I am an e-voting activist in North Carolina, and I can tell you that the NY Times article is misleading and inaccurate.   Your first tip should have been all of the parsing of verbs and failure to state any proof. I wrote to Ian Urbina, and here is his reply:

From: Ian Urbina  

To: joyce@ncvoter.net

Subject: RE: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin

Date: Oct 9, 2008 9:03 AM

From what we can see in the data, NC does not seem to have any major red flags. Best we can tell, it looks like the number of people coming off the rolls would roughly correspond with the number of people leaving the state or dying during that period (both of which are legitimate reasons to remove people within 90 days before an election).

Ian

-----Original Message-----

From: joyce@ncvoter.net [mailto:joyce@ncvoter.net]

Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 8:54 AM

To: URBINA@nytimes.com

Subject: FW:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html?_r=1&ref=politic

s&oref=slogin

The NC Coalition for Verified Voting successfully worked to eliminate the matching requirement in North Carolina in August 2007.

If a voter doesn't match, they just show some ID when they come to the polls.  ID includes  a utility bill or something like that. Not too hard. 

Ohio-duh steals Flori-duh's Butterfly Ballot Design.  Ohio may go down in history this November when 12 counties use a butterfly ballot.  The design is hauntingly similar to the one that made Florida notorious in November 2000.  Recently the Brennan Center for Justice urged Ohio election officials to redesign a ballot planned for 12 counties. The problem - the design is a modern day butterfly ballot, splitting the presidential contest over two columns on their paper ballots for this November's election. The difference between the Ohio butterfly ballot and the Florida butterfly ballot is that Ohio is using optical scanners, and Florida was using punch card. I guess this proves that there is more than one way to spoil an election.

Potential Ballot Trouble In OH: Split Contests

By Lawrence Norden – 10/01/08

By our count, at least twelve Ohio counties have split the presidential contest over two columns on their paper ballots for this November's election. This "column split" often confuses voters and results in double voting in the presidential race — and an uncounted vote. Today the Brennan Center urged election officials and advocates in Ohio to make sure that voters are aware of the split, and to make sure they vote only once for president. Unfortunately, the design meets legal guidelines and a directive issued by the Secretary of State.

The twelve Ohio counties whose ballots spilt the presidential race over two columns are: Ashtabula, Athens, Auglaize, Champaign, Delaware, Lawrence, Logan, Madison, Ottawa, Seneca, Shelby, and Wyandot.

A picture of the butterfly ballot and some further comments after the jump

Florida is throwing up every barrier they can for the newly engaged voters.  Unlike 45 other states, Florida won't let you clear up the matching problem ON election day, by simply showing your ID. Voter ID is required in order to vote, yet Florida won't let you use it to prove your identity on election day! Florida says you have to either miss work or make a special trip before the election, or get stuck with a crappy provisional ballot and clear up the problem AFTER the election. 

A recent report by the Advancement Project outlines how states like Florida and Ohio had disenfranchised voters by over using provisional ballots, ballots which often don't count! Provisional ballots are not counted on election night, but for many, the election is considered over. Further, at least 30% of provisional ballots end up being rejected. 

The problem - The "No Match No Vote" law orders that a registrant provide either a drivers license or the last four digits of their social security number, and then the Elections dept tries to match that against the DMV or the Social Security databases. Often as high as 20% fail to match using their social security number.  45 other states wisely either never adopted the "no match no vote" law, or abandoned it. 

In his Oped Even the unverified can vote Florida SOS Kurt Browning misleads the public into thinking that enforcing Florida's "No Match No Vote" law will not disenfranchise any voters. Many through no fault of their own will fail to match. 

Reference: Amendment 14 - Citizenship Rights. Ratified 7/9/1868.

Bad timing or last ditch effort to supress new voters? A recent alert by the Social Security Administration announces that the agency plans to shut down its databases for maintenance from October 11 through October 13. How will this hurt new voters?  Election officials would lose 4 days of processing time needed to handle new registrants.  Elections staff are already overworked at this time of the year and this is another straw on the camel's back.

