By Paul Lehto
As some of you probably already know, by a 3-2 vote of the Snohomish
County Council in WA state, the Sequoia touch screen voting machines
here will be history as of September 2006, and we will vote by mail
in Snohomish, like Oregon. Comments from council members focused on
cost of compliance with a new state paper trail law, problems of
secret vote counting, and maximizing the opportunity and convenience
of voting. Because Yakima county also ditched its DREs made by Hart
Intercivic, the only two counties that had DREs in 2004 have now
dumped them and none have added DREs in polling places for
nondisabled voters, so Washington is DRE-Free.
(Perhaps the fact that WA state is home to votersunite.org, one home
for voteraction, Andy Stephenson's home, bbv.org's home, Bev Harris's
home, and the home of Lehto v. Sequoia litigation gives us a leg up
on some states).
These touch screens are the same ones in our study that were shown to
malfunction so "well" that for machines taken out service due to
'malfunctions' with less than 30 votes on them, fully 50% more votes
for the Republican candidate for Governor in 2004 were recorded than
for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire. This
Republican electronic landslide also took place in a historically
Democratic County and in the closest gubernatorial race in US History
(around 100 votes in 3 million cast). Of course, the paper ballots
that were hand recounted and constituted 68% of the electorate
throughout the county showed Gregoire winning Snohomish county by
2000 votes, but the electronic votes that comprised 32% of the vote
throughout the county had Republican Rossi winning by 8,500 votes,
for a net Rossi victory of around 6500 votes. The chances that
voters, randomly assigned to vote electronically or paper would
separate out this way is one in well over a trillion. Political
factors like "late surges" are usually called on to account for such
discrepancies, but in this case we have irrefutable evidence that
electronic error in the malfuntioning machines disproportionately
favored one party over the other. The study and my lawsuit are
collected at www.votersunite.org/info/lehtolawsuit.asp
Anyway, these Sequoia machines that did this will now be put out to
pasture. Some of them apparently are headed to Florida. Others may
be headed to your state.
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