Voting Machines

City Council candidate Julie Welker will be allowed a free inspection of voting machines this weekend to determine whether there were any errors in the vote count in her extremely close race for the Democratic nomination for the Fifth District Council seat, the acting City Commissioners ruled yesterday. "I am of course upset that we had to spend time doing this," Welker said after the commissioners' meeting yesterday. "There should have been no question from the beginning. " Return sheets at the Board of Elections show Welker trailing former Council aide Darrell Clarke in the May 18 primary election by just 96 votes - or 9,860 to 9,956.

A divided state court turned down efforts by the Department of State to dismiss a legal challenge to the use of touch-screen voting machines in Pennsylvania counties. The four-judge Commonwealth Court majority opinion issued Thursday keeps alive a lawsuit that seeks to stop the use of electronic voting machines and order Secretary of State Pedro Cortes to establish new criteria for testing them. "Electors allege that the machines are not reliable or consistent in recording votes cast and that electors have no way of knowing whether a [direct-recording electronic machine, or DRE]

The increasing militancy of America's handicapped citizens is a refreshing - and long overdue - phenomenon. If, like any segment of the population that's been left out of the mainstream for whatever reason, they can seem shrill and "inconvenient" to some in the majority, it may reflect our own feeling of guilt, rather than their behavior. That said, if it's true that only 46 of Philadelphia's 1,681 polling places are accessible to wheelchairs, as disability advocates have charged, this is something we should all be concerned about.

An overhaul of the nation's creaky electoral machinery, inspired by the Florida presidential recount in 2000, will get its biggest test so far in the midterm congressional elections Tuesday - and some worry the cure might be as bad as the disease. Citing problems in the spring primaries and the sheer magnitude of the changes, experts warn of possible problems at the polls. Many voters and election officials will be grappling with new electronic voting machines, new computerized registration databases, and, in some states, stricter voter-identification requirements.

City Controller Joseph C. Vignola issues audits of city departments and agencies with icy regularity. So did his predecessor Thomas A. Leonard (1979-83) and the controller Leonard replaced, the late William G. Klenk 2d (1973-79). The audits pointed out plenty of ways the city could save thousands, even millions, of tax dollars or improve administrative practices. They've been duly reported by the media and that's the last heard about them. Last week the latest Vignola audit which prompted him to call for abolishing Traffic Court, Municipal Court and the office of the clerk of quarter sessions, caused a stir and even got a rise from several members of City Council and the judiciary, but that was unusual.

Every time there's a problem with voting machines on an election day, the city commissioners get the back of the hand from the newspapers and the Max Factor crowd on the prime-time newscasts. If there's a snafu in just one division, the Committee of Seventy yells "foul" and the media sends out a frantic bell ringer to all points. Then, once all the divisions are in, everything seems to settle down and little is said about the voting machine problem until there's a breakdown or two on the next election day. But John Kane, the ageless Republican who holds the minority seat on the Board of City Commissioners, says that the problems with the voting machines are a nonstop headache.

A Mercer County judge will weigh arguments this afternoon from voting-rights activists who contend that electronic voting machines are unreliable and vulnerable to fraud. Lawyers for the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers University sued the state last week, seeking to force election officials to use old-fashioned paper ballots in the presidential election next week. They argued that the electronic voting technology used in 15 of the state's 21 counties does not provide a printed record and therefore "cannot be relied upon to protect the fundamental right to vote.

In just months, Philadelphia could boast the latest touch-screen voting technology. Or the city could be that much closer to a day when its polling apparatus sputters out. Until last week, bragging rights seemed assured. Now a lawsuit on behalf of disabled voters challenges the city's years-long effort to modernize its voting machinery. Nine disabled city residents represented by a national disabilities' rights group make what appear to be straightforward demands: The city should "commit to a date by which all polling places will be made accessible.

Just four months before the Nov. 2 elections, vulnerabilities persist in electronic voting machines used nationwide, a group of computer experts told House lawmakers yesterday. The experts voiced concern that the elections may be plagued by hackers, fraud and computer malfunctions. Some argue for the return of the paper ballot as a backup to verify voters' intentions. But election commissioners who plan to rely on electronic balloting insisted that their machines worked well.

The central Pennsylvania voting machine shown Tuesday in a YouTube video recording a vote for President Obama as a vote for Republican challenger Mitt Romney was broken and has been fixed, a state official said. The video, reminiscent of a 2008 parody on The Simpsons, went viral and attracted national media attention as it raised concerns about voting-machine fraud. YouTube user "centralpavote," who posted the video, wrote that when he tried to cast a ballot for Obama, the light in the voting booth lit up for Romney.

