October 21, 2008 (Computerworld) With two weeks to go before the presidential election, early voting is underway across the nation, and voters in many states are casting their ballots before Election Day to avoid the long lines expected on Nov. 4.

Thirty-one states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Texas and West Virginia, allow voters to go to the polls in person before Election Day, according to the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Three states -- Kentucky, Minnesota and Virginia -- plus the District of Columbia also allow early voting but require voters to give a reason for why they wouldn't be able to vote on Election Day.

Among other things, early voting may reduce the crush of voters on Nov. 4, when turnout is expected to be high; it could also give states a chance to check their Election Day processes ahead of time.

In at least one of the early-voting states, West Virginia, two voters said they had problems with touch-screen e-voting machines when they cast their ballots on Friday, but the problems were eventually resolved.

Barbara "Bobbi" Oates, a retired West Virginia State Tax Department official from Scott Depot, W.V., and Calvin Thomas, a retired machine operator from Ripley, W.V., said the iVotronic machines they used apparently "switched" their selections from the candidates they chose to the opposing candidates in some of the races, causing them to ask election officials for assistance. Election Systems & Software manufactures iVotronic machines.


Related StoryBreach cripples Ohio Secretary of State's site "It did switch my vote," Oates said. "I corrected it. I touched my [candidate's name on the ballot screen] and it switched to the candidate in the other party."

A poll worker showed Oates how to de-select the incorrect candidate and change it to the correct selection, she said, but Oates was worried that other voters might not know to ask about such a problem. "What concerned me is that people are not computer-savvy" and wouldn't know to ask, she said. "I think this election is very crucial and you want the person you voted for to get your vote."

Thomas, 81, said he also was concerned about how other voters potentially could be affected if they didn't know to check their candidate selections before finalizing their ballots.

Thomas said he has vision problems and took his daughter with him in case he needed help casting his ballot. "I've been a registered Republican all my life," Thomas said. "This election, I'm voting Democratic. We pushed [Barack] Obama [on the touch screen], and when we pushed Obama, it jumped up to [Republican presidential candidate John] McCain. It did the same for the governor's race."

"I don't want people to get discouraged and not go out to vote," he said. "If they get discouraged ... then that's bad."

The iVotronic e-voting machines from by Omaha-based ES&S include a paper feed that prints out a record of how a person voted so the voter can confirm his choices. All of West Virginia's 55 counties use iVotronic machines.

Pamela Smith, president of San Francisco-based VerifiedVoting.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan election watchdog group, said the problems reported in West Virginia are typically related to the machine's calibration and can be corrected by careful re-adjustment.

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote. Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or "purged," from voter rolls. It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with cases like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

"What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the voter rolls without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity to correct it before Election Day."

Weiser acknowledged that "purging done well and with proper accountability" is necessary to remove people who have died or moved out of state. "But the problem is it's not necessary to do inaccurate purges that catch up thousands of eligible voters without any notice or any opportunity to fix it before Election Day and really without any public scrutiny at all," she said.

Umm, not at all. I consider myself an independent, though my voting record (including past presidential elections) would tend to favor democrats. I'm definitely not right wing. Btw, there's plenty of younger (25-35) engineers/workers in the pharmaceutical industry that are democrats/independents.