This 4 day shutdown occurs at a critical time for most states - it is just past the average cutoff date to turn in new voter registrations. (25 days before the election). Thanks to the "Help America Vote Act" passed in 2002, officials now must check either the registrant's last 4 digits of their social security number against the government database, or the voters drivers license number against the DMV. This shut down would mostly hurt voters who do not have a car or drive.

Voter Registration Shut Down? By Wendy R. Weiser – 09/24/08

Updated (5:30pm): Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) writes to Social Security Administration seeking delay of shutdown. A copy of the letter is here. 

A recent alert by the Social Security Administration announces that the agency plans to shut down its databases for maintenance from October 11 through October 13. While this might not sound like an election issue, it turns out that this could significantly impede registration of first-time voters as well as the re-registration of eligible citizens.

Read More...

CANDIDATE BARRED FROM OBSERVING RECOUNT Sun-Sentinel - Sept. 1, 2008, by Akilah Johnson

Just look at the history of IRV in real life:

In San Francisco, elections have many, many candidates and thus majority failure in the first round is common.  In no case did the vote transfers change the preference order affecting the top two candidates in the first round; i.e., the leader in the first round won the election, and the runner-up in the first round remained the runner-up.  This, then, can be expected generally in IRV elections.  Australian experience with IRV shows that this is what it normally does.

Here are some more observations about IRV's hamr to third parties.

The Libertarian Reform Caucus writes:  "Anyone for a Bullet in the Foot?  Instant Runoff!"

IRV can be trusted to maintain a two-party system. When lawmakers on the hill realize this, what's to stop them from building whole-hearted bipartisan suport for IRV? Some in Congress already say they like it! If nothing is said against IRV, one day we'll all be worse off than we were with Plurality Voting! IRV lovers don't know where they're pointing their pistol!

...in ordinary scenarios, if a group of major party supporters conspires to rank their favorite candidate lower they can push up that candidates chances of a win! And vice-versa. Ranking lacks meaning in IRV.

Australian Politics  - in Australia, they call the ranked type voting for single contests - Preferential voting.  According to the analysts at  Australian Politics, the "Disadvantages of the Preferential [IRV] System" are:

1. It is more complicated to administer and count.
2. It can produce a higher level of informal voting.
3. It promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents.
4. Voters are forced to express a preference for candidates they may not wish to support in any way. (The use of optional preferential voting, as used in New South Wales State elections, is a solution to this problem.)

Take a look at IRV reality, Not theory

The facts are there are three IRV countries: Ireland (mandated in their 1937 constitution), Australia (adopted STV in the early 1900s, but in 1949 added "reweighting" to STV in their multi-winner elections, a change which does not matter for us since we are only considering single-winner elections – Australia and Ireland have both kinds of elections), and Malta. (Later note: a recent addition is Fiji, but it unfortunately then got subtracted due to a 2006 coup.)

All three became 2-party dominated in their IRV seats.  And this is despite the fact that in addition to IRV single-winner elections, they all also have multi-winner STV "proportional representation" (PR) elections, and they are parliamentary rather than presidential.  Both of these two factors mitigate toward having more than two parties (the parliamentary countries with PR essentially all have many more than two vibrant political parties).  But despite those multiparty-genic factors, the effect of IRV in these countries has been enough to drag them back down to two-party domination status!

So given that, you can bet your bottom dollar that the USA, were it to adopt IRV but still to remain presidential and without multiwinner PR elections (i.e. wholy with single-winner elections), will definitely stay two-party dominated.

According to Wikipedia, the minor parties (e.g. The Australian Democrats, Greens, One Nation, Family First, Christian Democrats) are often able to hold Senate seats thanks to the multiwinner PR system used to elect it, but have usually been unable to hold House seats thanks to the fact that they are elected using IRV.  As I write this in 2004-2007 the total number of House seats owned by these parties is zero out of 150.  (There is a seat owned by CLP member Dave Tollner, but the County Liberal Party is really the Liberal/National party branch in the Northern Territories.)

Has IRV helped third parties anywhere?