Poll Screw-Ups: Snow, 'Invisible Ink' and Missing Ballots

California Run Out of Ballots, Snow Snarls Illinois and 20 in Chicago Fooled By 'Invisible Ink' Stylus

By MARCUS BARAM

Feb. 5, 2008 —

It wasn't quite a "hanging chad" moment, but Oprah Winfrey stepped in early today to resolve one of the first voting glitches of Super Tuesday.

When Rachel Waymire got to her Chicago precinct this morning to vote, she was told that she wouldn't be able vote because only one of five election judges was present.

When Winfrey, who happened to be at the next-door precinct, heard about the problem, the talk show queen and Barack Obama supporter told Waymire she would stay with her until she was allowed to cast her ballot.

"She just kind of stood there and then as soon as I got to vote she left and she said, 'I'll call you later to make sure that you voted.' And probably about an hour later I was sitting at my desk and she called my cell phone," Waymire told Chicago's talk station WLS, adding that she voted for Obama.

That was just one of several mishaps and polling flukes on the most busy primary day in history.

One of the more unusual blunders, consistent with Chicago's notorious history of political hijinks, involved 20 voters on the city's North Side who were convinced by a precinct worker that a stylus for marking electronic touch screens was actually a pen with "invisible ink" to be used for marking paper ballots.

The ballots were rejected by the machine and election officials had to scramble to find the voters who cast bad ballots, eventually getting 10 of them to vote with real ink.

A spokesman for the city's Board of Elections said there was no skullduggery involved and confirmed that one of the 20 voters was the wife of an election judge.

Meanwhile, on the city's West Side, police were called to a polling place after a fight broke out between two female election judges, leaving one injured and one in police custody.

The weather played havoc with voting results in Lake County, Ill., on Tuesday afternoon, as a snowstorm may have impacted telephone lines and delaying the transmission of vote totals. As a result, poll workers had to hand-deliver ballots to the county clerk's office.

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton, had to wait for almost an hour to vote this morning because voting machines didn't work at his polling place, the Hoboken Fire Department Engine Company No. 2. About a dozen voters were turned away and it was unclear what caused the problem.

Because another polling site in Jersey City opened almost an hour late this morning, a lawyer for Obama's campaign was in Hudson County Superior Court arguing that the site should be kept open until 8:50 p.m. tonight, the Jersey Journal reported, but was turned down by a judge.

In John McCain's home state of Arizona, there were scattered reports of irregularities that included registered voters' names missing from registration lists, identification problems and changes in polling locations that confused voters who were not provided an opportunity to vote by provisional ballot.

After more than six polling sites in New Mexico ran out of ballots due to heavy voter turnout, new ballots had to be frantically printed and sent via couriers to those locations, according to the state's Democratic Party.

Five precincts in California's Santa Clara County and about a dozen precincts in Alameda County also ran out of ballots, reportedly due to large numbers of independent voters requesting Democratic ballots. The Santa Clara County registrar was urging voters to bring sample ballots or wait in line to use the few electronic voting machines meant to serve the disabled and affected precincts in Alameda County were kept open until 9:00 p.m.

There were problems with voting machines including temporary glitches in St. Louis and Chicago and two-hour waits at some polling stations in Fulton County, Ga. In Los Angeles, voting machines weren't delivered to several polling locations.

Even in Beverly Hills, Calif., there were glitches and a shortage of poll workers forced some voters to cast provisional ballots. "There's so much frustration in this country, so to feel like I'm a disenfranchised voter in Beverly Hills is ridiculous," Kristen Bell, an Obama supporter, told the Los Angeles Times.

And in Wisconsin, Texas and Virginia, some clueless voters showed up at polling locations even though primaries weren't taking place in those states today.

But there weren't any large-scale failures like the "hanging chad" nightmare that resulted in the historic Florida recount of 2000.

Since then, dozens of states have spent millions of dollars to purchase electronic voting machines and to put in places ways to verify votes. But was all that money worth it?

Problems have persisted in almost every federal election since 2000. Just two weeks ago, Republican primary voters in Horry County, S.C., were turned away from some precincts where paperless electronic machines weren't working.

