The mission of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is to restore public ownership and oversight of elections, and to ensure the fundamental right of every American citizen to vote and to have each vote counted as intended in a secure, transparent, impartial, and independently verified election process.
LATEST E-VOTE LAWSUIT: Oregon Sues ES&S for Breach of Contract
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/20/2006 - 4:12pm
2006 Election 'Train Wreck' Continues as Company Fails to Meet Obligations in Yet Another State
By Brad Friedman / The Brad Blog / April 20, 2006
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In the latest amongst a spate of lawsuits being filed against Electronic Voting Machine Companies around the country, the Oregon Sec. of State has announced today that they have filed a complaint against Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) for breach of contract in failing to provide the state with disabled-accessible voting machines, as promised, in time to meet the January 1, 2006 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) deadline.
The press release goes on to explain the history of ES&S's broken commitment to provide disabled-accessible electronic AutoMark voting systems to the state in what seems to echo problems that ES&S and several of the other electronic voting machine vendors are now having in meeting contractual obligations all around the country. The problem in Oregon is just the latest to come to light, as the voting machine vendors have been snatching up any and all available agreements with states, in light of Election Officials' attempts to comply with various mandates set forth, and funded by federal tax dollars, in the disastrous HAVA legislation of 2002. John Gideon, has written several articles on the epidemic recently for BRAD BLOG (see link at bottom).
In addition to failures to meet such obligations as simply providing hardware and software as promised to states and counties, companies such as ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic, have failed across the country to provide hardware and software that actually works and actually counts voters votes accurately as they intended to cast them.
HAVA was passed in 2002 by Congress after efforts led by Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) -- and funded by Diebold lobbyists including Ney's former chief of staff, David DiStefano -- convinced lawmakers that the bill would correct perceived problems revealed with voting systems during the 2000 Florida Election debacle.
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