CHICAGO - The problems Republican candidate Jim Moynihan experienced Monday when he tried to vote for himself at the Schaumburg Library weren't the first problems with the screen voting machine he used.
Moynihan's spokesman told Illinois Review that the candidate was finally able to vote for himself for State House when he touched the upper right hand corner of the box on the screen. Touching anywhere else on the box, his vote would register for Moynihan's Democrat opponent Michelle Mussman. The same happened with several other Republican candidates for which Moynihan voted.
An election judge witnessed the problems Moynihan was having with machine #008958. After Moynihan called the Illinois Republican Party and they called the election board, Cook County Clerk David Orr reported the machine was taken aside and "recalibrated."
The problematic voting machine is the EDGE Plus 2 - Dominion Sequoia Voting System which is in use in Chicago and suburban Cook County Illinois. Earlier this year, Defend the Vote's Sharon Meroni filed a complaint under the Help America Vote Act against the machines, saying they are "deficient."
"Federal and Illinois law requires a specific error testing rate and these machines were withdrawn from the EAC certification process and the manufacturing of these deficient machines was stopped when they failed to pass the mandated federal standards," Meroni write on her website. "Still the machines are available for use in Chicago."
One of Meroni's complaint seeks to stop the alleged illegal use of the EDGE Plus 2 - Dominion Sequoia Voting System in Illinois. The other is an appeal for a procedural change.
"We filed two complaints on August 22nd, 2014. These machines (Edge Plus 2 and the 500c) are also in Nevada and were reputed to do the same thing in the last Harry Reid 2010 re-election bid; switching votes from Sharron Angle to Reid," Meroni reports.
Meroni's complaint was before the Illinois State Board of Elections Tuesday October 21st. The next step is we go into a process referred to as "alternative dispute resolution". Within a couple of weeks, the complaint will move forward.
True the Vote aren't the only ones concerned about the status of the voting machines.
On February 19, 2014 at the Chicago Board of Election's Board meeting, Commissioner Cowen requested to place the sale of Chicago electronic voting machines “for parts” on the April 2014 agenda.
"During the meeting, they commented on an article discussed at an earlier meeting from USA Today that verifies what we said in earlier Board appearances: the manufacturers of electronic voting machines are all discontinuing them because they cannot be secured from fraud, and the entire industry is moving back to paper ballots," Meroni said.
Meroni asks for donations to hire an attorney to proceed through the next appeal levels.
