Strong safety Rodney Harrison, arguably the most irreplaceable player in an already-decimated New England secondary, suffered a broken right scapula in the Patriots’ loss to the Colts on Sunday night. Harrison is expected to miss at least a few weeks.
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Delays Mean Long Lines for Voters in Florida, Utah, and Other States
San Francisco - Problems with electronic voting machine failures kept some polls from opening, created long lines, and left many voters puzzled about whether their votes were counted in Tuesday’s high stakes election.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) joined a nationwide team of technology lawyers and other experts staffing nationwide call centers and legal command posts on Election Day. The volunteers chronicled election problems, assisted voters, and worked with election officials to pull malfunctioning machines wherever possible. By 8:00 pm ET on Tuesday, over 17,000 incidents, including machine-related problems, had been reported to the Election Protection Coalition’s 866-OUR-VOTE hotline.
The types of machine problems reported to EFF volunteers were wide-ranging in both size and scope. Polls opened late for machine-related reasons in polling places throughout the country, including Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Utah, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, and California. In Broward County, Florida, voting machines failed to start up at one polling place, leaving some citizens unable to cast votes for hours. EFF and the Election Protection Coalition sought to keep the polling place open late to accommodate voters frustrated by the delays, but the officials refused. In Utah County, Utah, more than 100 precincts opened one to two hours late on Tuesday due to problems with machines. Both county and state election officials refused to keep polling stations open longer to make up for the lost time, and a judge also turned down a voter’s plea for extended hours brought by EFF.
“If election officials insist on depending on this unreliable technology, they should be prepared to react appropriately when things go wrong,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “Voters should not have to bear the brunt of this poor planning. We are very disappointed that the court did not recognize that.”
“Jumping vote” problems — touchscreen machines displaying selections not intended by voters — once again appeared across the country and across machine models. Some voters again encountered difficulty making or changing selections on touchscreen machines, resulting in long lines and frustrated voters leaving polling places. Optical scan machines also broke down in many places, most prominently in Cook County, Illinois, but also in Los Angeles, California, also leading to long delays for voters.
The national monitoring campaign was developed after many states hastily implemented flawed electronic voting machines and related election procedures. Twenty-three states still do not require a paper record of all votes, despite the demonstrated technical failures of e-voting machines in the 2004 presidential election. Without a record, voters cannot verify that the e-voting machines are recording their votes as intended, and election officials cannot conduct recounts. In addition, most of these machines use “black box” software that hasn’t been publicly reviewed for security.
But poorly designed systems are not the only problem. Most election workers remain woefully under-trained regarding potential e-voting problems. Vendor technicians frequently have unsupervised access to voting equipment, and local election officials routinely deny attempts to examine e-voting audit data.
Along with supporting local election reform, EFF has helped Congressional Rep. Rush Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act garner immense, bipartisan support. The bill contains several critically important election reforms, including the requirement of a paper trail for all electronic voting machines, random audits, and public availability of all code used in elections.
“Voters deserve these practical election reforms — not long lines and unverifiable results,” said EFF Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman.
For the latest election news:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/
For more on EFF’s e-voting efforts:
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/
Contacts:
Cindy Cohn
Legal Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
cindy@eff.org
Matt Zimmerman
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
mattz@eff.org
Glenn Gordon Caron, creator of NBC’s hit supernatural series Medium, told SCI FI Wire that he hopes to enlist star Patricia Arquette’s actor brother David to helm an upcoming episode; David recently directed his first feature film, the independent horror movie The Tripper.
With the election results in, moviegoers have one other thing to blame on George Bush: the delay of the proposed fourth Mad Max movie. At least that’s the opinion of Mad Max’s creator, director George Miller.
Daniel Craig, who stars as British superspy James Bond in the upcoming film Casino Royale, told SCI FI Wire that he received kind words of encouragement from his 007 predecessor, Pierce Brosnan, after signing on to play the iconic role.
Lena Headey (Imagine Me & You) has landed the title role in the Fox pilot The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is based on the mythology of the Terminator films, Variety reported.
Comic actress Catherine O’Hara–who provides one of the voices in Where the Wild Things Are, a live-action/animated film based on Maurice Sendak’s children’s book–told SCI FI Wire that she and the other voice actors workshopped their characters together before director Spike Jonze and the animators went off to complete the production.
Elijah Wood, who voices a tap-dancing penguin in the upcoming animated musical Happy Feet, told SCI FI Wire that he had the unusual opportunity to work at the same time with co-star Robin Williams and other voice actors.
The new trailer for Sam Raimi’s upcoming Spider-Man 3 is set to go live on the Web on Nov. 9 on iFilm and will be linked through SCI FI Wire’s Trailers page. The trailer will go live at 10 p.m. ET and will be available in two formats.
Lindsay Lohan has set the supernatural thriller I Know Who Killed Me as her next movie, with production set to start next month, Variety reported.
An anonymous reader writes, “Novell has published additional details about its agreements with Microsoft concerning Windows and Linux interoperability and patents. It seems the company is receiving an up-front payment of $348 million from Microsoft, for SLES subscription certificates and for patent cross-licensing. Microsoft will make an upfront payment to Novell of $240 million for SLES subscription ‘certificates’ that Microsoft can use, resell, or distribute over the term of the agreement. Regarding the patent cooperation agreement, Microsoft will make an up-front net payment to Novell of $108 million, and Novell will make ongoing payments totaling at least $40 million over five years to Microsoft.”