As voters head to the polls today on an election day with the most delegates at stake and a tightening Democratic contest, some are concerned that there could be chaos at the polling booths with malfunctioning machines and disputed results.

Six states, including New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Arkansas, Delaware and Tennessee, are "considered at high risk for having election results affected by machine malfunction or tampering," according to a report by Common Cause and the Verified Voting Foundation, nonprofit groups committed to accountable politics.

Those states made the list because they don't have safeguards in place such as requiring machines to produce paper ballots or records and requiring random postelection audits of the machines, according to the voting foundation's president, Pamela Smith.

"If a situation arises where there is a question about the results, what do you do?" said Smith. "The states that we've listed at high risk  the voting systems may work, it may not work. But there's no way to prove it's accurate. Things can and do go wrong."

Smith says that many states and counties rushed to buy electronic voting machines without regarding the need for a way to verify votes if the machine malfunctioned.

"What happened was people moved too quickly to all electronic and didn't realize that they had to have a way to check for accuracy," she said.

Although most electronic voting machines have worked well, there have been some well-publicized debacles.

In the November 2006 election in Sarasota County, Fla., where the race was decided by 369 votes, more than 17,000 ballots showed no votes cast, a difference that had the potential to change the results.

Election officials in the six states considered "high-risk" in the report insist that their machines work well and that they don't anticipate any problems.

New York, which still uses old-fashioned lever machines, will provide emergency paper ballots and technicians if the machines break down, according to Lee Daglian, spokesman for the state board of elections.

"I haven't heard from anyone in any county about any problems with the machines," he said, adding that the report's authors "shouldn't be concerned because historically, they work pretty well."

New Jersey was set to switch to paper-based systems by Jan. 1, 2008, but the deadline was extended to June. 'We are confident that every voter's vote will count," said David Wald, spokesman for the state attorney general. "The machines are polished and dusted and ready to go."

In Arkansas, most of the state's 75 counties have a voter-verified paper trail in the machines, but three counties haven't made the change. The state also uses Ivotronic touch screens, the type that didn't work in Sarasota County in 2006.

"They've been tested in five statewide elections with good success and we're not concerned," said a spokesperson for the Arkansas secretary of state. "It's worked for us so far and we're not about to overhaul it in this election year."

In Delaware, the state's electronic voting machines store the results in three places: on a paper tape in the machine, on the machine itself and on a cartridge, all of which allow ballot image retention, says a spokesman for the state's commissioner of elections.

Georgia has one of the strictest levels of requirement for the testing of machines, according to Matt Carruthers, a spokesman for the secretary of state. "In addition to testing procedures, on Election Day, monitors are deployed throughout the state and we have technical support specialists available to respond."

A coordinator for the Tennessee Division of Elections did not return calls seeking comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

U.S. recession could be worse than recent downturns

Joanne Morrison
Reuters
Wednesday February 6, 2008

The chances of the United States avoiding a recession appear to be growing dimmer by the day, and any contraction in the economy will likely last longer and be more severe than other downturns in the past 20 years.

Recent reports have shown the housing market slump and rising defaults in the mortgage market are now taking their toll on job growth and on the manufacturing and services sector.

But heavy consumer debt, a growing federal budget gap, and rising prices could make any recession worse than Americans have experienced over the past two decades.

"If we do go into recession, it's going to be more severe and long-lasting than the last one," said Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard professor and member of the private-sector panel that dates U.S. recessions.

The nation's last two recessions, in 1990-1991 and 2001, each lasted for just eight months.

But the two downturns that ended in 1975 and 1982, when economic conditions bore some similarities to today, each lasted 16 months, making them the longest recessions since the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the accepted arbiter of U.S. recessions.

The U.S. economy entered the recessions of 1975 and 1982 saddled with huge government budget deficits from spending on social programs and the Vietnam war, and was suffering double-digit consumer price inflation.

Frankel said members of NBER's business-cycle dating panel have been in contact with each other over the prospect of a recession through e-mails, but it would likely take months, or perhaps even more than a year, for the panel to determine whether the economy had turned down.

