Blawg Search - Law Blogs, Lawyer Blogs, Legal Blogs Directory & Search Engine

SACRAMENTO, California - Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) admitted in a state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs produced by its tabulation software miss significant events, including the act of someone deleting votes on ... . "It was just not in the initial program, but now we're taking a serious look at that." California Secretary of State Debra Bowen called the audit logs "useless" and vowed to investigate the issue further. She told Threat Level after the hearing ...

"California will be using paper ballots for the foreseeable future, Secretary of State Debra Bowen said Saturday before a Democratic fundraiser in Banning. "It's old technology, but that means the bugs have been worked out," Bowen said ... the state's electronic voting systems amid growing concerns that the machines, and therefore the vote, could be tampered. In August, she decertified the state's voting machines, but permits their conditional use to accommodate disabled voters." The article is here.

... changes are inconsequential, but that decision is not for the vendor to make," he said. In the next few weeks, Secretary of State Debra Bowen will decide whether to file suit against the company for what could be a huge amount of damages. The ... rules require that disabled voters have equal access to polling places. An ES&S executive urged state officials not to penalize the company for a problem that was at most a matter of misunderstood communications. "The company has acted in good faith," ...

The Oakland Tribune offers this report, which begins: "Secretary of State Debra Bowen's decision to attach new security conditions to voting systems used in California is likely to cost Alameda County voters their ability to vote early."...

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has sent a letter to Chair Gineen Beach of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) outlining three proposals that she thinks will markedly improve the integrity of voting ... The EAC should require that vendors disclose vulnerabilities, flaws, problems, etc. to the EAC as the system certification authority and to all the state election directors that use the affected equipment. Uniform Incident Reporting -- The EAC should create and adopt procedures that ...

06/23/09 press release by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen: The California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, has announced that Yes on Equality and other supporters of the April 30th version of the ... as "the third marriage- related initiative." One other "marriage-related" initiative - the Domestic Partnership Initiative - would replace "marriage" in state law with "domestic partnership." (See the text here, the SOS announcement here, and previous blog posts here.) The January 26th and ...

... what the audit logs record and whether they can be easily altered or deleted, according to Secretary of State Debra Bowen. The investigation stems from a serious problem discovered in January with voting systems made by Premier Election ... at an event Wednesday evening to discuss an open source voting project in development, told Threat Level that the state contracted with David Wagner, a computer scientist with the University of California at Berkeley, to investigate fully what the logs on the ...

... today's court filing argues it's too late, and says that the anti-compact campaign and Secretary of State Debra Bowen have both misinterpreted the California constitution. The language at issue is found in Article II, Section 9: A ... latter, that the 90 days only refers to the gathering and submitting of signatures. And that's consistent with a bench ruling by a state judge in 1998 about how the referendum process works (ironically, a case that also revolved around Indian gaming). But the new legal ...

... that the state sent the report to the federal Election Assistance Commission to communicate the issue to election officials in other states. A spokeswoman for the EAC told Wired.com that the commission has no authority to address problems with voting systems that were ... system and therefore were not at risk from the flaw. California officials backed this claim in their report. Secretary of State Debra Bowen has sponsored legislation that would require a voting-machine vendor to notify the state in ...

... for same-sex couples excluded from the general election ballot this November. Bennett v. Bowen is the name of the case, with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen sued in her official capacity, and the individuals whose names appear as ... each house of the legislature approving a proposed revision by a 2/3 vote followed by submission to the people, or a state constitutional convention, again followed by submission to the people. The key question here is: what is a revision, and how is that ...