the 21st century.

But the push by Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Pat Hollarn to use the Internet to make it easier for U.S. soldiers overseas to vote is drawing fire from voting activists who call her project unsafe and contrary to a new law that requires the state to use paper ballots.

Frustrated by the pace of overseas voting efforts undertaken by the Department of Defense in recent years, Hollarn has championed a plan that will let those living on, or near, three military bases in the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan cast ballots in the November election.

During a 10-day period just before Election Day, voters living abroad will be able to enter a computer kiosk and vote on an encrypted electronic ballot, which will eventually be shipped to Florida via the Internet and then counted. Poll workers will be on site to verify that the person is a registered Okaloosa County voter. -- Web vote offered to military abroad - 05/26/2008 - MiamiHerald.com

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John Q. Jacobs writes: The 2004 Ohio Presidential voting results do not accurately reflect voter intentions. In Cuyahoga County, the election was flawed and the design appears to have been manipulated. At locations with several ballot orders in use, many votes were cast by voters crossing precincts, hence counted other than as intended. At precincts with the highest Kerry support, the percentage of uncounted votes is inexplicably high. The obvious inference—intentional manipulation produced concentrated undercounting, cross-voting, and vote-switching in areas of highest Kerry support—cannot be ignored in the face of the evidence and statistics. The possibility that ballots were switched to different precincts, post-voting to effect vote-switching, must be considered in a complete chain of custody context.

Many individual ballots resulted in a vote-switch, a two-vote margin difference from the intended result. Switched-votes cast for Kerry and counted for Bush had twice the impact as their actual occurrence, by each subtracting one from Kerry and adding one to Bush. Bush and Kerry votes also went uncounted as non-votes or were miscounted as minor candidate votes. A high percentage of all Cuyahoga County votes were cast at locations with multiple ballot orders. The manner in which precincts and ballot orders were combined increased the probability of a Kerry cross-vote being recorded as a Bush vote. Quantitative analyses of candidate votes and of non-vote percentages evidence the cross-voting and the patterns of cross-voting and vote-switching. -- How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes.

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Ars Techinca reports: In a decision issued last week, superior court judge Linda R. Feinberg ruled that a technical review of voting machines used in New Jersey may proceed despite the objections of the manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems.

Serious problems emerged in five counties where Sequoia voting machines were used during the New Jersey presidential primaries. Audits conducted by election officials revealed that the electronic tallies didn t match the total counts from the paper trail generated by the machines. Sequoia attributes the problem to operator error and argued that it isn t indicative of a technical malfunction.

In response to that glitch and other irregularities, election officials from Union County decided decided to subject the voting machines to an independent review. They went to Ed Felten, a voting machine security expert who serves as the director of Princeton s Center for Information Technology Policy. Although preliminary evidence from the audit indicated the potential presence of some serious malfunctions, Union County decided not to go forward with the review after receiving legal threats from Sequoia. The voting machine company claimed that an unauthorized third-party review would violate the county s license agreement. Sequoia also argued that unauthorized examinations expose the its proprietary trade secrets to public disclosure and threaten its intellectual property rights. -- Review of NJ e-voting approved; won t be in time for election

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AP reports: U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan can speak to their families by Web camera and fight insurgents using sophisticated electronic warfare. Yet when it comes to voting, most troops are stuck in the past.

Communities in 13 states will send overseas troops presidential election ballots by e-mail this year, and districts in at least seven states will also let them return completed ballots over the Internet, according to data compiled by The Associated Press and the Overseas Vote Foundation.

That still leaves tens of thousands of service members in far-flung military bases struggling to meet voting deadlines and relying largely on regular mail to get ballots and cast votes -- often at the last minute because of delays in ballot preparations in some states.

Adding an electronic boost to the process would ease those problems, but it raises security and privacy concerns. -- Military struggling with electronic voting

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Philly.com reports: Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Ramy Djerassi has rejected a request to extend Philadelphia poll hours to 10 p.m., and to distribute emergency paper ballots to all precincts where there have been reports of broken voting machines. -- Judge: Polls Will Close As Scheduled | Philly | 04/22/2008

Voter Action, a national voter rights group, has asked a Philadelphia judge to extend voting hours tonight until 10 p.m., and to use paper ballots at all voting places where broken machines have been reported. The city's Board of Elections seems certain to object. The hearing is expected to begin momentarily. -- Voter Group Requests Extended Poll Hours

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Politiker NJ reports: Rob Andrews wants to render Frank Lautenberg’s county line advantage obsolete.

