Voting Rights Group Sues

The Associated Press is reporting that voting rights groups in nine states have file lawsuits seeking to change how elections are to be conducted.

Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers and prone to temperamental fits of technology that have assigned votes to the wrong candidate.

The group Voter action has taken action in California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. Other groups such as VotePA and the Coalition for Voting Integrity have been active in Pennsylvania. Suits have also been filed in Ohio, Texas and Florida.

``The designers of video games have built far more sophisticated security into their systems than have the manufacturers of voting machines,'' said Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group based in Berkeley, Calif. ``The biggest problem is security against tampering.''

New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study last month that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines ``pose a real danger'' to election integrity.

More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked ``by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge'' and a PC card; the failure of most states to install software that could detect outside attacks; and the failure of many states to audit their electronic systems.

`We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent,'' he said. In the state's biggest county, home to Albuquerque, touch-screens machines purchased from Sequoia lost 13,000 votes, Finley said.

Voting integrity is the very foundation of democracy. Voters must have complete faith and trust that their votes will be counted and that their votes are being counted exactly as they were cast.