- Director Of Elections Sends Letter Authorizing
Measure In Light Of Latest Failure By The Electronic Voting Machine Vendor ES&S
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- Says Company's Performance in Most Recent
-- of Many Similar Incidences Around the Country -- is 'Completely Unacceptable
and Disturbing'
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- On Monday, Texas Director of Elections
Ann McGeehan sent a letter to all state Election Officials authorizing
them to create "emergency paper ballots" in light of statewide
failures by Election System & Software, Inc. (ES&S) to provide
ballots in time for the state's upcoming May 13 Runoff Elections, The BRAD
BLOG has learned.
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- Early voting begins on Monday for those
elections and counties across the state do not yet have ballots and, in
many cases, programming for their optical-scan and touch-screen voting
machines. ES&S has contracts with more than 140 Texas counties.
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- McGeehan has instructed officials to
create and number their own paper ballots, secure boxes to store them in,
and hire additional workers to manually hand count ballots as an emergency
procedure to deal with the rapidly deteriorating situation.
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- The letter from McGeehan (posted in full
exclusively at the end of this article) -- which does not mention ES&S
by name, but refers to the Omaha, Nebraska-based company only as "a
certified voting systems vendor" -- was sent in response to complaints
from officials around the state that "programming media or, in some
cases, your ballots" had not been received yet by officials.
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- In a statement to the San Antonio's Express-News
this morning, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff says, "It sure is exasperating...We
are looking at avenues to hold them responsible for this." Bexar County
is just one of more than 140 in Texas with whom ES&S has contracts.
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- "They made their priorities,"
Wolff says, "and I think Texas certainly wasn't one of them."
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- The BRAD BLOG has also received statements
from officials in other states who were still more direct in expressing
their frustration with the company's business practices now being described
by some as including "coercion" and "threats."
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- This most recent embarrassment for ES&S,
the country's largest Electronic Voting Machine Vendor, is just the latest
in what has now become an epidemic string of failures to meet contractual
obligations in scores of states and counties across the country. The BRAD
BLOG has reported on many of these troubling problems in a long series
of articles in hopes of connecting the dots of those failures to illustrate
and warn of the rapidly approaching E-Voting train wreck.
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- So far, both the mainstream corporate
media, as well as many elections officials across the country have -- to
the delight of ES&S -- failed to notice the remarkably clear pattern
of delinquency and failure the company has demonstrated time and again
across the nation in recent weeks and months.
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- Texas was plagued, during their recent
March 7th Primary Election, by a host of failures in voting equipment made
by both ES&S and Hart InterCivic, another voting machine vendor certified
to do business in the state. Those failures on Election Day led to a statewide
Election Contest filed by a former Republican Supreme Court Justice after
tabulators failed and electronic ballots were misprogrammed and miscounted.
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- In Jefferson County, TX officials threatened
to withhold payment after the debacle until their machines were fixed by
ES&S. The company, however, answered by reportedly refusing to program
the machines at all for the state's upcoming Runoff Elections unless payment
was made in full. The county, in a bind, was forced to comply with the
strong-arm tactics.
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- And now, with new elections just weeks
away, officials all over the state are finding themselves -- like many
other states across the country -- without the promised ballots from ES&S
and scrambling for alternative solutions. Election Director McGeehan describes
the situation as "completely unacceptable." Writing in her letter
to Election Officials, she says:
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- We recognize that this kind of service
from a certified voting systems vendors [sic] is completely unacceptable
and disturbing. We will be pursuing all appropriate remedies from a state
level that are available to us.
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- In the letter, McGeehan goes on to explain
that officials should crate "emergency paper ballots" by either
creating their own, or using "PDF format to print copies of the ballot"
in cases were "proofs" had been previously supplied by ES&S.
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- Instructions are included for number
and initializing thousands of ballots by hand:
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- After you print a copy of the ballot,
you will need to put a ballot number at the top of the ballot beginning
with the next ballot number of the last number of your original ballot
order. In other words, if you ordered 15,000 ballots numbered 1-15,000,
any ballots you create would be numbered beginning with the number 15,001.
You will need to put your initials on the back of the ballot so you can
determine it was an official ballot provided by you.
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- Further, officials are instructed that
they may have to manually hand count ballots that would otherwise be counted
by either optical-scan systems or recorded by touch-screen voting machines.
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- They are also told to create boxes for
the ballot storage and find people to count them. McGeehan writes...
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- Go here for rest of story:
- http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002742.htm#More
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