Arkansas Blog

You mean the Hathorn/Foster/Pritt tandem? Hear they're joined at the hip. Or joined at something.

I love how KUAR and the paper both report that there are three candidates for the democratic nomination instead of four.

I guess they saw the (R) under the wite-out on Wooldridge's paperwork...

Good reporting, KUAR!

Are you accepting applications? I want I job where all I have to do is read the paper and re-misreport information...

Thought I hear in the news that all voting problems had been taken care of. Same group as before?

>>Thought I hear in the news that all voting problems had been taken care of.

No, they have not been taken care of. A few more machines arrived yesterday, they are still short 20 some odd machines just in Pulaski Co. alone. However, the machines cannot operate without the software that instructs them. ES&S did NOT ship the software. So, the 'good fit for AR"' machines are now worthless paperweights.

Daniels, PC Election Commission, Miller, Humphries, Jody Mahoney, et al. This is your baby and many Arkansans have NO sympathy for you. They are worried about how their vote will count, and rightly so. They trusted you people to make their voting accountable. That was their first mistake.

O'brien can't take credit for squat. And he sure can't blame this on Ms. Carolyn Staley. It's poetic justice friend. Carolyn, you're being vindicated.

Posted on Wed, Apr. 26, 2006

http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/living/community/14430759.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

Summit vote system to debut
ES&S has extra memory cards on hand; elections board uncomfortable
By Lisa A. Abraham
Beacon Journal staff writer

Deployment of Summit County's new optical-scan voting machines will begin Thursday, but it's anyone's guess how many of them -- or more specifically, how many of the memory cards inside them -- will work in Tuesday's primary election.

The last round of testing saw failures of 17 memory cards -- the credit-card-sized piece of equipment in the machine that scans ballots and tabulates and stores vote totals.

Summit County will debut a precinct-count optical-scan voting system by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., on Tuesday. The system will replace punch-card voting, which was outlawed by the Help America Vote Act.

Summit County Board of Elections Director Bryan Williams said he expects failures on Election Day, and contingency plans are being formulated for things that could go wrong.

With an optical scan system, voters mark paper ballots by filling in circles with a pen, similar to the way students take standardized tests. The ballot is then fed into a scanner that reads it and records the votes on a memory card inside.

The memory cards have had repeated failures in testing.

``We are working on a plan so that if any or all fail, we can replace them in a timely fashion,'' Williams told the board in a meeting Tuesday.

ES&S Account Manager Jerry Hayek told the board the company's failure rate in all areas averages 1 percent.

Summit County's failure rate is 3 percent or more, which Republican board member Alex Arshinkoff called ``catastrophic.''

``What do you guys have planned?'' he asked.

Hayek said the plan is to program 48 spare memory cards -- each to read about 10 of the county's 475 precincts -- so those cards will be ready if any fail on Election Day.

Board members also expressed concern about ES&S' plan to hire 19 University of Akron students to serve as rovers or troubleshooters on Election Day. The students would be paid $350 each to go through training planned for Saturday and to work all day on Election Day.

Williams told the board he had been under the impression that ES&S would provide trained professionals, not students, to trouble-shoot, but that is not the case. ``They don't have people to bring in as a SWAT team with expertise from other places,'' Williams said.

``It's just not right and will not be tolerated,'' Arshinkoff said. Addressing ES&S, he said: ``You guys are supposed to be the gold standards of optical scan, and I'm amazed.''

Board member Russ Pry, a Democrat, expressed concern that the group of students would not be bipartisan, and he said they needed to be trained by the board as well as ES&S so they would know they cannot attempt to participate in politicking while at the polls.

Ballots not printed

In other issues, two-thirds of the ballots for the election have yet to arrive from the printer. ES&S contracted with Dayton Legal Blank for the printing, but election officials said the company is overwhelmed and at one point even ran out of paper.

Williams said the county used to contract with the company, which has missed ballot printing deadlines before.

Michael Curry, assistant to elections Deputy Director Marijean Donofrio, said the delay is causing problems because the staff needs time to test at least one of each ballot style.

Williams said ES&S' $200-per-day fines for not having the ballots printed on time total more than $6,000.

The board also will not be in compliance with a directive from Ohio's secretary of state not to count votes for statewide candidates who have dropped out of the race.

The names of Jim Trakas, a Republican who was running for secretary of state, and Hugh Quill, a Democrat who had been running for state treasurer, will still appear on the ballots.

Hand count supported

Board Chairman Wayne Jones, a Democrat, expressed concern that voters are losing confidence in the system. He said he's frequently asked by friends and family if their votes will be counted correctly.

``We are going to have a fair and accurate election,'' he said.

Jones asked for the board to consider hand-counting 10 precincts after the election to see how their totals compare with totals on the voting system tabulators to help assure voters the system worked.

Other board members supported the idea, and Jones asked that the board seek special permission from the secretary of state to conduct the hand counts, even though recounts may not be warranted in those precincts.

Jones and Pry had opposed an optical scan system. They wanted touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Inc. of Green. When their votes on the issue were offset by Arshinkoff and Joe Hutchinson, who is no longer on the board, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell broke the tie and picked the ES&S system.

Arshinkoff said after Tuesday's meeting that he still supports optical scan voting because it has a paper ballot, which provides a backup for any computer problems. ``Obviously, I'm not happy with the failures everywhere on this system,'' he said.

Halter is not Arkansan. Report that.

November
2000
iVotronic
Pulaski County, Arkansas.
13
More than two dozen voters reported that the screen registered the
wrong choice.
Virginia Buck isn't sure what went wrong with the machine she used Thursday at the Walker Tennis
Center in Little Rock. She said she marked her vote for Snyder and went on to fill out the rest of her
ballot. When she went back to double check her votes, she found a mark beside Thomas' name.
"To me, it's horrifying to think what would have happened if I'd not taken the time to go back. I'm
sure a lot of people didn't do that," she said.
February
2002
Arkansas.
February 5, 2002 - Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to felony charges that he
took bribes, evaded taxes and accepted kickbacks. Part of the case involved Business Records Corp.
[now merged into Election Systems & Software ], a Dallas company that sold Arkansas computerized
systems for recording corporate and voter registration records.
Arkansas officials said the scheme involved...then-BRC employee Tom Eschberger...Eschberger got
immunity from prosecution for his cooperation. Today, he's a top executive of ES&S.
14
13
Voting machines err, misread Snyder votes. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; November 3, 2000; By Austin Gelder.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a02bcf4756a.htm
14
Arkansas Secretary of State pleads guilty to taking bribes in computer voting equipment case. The Baton Rouge Advocate.
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-28.htm. Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.