Daily Voting News For July 14, 2008

In this evening’s “Featured Article”, Kim Zetter of “Threat Level Blog” at Wired reports about the failure of new Sequoia voting machines to get through state and local testing. So far about 50 percent of the voting machines delivered to the state have problems. Doug Kellner, co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, is quoted as saying something that the Election Integrity community has known for a long time. He said, “There's no way the vendor could be adequately reviewing the machines and having so many problems. What it tells us is that the vendor just throws this stuff over the transom and does not do any alpha- or beta-testing of their own before they apply for certification testing. Then they expect that we'll identify technical glitches and then they'll correct those glitches. But correction of those glitches is an extraordinarily time-consuming process. And it’s very disappointing that this equipment is not ready for prime time.” The vendors have used real elections to beta test their products without regards for the voters and this has been an ongoing process for years....

**"Daily Voting News" is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in "Daily Voting News" may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or Scoop.**

John Gideon
Co-Executive Director
VotersUnite.Org
www.votersunite.org

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