Andrews announced today that he’s filing suit against 13 mostly northern county clerks to seek a “fair and open Democratic primary” that requires county clerks give “fair and equal” ballot position to both U.S. Senate candidates at the State Superior Court. The challenge was first reported on the liberal Web site Blue Jersey.

While Andrews has the county line in seven southern counties, Lautenberg has the line in the 12 other counties that award it -- a big advantage in a primary with an expected low turnout.

Andrews cited a state statute, N.J.S.A. 19:23-26.1, that says primary candidates for Senate or Governor must appear in the first column and apart from candidates for lower offices. -- Andrews sues for an open primary | Politicker NJ

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The New York Times reports: A plan to use only paper ballots in Colorado in this November’s election, which was announced with bipartisan hoopla in January to replace the state’s troubled electronic voting machine system, died quietly in a state legislature committee room on Thursday.

Opponents of the plan said it was no longer needed, because what was broken then is now fixed. But supporters said that questions of reliability and security of the electronic voting and vote-counting machines remained unresolved, and could yet resurface before November.

The debate exploded in December, when Colorado’s secretary of state, Mike Coffman, a Republican, announced that voting machines used all over the state, including in many of the most populous counties, had failed tests by his office.

The proposed solution of using paper ballots faced immediate and stiff opposition from county clerks, who administer the elections and who said the logistics of a one-year transformation were insurmountable. -- Plan to Use Paper Ballots Is Reversed in Colorado

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The Herald reports: The firm behind last year s election fiasco has been blamed again after a local council by-election was thrown into disarray.

More than 100,000 votes were not counted in last May s debacle but fewer than 3000 were involved in the latest count, which saw the declaration abandoned overnight in South Lanarkshire.

Only 2594 votes were cast in South Lanarkshire Council s Cambuslang East ward on Thursday but candidates had to wait until noon yesterday to find out the result after the system could not process the data once the votes were counted.
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It emerged the software that was being used by DRS, the firm used to supply the equipment and staff for the count, did not work because the licence had expired. The same counting software was used for the Cambuslang East count as that used in last May s Holyrood election. -- Holyrood Election Firm In New Poll Shambles from The Herald

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Pam Fessler reports on NPR: Voting officials across the country have been trying to find a secure, reliable voting system ever since the 2000 presidential elections. After electronic machine failures, a number of states are returning to paper ballots. But not everyone agrees that is the right way go. -- NPR: Shift Back to Paper Ballots Sparks Disagreement

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The New York Times reports: Ohio’s effort to clean up its voting system before the presidential primary on March 4 has pitted state election leaders against local officials over an order to provide a paper ballot to any voter who requests one.

Secretary of State Jennifer L. Brunner, a Democrat, wants to eliminate touch-screen machines for the November election from the 53 counties that still use them and install optical scan machines to provide a paper trail.

Because the conversion cannot be completed in time for the primary in most counties, Ms. Brunner ordered the printing of paper ballots as an interim step.

“The paper ballots are not only going to provide a voter alternative for those who prefer not to use touch-screen machines, but they may also alleviate long lines,” Ms. Brunner said. “We expect a much higher than normal turnout in the primary.”

But some local officials contend the paper ballots are unnecessary and have gone to court to fight the requirement. -- Ohio Officials at Odds Over Paper Ballot

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The Washington Post reports: Adam Bigenho, tech guy for the Montgomery County Board of Elections, spent part of yesterday training election judges how to match up computer plugs at polling places Monday night as they prepare for the next day's primary.

"If something is wrong Monday night, it's a problem. If something is wrong Tuesday, it's a crisis," said Bigenho, 24, one of hundreds of ground troops in a massive mobilization by local officials to ensure that all systems are good to go for Tuesday's Potomac Primary.

Across the District, Maryland and Virginia, election board employees are testing an array of voting machines and computerized voter check-in systems, conducting last-minute training, updating software and completing low-tech tasks such as replacing batteries and stockpiling emergency paper ballots. ...

Officials were optimistic as they completed their tuneups of the touch-screen voting machines that will be in wide use across Maryland and in about half of Virginia's jurisdictions. In the District, paper ballots read by optical scanners are the system of choice, with touch-screen machines used only for disabled voters or those who don't want to use the paper and scanners, said D.C. election spokesman Bill O'Field. -- Scouring the Screens And the Scanners - washingtonpost.com

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UPI reports: A rights group filed a legal challenge on voting technology to be used in and around Cleveland in the March 4 presidential primary elections.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed the challenge Monday in U.S. District Court to Cuyahoga County's move back to paper ballots away from electronic touch-screen systems, a release on the group's Web site stated. ...