Full article here.

DHS official moots Real ID rules for buying cold medicine

Dan Goodin
The Register
Wednesday February 6, 2008

A senior US Department of Homeland Security official has floated the idea of requiring citizens to produce federally compliant identification before purchasing some over-the-counter medicines.

"If you have a good ID ... you make it much harder for the meth labs to function in this country," DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker told an audience last month at the Heritage Foundation. Cold medicines like Sudafed have long been used in the production of methamphetamine. Over the past year or so, pharmacies have been required to track buyers of drugs that contain pseudoephedrine.

His comment came five days after the agency released final rules implementing the REAL ID Act of 2005 that made no mention of such requirements. It mandates the establishment uniform standards and procedures that must be met before state-issued licenses can be accepted as identification for official purposes.

Beyond boarding airplanes and entering federal buildings or nuclear facilities, there are no other official purposes spelled out in the regulations. And that's just what concerns people at the Center for Democracy and Technology. They say Baker's statement underscores "mission creep," in which the scope and purpose of the REAL ID Act gradually expands over time.

"Baker's suggested mission creep pushes the REAL ID program farther down the slippery slope toward a true national ID card," CDT blogger Greg Burnett wrote here. He says requiring people to produce a federally approved ID to buy cold medicine is a good example of the "significant ramifications" attached to the act.

So far, 17 states have formally opposed REAL ID, which takes effect on May 11. Residents of those states will be subject to additional searches and other inconveniences when flying and may be barred from entering federal buildings and nuclear plants.

Baker's statement belying the official DHS position on REAL ID isn't the first time the agency has made confusing remarks about the legal requirements surrounding identification. According to travel writer Edward Hasbrouck, DHS officials continue to plant the misunderstanding that residents from states which don't comply with REAL ID requirements won't get on planes. They will, Hasbrouck asserts here. In fact, he says, airlines are prevented by law from requiring any kind of ID.

Nonetheless, the DHS website continues to claim a photo ID is needed to pass through security checkpoints. Hasbrouck has his suspicions about the motives for such statements.

"The most obvious explanation is that they want to use the implied (but legally and factually empty) threat of denial of air travel to intimidate states into 'voluntarily' complying with the Real-ID Act and its rules," he writes.

Nelson says he doubts official explanation of terrorist attacks

Associated Press - February 5, 2008 7:25 PM ET

AUSTIN (AP) - Texas icon Willie Nelson said on a nationally syndicated radio show this week that he questions the official story of the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York City.

Nelson was asked by talk show host Alex Jones if he questions the official story.

Nelson said quote: "I saw those towers fall and I've seen an implosion in Las Vegas, there's too much similarities between the two. And I saw the building fall that didn't get hit by nothing. So, how naive are we, you know, what do they think we'll go for?"

Nelson's publicist would not comment on the remarks.

Jones is an Austin-based talk show host on the Genesis Communications Network. He is sometimes described as a "conspiracy theorist."

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Will Congress Vote "Yes" to More Bush Spying?

Ari Melber
The Nation
Wednesday February 6, 2008

This week Americans face a profound choice -- and it has nothing to do with the presidential election.

The Senate is about to vote on legislation, favored by President Bush, to strip American courts of their authority to supervise massive government surveillance. The Senate intelligence bill sidelines the U.S. intelligence court, established by a 1978 law, and grants Bush new spying powers. Under the proposal, the Administration merely needs to "certify" it will not abuse them.

Of course, Bush already has abused his spying powers. He conceded in 2005 that the Administration conducted massive surveillance without the warrants required by law. A judge resigned in protest; Bush's former attorney general, his deputy attorney general and the FBI director also threatened to resign; and one federal court found the warrantless spying illegal.

Yet the Senate's legislation fails to confront that history. Instead, Democratic leaders are poised to validate Bush's illegal surveillance -- giving even more ground than the Republican Congress ever did. Worse, the current bill would cover up Bush's abuse by granting retroactive amnesty to telecommunications companies accused of breaking the law, even if the people involved acted knowingly or maliciously.

