Blog of My Life

LATimes Covers eSlate's Ass by Stripping It Away From Article's Title and Content

LATimes published an article on how the electronic voting machine, eSlate, selected by the Orange Country Registrar of Voters, glitched in the March 2nd election.

Voters cast votes prematurely, were given the wrong ballots electronically or were unable to use machines that froze or showed error messages.

It seems like LATimes has modified that article with all mentioning of the eSlate system stripped away.

cache of news.google.com (click to verify me):

OC Still Favors eSlate Voting
Los Angeles Times (subscription), CA - Apr 15, 2004
... Orange County used a system developed by Hart Intercivic of Texas that allowed voters to cast ballots on an eSlate machine, on which they spun a wheel to make ...

modified version on latimes.com (free reg. req.):

Secretary of State Gets Voting Plea
Orange County, which had glitches with electronic balloting in March, wants to keep the system. Many such counties will soon be told whether they can.

Some sort of censoring I suppose...

Is this a common practice?

Update:

Apparently similar incident was published in a book (titled Black Box Voting) too, just that my discovery was more recent:

To this end, it is interesting that Hart Intercivic, which helped organize this meeting, was one of the first beneficiaries of such a strategy. Let's take a moment to see "Deliverable #5" in action. Ellen Thiesen, a voting activist, noticed that a news story damaging to Hart Intercivic somehow got a midday rewrite.

Go to the source here.

Posted by david at April 26, 2004 10:24 PM | TrackBack