A hearing was set for Tuesday on the ACLU's request for an injunction, the report said. -- Ohio ACLU challenges primary ballots - UPI.com

The ACLU website has the press release and court documents.

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The Sunday Herald reports: THE FIRM that provided the e-counting technology at last year's botched Holyrood election is refusing to appear before a parliamentary inquiry into the fiasco.

DRS, which supplied the equipment for scanning and reading the ballot papers, said it has had to "regrettably decline" a request for oral evidence.

The company believes the "quantity of information" it provided to a previous inquiry makes an appearance at Holyrood unnecessary.
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The snub comes as the parliament's local government and communities committee looks at the problems surrounding last year's Scottish elections.

Around 140,000 ballots were spoiled last May after voters failed to get to grips with the new single ballot paper.

An official inquiry into the bungled election, led by Canadian Ron Gould, blamed political parties and the Scotland Office for putting their own interests above those of the public. -- Votecount Firm Snubs Holyrood Inquiry (from Sunday Herald)

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The Daily Sentinel reports: Gov. Bill Ritter asked lawmakers Wednesday to require counties to conduct the 2008 election using paper ballots so that the election will be secure.

“We have a bipartisan agreement struck in the Legislature that would take us to paper ballots with precinct voting,” Ritter said.

He said voters still could cast absentee ballots through the mail, and there would be a verifiable paper trail of each ballot following the election.

Ritter said he wants an all-paper election because he fears the “specter of litigation,” citing a 2006 court decision that nearly barred counties from using electronic voting machines.

The governor said Secretary of State Mike Coffman’s decision in December to decertify most of the electronic voting equipment used in Colorado made him doubt the reliability of the machines. -- Ritter wants ballots on paper statewide

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AP reports: This year, for the first time, expatriate Democrats can cast their ballots on the Internet in a presidential primary for people living outside the United States.

Democrats Abroad, an official branch of the party representing overseas voters, will hold its first global presidential preference primary from Feb. 5 to 12, with ex-pats selecting the candidate of their choice by Internet as well as fax, mail and in-person at polling places in more than 100 countries.

Democrats Abroad is particularly proud of the online voting option - which provides a new alternative to the usual process of voting from overseas, a system made difficult by complicated voter registration paperwork, early deadlines and unreliable foreign mail service. ...

U.S. citizens wanting to vote online must join Democrats Abroad before Feb. 1 and indicate their preference to vote by Internet instead of in the local primaries wherever they last lived in the United States. They must promise not to vote twice for president, but can still participate in non-presidential local elections. -- The Modesto Bee | Americans abroad can now vote online

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports: The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed a lawsuit Thursday to block Cuyahoga County's switch to a paper ballot voting system for the March 4 primary election.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, argues the county's new system violates the U.S. Constitution and Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it doesn't give voters a chance to fix mistakes on their ballots.

The ACLU said it will seek an injunction next week to block the voting-system switch.

The county already is deep into its transition to paper ballots. Poll-worker training is under way, and ballots compatible with the new equipment are being designed. -- ACLU files suit to block paper ballots - cleveland.com

The case is American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, Inc. et al v. Brunner et al, No. 1:08-cv-00145-KMO. Download the complaint here.

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AP reports: A judge who had threatened to jail elections officials Wednesday approved the state's plan for bringing New York into compliance with federal voting law by making it easier for disabled voters to cast ballots.

New York is years behind federal deadlines under the Help America Vote Act, which was enacted after the contested 2000 presidential elections to ensure better accuracy and access for the disabled.

If the state acts on the timeline approved by U.S. District Judge Gary Sharpe, voting machines accessible to the disabled will be available in every polling place around the state by this fall's federal elections. The state would then follow up by replacing all pull-lever machines by the fall 2009 state elections.

The state Board of Election must send a progress report to Sharpe every Friday to verify it has met each deadline. -- Judge OKs NY state voting remedies

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The New York Times reports: All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.

“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.

Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters. -- Ohio Elections Official Calls Machines Flawed

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports: A recount after next year's presidential election could mean disaster for Cuyahoga County based on problems discovered Tuesday with paper records produced by electronic voting machines.

More than 20 percent of the printouts from touch-screen voting machines were unreadable and had to be reprinted. Board of Elections workers found the damaged ballots when they conducted a recount Tuesday of two races, which involved only 17 of the county's 1,436 precincts.

The recount lasted more than 12 hours. Reprinting the damaged records and hand-counting them created an extra step that added hours. ...

Board of Elections Director Jane Platten said recounting the entire county for the 2008 presidential election could take more than a week. -- 20 percent of election printouts were unreadable - cleveland.com

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The New York Times reports: The California secretary of state, Debra Bowen, filed a lawsuit yesterday against a voting machine manufacturer for the reported sale of uncertified machines to five counties in northern California.