The retroactive amnesty proposal is so extreme, in fact, it is hard to fathom how Congress, as a law-making body, can advance this blatantly lawless approach. This amnesty makes presidential pardons look tough. While pardons save convicted felons from jail, a controversial tack, they still require a full public trial. Retroactive amnesty just squashes entire cases. No investigation. No judicial fact-finding. And the public gets no information about these alleged crimes at the highest levels of American government and business. What if the spying was abused to distort elections or pad corporate profits? The bill would keep the public in the dark.

The intelligence bill is not just unpalatable; it is indefensible on the facts. That may be why the Senate is pushing the bill now, during the distractions of the busiest week in presidential politics. (The ACLU, MoveOn and liberal bloggers have also been fighting the bill, causing some delays and fortifying efforts by Senators Feingold and Dodd to amend it this week.) The Administration has also savaged the facts to bolster a weak hand. Bush officials have mischaracterized the bill, impugned the security credentials of their opponents and threatened to veto a temporary version so they could blame any ensuing intelligence problems on Democrats.

Bush's bad faith nearly derailed everything, because his veto threat enraged the bill's chief sponsor, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Bush ally on intelligence issues. Last week, in a showdown on the Senate floor, the normally mild-mannered Rockefeller even accused the White House of "political terrorism." Then Bush buckled, signing a temporary measure despite his veto threats, while reiterating his demand for amnesty in a final bill. Jacob Sullum, a conservative writer for the libertarian Reason magazine, described it as "the latest in a series of Bush administration reversals and self-contradictions" on intelligence legislation. "If the president and his men can't even get their public story about warrantless surveillance straight, how can we trust them to secretly exercise the unilateral powers they are seeking?" he asked.

We can't. And it's not just Bush, who has little time to exercise these unfettered powers, anyway. Spying abuse has bipartisan roots, from Democratic administrations infiltrating the anti-war movement to Nixon taping everyone from John Kerry to his own aides.

Surveillance is only more crucial and ubiquitous now, in an asymmetric war with elusive non-state actors. The core issue is whether Congress will ensure that our government conducts surveillance the American way, with oversight by American courts and public accountability for anyone who would exploit security concerns for illicit ends.

Proponents of warrantless surveillance like to say that "you have no problem if you have nothing to hide." Put aside the unconstitutional premise about individual rights, though, and that dare works in the other direction. Congress can confront Bush with a similar imperative: court oversight is no problem for you or the telecommunication companies, as long as you have nothing to hide.

'Complications put Iran war on ice'

Press TV
Wednesday February 6, 2008

A prominent security think tank says there is now a low probability of a US military attack on Iran over the country's nuclear program.

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) announced on Tuesday that there is no short-term prospect of a US strike on Iran, despite the fact that Tehran remains intent on continuing its nuclear activities.

IISS director-general and chief executive Doctor John Chipman said that the US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded Tehran is not running a nuclear weapons program, 'changed the dynamics of efforts to curb Iran's dual-use nuclear program'.

"Tehran is moving ahead with a new generation of more efficient centrifuges," Chipman continued.

This is while the UN nuclear watchdog says Iran's nuclear program is in line with power generation for its nation.

He added that Russia's delivery of 82 tons of uranium fuel, which will be used in Iran's nuclear power plant in Bushehr, 'removed another form of leverage over Iran'.

Iran says as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is entitled to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and therefore refuses to halt its uranium enrichment program.

Vaccine Companies Investigated for Manslaughter

Mercola.com
Wednesday February 6, 2008

French authorities have opened a formal investigation into two managers from drugs groups GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur. Judge Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy also opened an investigation for manslaughter against Sanofi Pasteur MSD, a joint venture between Sanofi Aventis and Merck.

The investigations follow allegations that the companies did not fully disclose side effects from an anti-hepatitis B drug used in a vaccination campaign in the 1990’s.

From 1994 to 1998, almost two thirds of the French population, and almost all newborns, were vaccinated against hepatitis B. The campaign was suspended after concerns arose about side effects.

Some 30 plaintiffs have launched a civil action, including the families of five people who died after receiving vaccinations.

Sources:
Reuters February 1, 2008