February 14, 2007

Senator Feinstein urges federal e-voting probe

"No one's sure whether touch-screen electronic voting machines used in Sarasota County, Florida were solely to blame for some 18,000 votes that went unrecorded in a tight congressional race last fall.

But the incident is cause for a "top-to-bottom" investigation of the voting system and software used in that race and more broadly, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a Wednesday letter to the Government Accountability Office.

Feinstein, the chairwoman of a Senate panel with jurisdiction over election matters, asked the federal watchdog agency to compile information about irregularities in direct-recording electronic voting systems, or DREs, which do not typically produce a paper record.

She requested that investigators scrutinize both the 2004 and 2006 elections and include in their research the ES&S iVotronic System used in Sarasota, the Avante Touch Screen, the Diebold's TSX, the Sequoia/Smartmatic HAAT (Hybrid Activator, Accumulator & Transmitter), and the Sequoia AVC Edge System."

The story is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at February 14, 2007 02:18 PM