The suit follows an investigation that Ms. Bowen began in July after an employee of the company, Election Systems and Software Inc., mentioned to her that changes had been made to machines bought by the counties. After a similar suit against Diebold Election Systems in 2003, California required that all changes made to voting machines be reported to its secretary of state. ...

The suit, filed in San Francisco, seeks $9.72 million from the company for the sale of 972 machines with internal hardware changes that were not reported or submitted for re-certification. It also asks for an additional $5 million for each county, Colusa, Marin, Merced, San Francisco and Solano.

Changes to the machines, AutoMARK A200 models, are not apparent in outward appearance or function, county election officials said. -- California Sues a Voting Machine Maker Over Changes

Disclosure: About 6 years ago, I did a little securities-related work for ES&S.

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The New York Times reports: It used to be that everyone wanted a Florida voting machine.

After the history-making presidential recount of 2000, Palm Beach County sold hundreds of its infamous Votomatic machines to memorabilia seekers, including a group of chiropractors in Arizona, the cable-news host Greta Van Susteren and the hotelier André Balazs. One machine ended up in the Smithsonian Institution. Dozens were transformed into pieces of contemporary art for an exhibition in New York.

But now that Florida is purging its precincts of 25,000 touch-screen voting machines — bought after the recount for up to $5,000 each, hailed as the way of the future but deemed failures after five or six years — no one is biting. ...

Across the nation, jurisdictions that experimented with touch-screen voting after 2000 are starting to scale back or abandon it based on a growing perception that the machines are unreliable and concern that they do not provide a paper trail in case questions arise. California will sharply scale back touch-screen voting next year after a review by the secretary of state found it was vulnerable to hackers.

Florida is the biggest state to reject touch screens so sweepingly, and its deadline for removing them, July 1, 2008, is the most imminent. For the 15 counties that must dump their expensive systems, buy new optical-scan machines and retrain thousands of poll workers, hurdles abound. -- Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache - New York Times

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The Herald reports: Voters in Scotland's poorest communities were twice as likely to have their votes rejected in last May's ballot fiasco as the average for Scotland.

The astonishing finding has come from Strathclyde University research, which suggests that Glasgow was by far the worst affected.

Social deprivation - including low educational attainment, poor health and unemployment - was the biggest factor leading to variation in rejection, even after other factors have been calculated out of the complex equation.

Glasgow had eight of the 10 constituencies with the highest number of spoiled papers. In Glasgow Shettleston, 12% of votes cast were spoiled. -- The Herald : Politics: MAIN POLITICS

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The Home News Tribune reports: A judge has declined to mandate new voting machines for New Jersey, agreeing that the state should instead extend a Jan. 1 deadline for installing printers on 10,000 electronic voting machines.

Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg's decision on Monday means voters in February's presidential primary won't approve paper receipts to ensure their votes were cast properly.

In 2005, the Legislature required electronic voting machines to be fitted with printers by January to protect against vote-tampering and help with recounts. After voting electronically, voters would view printouts to ensure their ballots were properly cast.

But scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology found flaws with printers, and state Attorney General Anne Milgram decided to ask the Legislature to extend the deadline. The judge on Monday accepted that position but scheduled January hearings on whether the machines are constitutional. -- Judge extends deadline to bolster voting machines in N.J. | Home News Tribune Online

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The New York Times reports: Democrats in Congress who are trying to redesign the nation’s voting system generally share the same goals: an affordable, easy-to-use system with durable paper ballots that can be used by the disabled without help from poll workers.

But yesterday, as House leaders failed for a second day to reach agreement on the outlines of a new system, the tension reflected in those competing needs was clear. The desire to make every voting machine accountable is running head-on into other needs, from the desires of the disabled to the budgets of states and localities.

Given the tensions, voting analysts say, the decision disclosed Thursday by Democratic leaders to put off the most sweeping changes until 2012 — four years later than planned — was easy. Congressional leaders are reluctant to tell states to junk hundreds of millions of dollars of relatively new voting equipment until it is clear when better technology will emerge.

But questions also arose yesterday about other aspects of a proposed compromise now being negotiated. Voting experts criticized a stopgap proposal to add spool-like printers to thousands of computerized touch-screen machines for 2008 and 2010, saying it would not be feasible in some states. -- Accessibility Isn’t Only Hurdle in Voting System Overhaul

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The New York Times reports: Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are slowing their drive to revamp the nation’s voting systems, aides said yesterday.

