Letter from TrueMajority // Verified Voting

[Goldom]

America's elections should be sterling examples of representative government. But the Florida fiasco in 2000 was just the opposite, an embarrassment to our country. Unless we act now, we could see an even worse election disaster.

After the disputed presidential election, Congress allocated billions of dollars through the Help Americans Vote Act (HAVA) to improve America's voting machines.

Trouble is, many election officials are installing voting systems with touch-screen computerized voting machines that are vulnerable to the same problems as other computer technology, including crashes, power outages, viruses and hacking. Simple question: Has your computer ever crashed and lost important data? Now apply that lesson to our democracy.

The fledgling technology already has failed widely publicized tests. One hacker was able to open a locked machine and start changing votes. It took him less than a minute. Another hacker was able to intercept and change vote totals being sent to headquarters. Still other experts analyzed a computer voting software program and found serious problems.

Fortunately there's a simple, cost-effective, two-part solution:

* All voting machines should produce a printout of each vote that could be used to audit the computer count, conduct recounts when necessary and otherwise serve as the backup system. You've heard "store a hard copy?" Voters are shown the printout of his or her vote for review before leaving the polling place, and the papers are saved by election officials. "Voter verified paper trail" is the fancy name for this simple safeguard.

* Public election officials and their trusted technicians must be given full access to the touch-screen software and hardware to verify the sanctity of the voting process, prevent fraud and eliminate unintentional errors.


Last year, legislation was introduced to get Congress and President Bush to fix the obvious problems before the 2004 election. TrueMajority members sent 63,268 faxes supporting these bills, but the Congressional leadership refuses to grant even a hearing on the bills by Rep. Holt (D-NJ) and Senators Graham (D-FL) and Boxer (D-CA).

So, TrueMajority is directing a campaign at the elected officials who have the power to stop the use of computer voting machines this year or demand a verified paper trail: secretaries of state, who typically are in charge of state elections.

Showing the way, the secretaries of state of California, Washington and Nevada have protected their citizens by requiring touch-screen computer voting in their states to include a voter verified paper trail. Excellent start; now onto the rest of us.

We believe other secretaries of state, who are not used to hearing from citizens, will follow suit under grassroots pressure. And as each state signs on to these higher standards, the pressure will build on those secretaries of state who refuse. No one will want to be the last chief state election officer to protect his or her constituents.

All the secretaries of state will be in Washington, DC, on February 17 at a meeting, so we'll kickoff the campaign then with a press conference calling on them to protect their constituents. We've hired two organizers who'll then move the campaign into the states, targeting a handful at a time for local news conferences, op-eds, letters to the editor and meetings with the election officers. As more and more states sign on and the pressure builds, we'll move the campaign around the country until everyone is covered.

To wage this campaign, we need $50,000 by Friday, February 13. Please help us create elections we can all be proud of.

[SaddenedDem]

1. And the sponsor of the 1st day breakfast is......

drumroll.......








Diebold!!!!!!!

Whoda thunk it, huh?

[SaddenedDem]

2. Kick!

Come on folks, we MUST stop these machines.

Trust me when I tell you there is a documentary film crew going to this thing. This is big....we need to support it. Ben Cohen, personally, has gotten involved in this.

[RedEagle]

3. NASS is just a vendor sponsored party

Go get'em!

[RedEagle]

4. Take Washington State OFF that List!

Washington's Secretary of State offered written rhetoric that delivers NOTHING.

Paper is only required of poll-based, touch screen voting machines. Anything else, including Internet, is wide open. (And we're only likely to have one touch screen per precinct)

The audits are a sick joke:

ONLY the touch screens
ONLY 1% or 4% of the machines in a county, depending on which bill
Audit the day AFTER the election

Any other kind of ballot, from punch card to optical scan, is excluded. So are any audits of central count systems, and most optical scan systems in Washington State are, unfortunately, of the central count variety. That means the ballots are taken to a central counting center- which is not a poll-based system.

Sorry, the real deal offered by Reed is a slap in the face.

Don't assume just because a state says it's going to a paper ballot, it means anything. Read the fine print.

Oh, the last indignity- while counties may have to buy paper systems after July 2004, they are not required to USE that function until 2006, nor are audits, such as they are, mandated until 2006.

Understand that Washington State is currently ALL paper ballots except for one county, and half of that county votes mail-in, on paper.

Tell my why we have to wait until 2006 to do any audits?

If you are from Washington, tell your legislators to bag this bill, or heavily amend it. They can look up HB 2978 or SB 6717 for what should be in a voting systems bill.

And you can also ask them why they ignored a bill crafted by citizens and voting advocates, in favor of an "agencey" bill. (From the Secretary of State)

After a year of information and obvious relenting-at-the-last-minute from the Secretary of State but-not-delivering-the-real-goods, they still picked up the agency bill and left the citizen bill to die, especially in the House. In the Senate, getting sponsorship was like pulling teeth.

It really mystifies me with all that is coming down about our Elections Office, that the legislature, most of them, would still only consider the agency bill.

We did get 12 sponsors of the House bill, and about 7 on the Senate, and my hat is off to those people.