Palin’s major energy speech, NASA still looking at possible cuts in a McCain administration, and voting technologies under the spotlight—week of 26 October 2008

With just days to go before the election, Republican vice-presidential pick Governor Sarah Palin gave what the McCain campaign billed as her second policy speech. Palin talked about energy to a small crowd at Xunlight corporation, a solar energy startup company in Toledo, Ohio. The speech made the New York Times editorial page on Friday. The newspaper observed that Palin’s speech began with great promise by reminding the audience that the recent drop in oil should not lull the country into complacency. But the editorial expressed disappointment that the speech ended in the same old place, emphasizing Senator John McCain’s call for increased offshore oil drilling and his commitment of $2 billion a year for clean coal R&D .

A few days earlier, Palin, attempting to ridicule congressional earmarks, had cited research that involves fruit flies as being a particularly egregious example of wasteful earmark spending. Palin apparently was unaware of the role that drosophila has played in the science of genetics .

Budget crunch for NASA?

Speaking in Florida on 29 October, McCain added NASA to the list of agencies that would be exempted from his vaunted across-the-board spending freeze . In earlier speeches, McCain had failed to include NASA along with defense, veterans, social security, and health as exceptions to his proposed freeze. This is the third shift in McCain’s stance on whether NASA would be funded at the levels proposed in President Bush’s plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars, nor did McCain clarify whether NASA would still receive the 22-27% of its budget that is made up of congressional earmarks.

Electronic voting

But with Sen. Barack Obama consolidating his lead in the polls, attention began turning to the voting process itself. Many election watchers are predicting a record turnout on 4 November, and some observers have concerns that the technologies in use won’t be up for the job, or worse, could be manipulated one way or the other.

Most of the worry concerns the all-electronic systems, which gained popularity in the wake of the “hanging chads” that plagued Florida’s paper ballots in the 2000 presidential election. Many states — including Florida—adopted touch-screen voting systems that, while promising to eliminate any chance of a Florida-style dispute, lacked a paper trail that would permit an accurate recount in the event of a software glitch or voting machine crash. Those fears proved valid last month in Finland, where 232 votes, or 2% of total votes cast on a fully electronic voting system, were lost .

In West Virginia, one election official demonstrated how touch-screen voting could record votes for the wrong candidate if the machines are not correctly calibrated . Three early voters in the state complained that their votes for Obama had been flipped to McCain instead. Three Tennessee voters reported that their McCain votes had been flipped to Obama.

Meanwhile, a Pennsylvania lawsuit demands that paper ballots be provided in any precinct where half the touch-screen machines fail on election day . The complaint asserts that as many as 20% of electronic voting machines fail on election day, although that figure would include glitches or hang-ups that don’t necessarily result in votes being lost.

A number of states, including Florida, California, and Maryland, that had gone to touch screens after the 2000 debacle have since replaced them with paper ballots that are tallied by optical scanners .

Research into electronic voting technologies is still limited, despite a September 2004 workshop at the American Association for the Advancement of Science that recommended increased funding to develop verifiable electronic voting systems after the 2000 presidential election fiasco, when it took weeks to declare a winner. The high turnout for the 2008 presidential election may go some way to reduce the likelihood that the winner will be declared through a lawsuit.

David Kramer