Under pressure from state and local officials, as well as from lobbyists for the disabled, House leaders now advocate putting off the most sweeping changes until 2012, four years later than planned.

Overhauling voting systems before next year’s presidential election had once been a top Democratic priority, primarily to allow greater accountability and be certain that all votes registered on computerized touch-screen systems were counted. But state and local elections officials told Congress they could not make the changes in time for the balloting in November 2008, particularly in light of the extra workload involved in preparing for next year’s much-earlier presidential primary season.

Confronted by similar concerns, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Senate Rules Committee, said she had already decided against seeking any major changes in voting equipment before 2010. -- Overhaul Plan for Vote System Will Be Delayed

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Scotland on Sunday reports: THE record number of spoilt votes at last month's Scottish elections were largely caused by major faults in the design of the ballot paper, according to an academic study.

Researchers at Strathclyde University have concluded that thousands of people made mistakes because they did not understand the instructions on the papers which, for the first time, asked them to mark two votes on a single sheet.

In both Glasgow and Edinburgh, some of the instructions were truncated to make room for the 23 different parties on the regional list. This, the researchers concluded, was a key reason why people got confused and spoiled their papers.

The findings, by Dr Christopher Carman and Professor James Mitchell, concluded that there were a total of 146,097 spoiled papers. This compares to just 15,107 in the 2003 election. Of Scotland's 73 constituencies, there were 16 where the winning margin was less than the number of ballots spoiled. -- Scotland on Sunday - Politics - Ballot paper design at fault for record number of spoilt votes

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Politico.com reports: Two days before legislation aimed at changing how the nation's votes are recorded was scheduled for a March markup in a House committee, the National Association of Counties realized it was in trouble.

Worried that the legislation would sail to the floor without amendments, NACo officials alerted their network of more than 27,000 elected officials to contact their lawmakers. In less than 24 hours, dozens of e-mails and faxes poured in to key committee members. Officials called the bill -- which would require paper records of all votes cast in time for the November 2008 election -- an unfunded mandate with an unworkable deadline.

Election reform has been a political priority for Democrats since the 2000 presidential election made hanging chads a household term. The issue provoked more debate last year when a closely contested Florida congressional seat was captured by Republicans after 18,000 votes cast on electronic touch-screen machines in a Democratic stronghold went unrecorded.

Democrats plan to bring verifiable vote legislation before the House as soon as next month. The bill's sponsor is Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), who may have made an early strategic error by not reaching out to the secretaries of state and other local leaders who would have to oversee the changes. -- Local officials take on voting rights groups

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BBC reports: Another clue has emerged as to why more than 140,000 ballots were rejected in the Scottish elections.

BBC Scotland has established that voters in two of the biggest cities did not receive the ballot papers they had been led to expect.

The papers had been redesigned after the nominations closed to cope with the high number of parties and individuals. ...

In Lothian and Glasgow, no fewer than 23 parties and individuals were vying for the list vote.

It was feared there would be too many on the ballot paper to permit electronic counting.

So in both regions arrows designed to help voters put one cross in each column were scrapped.

It meant thousands of voters went to the polling booths expecting to see one design of ballot paper and were faced with another. -- BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Clue over voter ballot confusion

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John Nichols writes in The Nation (subscription required): Election protection activists are already busy promoting legislative fixes designed to assure that all eligible Americans can vote and get those votes counted in 2008. It's vital work. But if we are serious about addressing what's wrong with our electoral system, we must look backward as well--to what happened in Florida's 13th Congressional District last year.

That contest was "decided" for Republican Vern Buchanan over Democrat Christine Jennings following a recount that put Buchanan up by 369 votes. What the recount did not resolve, however, were questions raised by apparent voting machine malfunctions in Sarasota County, a base of strength for Jennings. Machines manufactured by Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S) recorded 18,000 "undervotes"--ballots with votes cast for other positions but not for the House seat--in precincts that tended to favor Jennings. -- Protecting the Vote

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The Edinburgh Evening News reports: ELECTION chiefs today admitted they could be forced to abandon plans for electronic counting of next month's Holyrood vote in the Lothians if more candidates come forward.

The counting machines, being used for the first time, are only programmed to cope with up to 21 names on the Scottish Parliament regional list - and with a week still to go until nominations close, there are already 19 candidates in Lothian.

If just three more come forward, the electronic count - in preparation for two years - would have to be abandoned in favour of the traditional count by hand.

But that would almost certainly mean a last-minute dash to recruit extra counting staff and could lead to a delay in the results of the city council elections being held on the same day. -- Edinburgh Evening News - Politics - Electronic counting faces axe if candidate numbers increase

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