touch-screens

Mecklenburg County's election department sent me their trouble reports for the May primary and November General Election.

The report lists the many different problems with the touch-screens and their tempermental thermal printers, printers that often jammed or failed.

The NC Coalition for Verified Voting predicted these problems in advance and had urged all NC counties to purchase the tried and true optical scan systems and not the touch-screen machines. (See www.ncvoter.net )

23 of our NC counties use the ES&S iVotronic RTAL touch-screens.
The other 77 use the more mature and lower tech optical scan voting machines.

(Mecklenburg is the county that had 10 touch-screen machines with no voter verified paper printouts in the May, 2006 primary.)

Rory Blake, the Democrat who ran against Howard Coble got a taste of "Florida style elections" in Guilford County.

Excerpts from the Dec 7 issue of Yes Weekly:

The forgotten Democrat: Rory Blake tries to ride blue wave into red territory

...Blake pokes his head around the corner and summons his campaign staff - Smith and Gaddy - into a back room. In front of him sits a pile of sample ballots lifted from several 6th District precincts. His race tops the ballot, but his name doesn't appear on the paper.

"You can either choose Howard Coble or Howard Coble," Blake says, his temperature rising.

He's heard secondhand that a Democratic observer at Edgefield Baptist Church encountered the same non-choice during the actual touch screen voting and he's livid. Guilford County Board of Elections Director George Gilbert assures Blake the mistake had been taken care of and does not appear on the screens, but Blake doesn't buy it. The candidate is on his cell phone, trying to bend the ear of sympathetic journalists and gin up some last-minute support for what he now thinks might have been a stolen election.