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"News broke in Humboldt County, California, last week that the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project had discovered 'glitches' in the optical scanning machines provided by Diebold Election Systems (now called Premier Election Systems). Nearly 200 votes were not recorded due to flaws with the machines. While this may sound like disturbing news, there's a positive side to this: the fact that votes were missing was discovered because of the work of the Humboldt Election Transparency Project, a project Liberty Tree Fellow David Cobb and others have been involved with here in the county. Without the work of the Transparency Project, no one would have known that votes were missing at all, and the flawed machines would be remaining in use without anyone the wiser.

The Project's success shows what determined voters can do when they work together in democracy's defense. And it is also a victory for those looking to implement open-source software in elections, to make the process truly transparent. The scanning and tallying process used to discover the missing ballots was an open-source program called Ballot Browser developed by Humboldt resident Mitch Trachtenberg. You can read more about the software and the work of the Transparency Project in this story at Wired: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/unique-transpar.html"

More info:

Want to know more? Check out the Humboldt Election Transparency Project at http://humtp.com/index.html. The group also maintains a blog at http://democracycounts.blogspot.com/.

Areas of Focus:

Democratizing Elections, Voting Machines (No More Stolen Elections)

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