In the 1960s, a Democratic ward leader took shoe boxes full of quarters to the polls in poor neighborhoods - "to pay off voters," a veteran election lawyer recalls. In 1993, a judge overturned a pivotal State Senate race because of hundreds of bogus absentee ballots. In last year's primary, dozens of polling places mysteriously recorded more votes in some races than the number of voters who'd signed in. All are examples of real or suspected vote fraud, Philadelphia-style.

BRIAN SIMS, a lawyer who on Tuesday defeated state Rep. Babette Josephs in her bid for a 15th two-year term, has a plan to make political friends before he joins the state House in January. Sims, who will be the state's first openly gay legislator in January, will spend the next six months raising money for other Democrats who face Republicans in the Nov. 6 general election. Sims, who has no November opponent, is focused first on the campaign of Chris Dietz, another openly gay candidate, who is seeking to unseat a Republican incumbent in Dauphin County's 104th District.

Brian Sims, a 33-year-old lawyer, appears to have defeated Center City's longtime representative in the state House, setting himself up to become the first openly-gay state lawmaker in Pennsylvania. Sims held a 233-vote lead over his fellow Democratic opponent Babette Josephs, with 51.6 percent of the vote, according to unofficial returns. Returns from seven voting divisions in the 182d District were still described as incomplete, but Philadelphia election officials said Wednesday that this was likely the result of blank cartridges from voting machines that were not used on primary day. The election results in the Sims-Josephs race are unlikely to change, they said.

Defiantly, begrudgingly or compliantly, Pennsylvania voters took the test run of the state's new voter ID requirement in stride Tuesday, generally producing photo identification as requested but occasionally registering protests. Whether they offered identification or not, registered voters who showed up at their old polling places were ushered to voting machines and permitted to start punching buttons - an option they'll be denied in November's general election unless they can show election officials a Pennsylvania driver's license or other specified ID. Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele, part of the state Republican machinery which pushed voter ID into law in mid-March, made a surprise visit Tuesday morning to five polling places in Northeast Philadelphia and said the state's "soft rollout" appeared to be successful.

THERE IS AN equation in politics: Good news for one person is bad news for another. Former state Sen. T. Milton Street Sr. , fresh from federal prison last year when he challenged Mayor Nutter in the Democratic primary election, has dropped plans to run against state Rep. Michelle Brownlee for the 195th District seat representing the Strawberry Mansion, Powelton and Mantua area. Street tells us that, instead, he will seek the vacant House seat in the 197th District, which stretches from North Philly to East Falls.

When the returns came in for the Cumberland County Democratic Committee last summer, Cynthia Zirkle couldn't believe what she was seeing. Only 86 votes were cast in the race to represent her district in Fairfield Township, and despite assurances from dozens of friends, Zirkle and her husband, Ernest, had managed to win just 19 votes between them. "I can't believe that's correct," Zirkle told her husband, a retired veterinarian and the town's deputy mayor. The couple sued the Cumberland County Board of Elections and discovered that due to a programming error, their results had been switched with those of their opponents.

The crowd surrounding the Frank L. Rizzo statue Saturday afternoon seemed to be in a time warp, as the former Philadelphia mayor's entourage and admirers came out to pay their respects. The Quaker City String Band played as dignitaries arrived on foot and in cars, some following the motorcade that came down Broad Street from Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Cheltenham to the Municipal Services Building, across from City Hall. Saturday marked 20 years since Rizzo died of a heart attack while campaigning for a third term as mayor, a job he had held from 1972 to 1980.

Barbara Capozzi, who came up 40 votes short in her bid for the Democratic nomination to replace City Councilwoman Anna C. Verna, filed suit Tuesday alleging that the returns should be thrown out or modified because one candidate's name was improperly stickered over on an unspecified number of voting machines. Capozzi asked Common Pleas Court to either throw out the results of the May 17 primary election or exclude all votes cast on machines where the name of Damon K. Roberts had been covered over.

Anita Smith of Oak Lane, running for a Municipal Court judgeship, had all her bases covered except one: She isn't a lawyer, and under the Pennsylvania Constitution, she won't be able to sit on the bench even if she's the leading vote-getter in the May 17 primary. She's among three judicial candidates whose names will appear on the ballot even though they have no chance of winning - posing a hazard to inattentive citizens who may waste votes in the city's judicial races. Besides Smith, candidates Joseph C. Waters Jr. and Meredith Seigle-DiClaudio have given up their judicial campaigns and obtained court orders to make it official.