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Home » News » Newsletters » June 1, 2003
June 1, 2003
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Voter Verification Newsletter -- Vol 1, Number 4
David L. Dill (elections@chicory.stanford.edu) June 1, 2003
If you have items you think are appropriate for this newsletter, please email to "elections@chicory.stanford.edu" with "NEWSLETTER" in the subject of the email. I will exercise editorial discretion over what appears.
Rep. Holt paper trail bill
More information about the voter verified paper trail bill introduced by Rush Holt: It is HR 2239 -- The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 was introduced on May 22, 2003. The text can be found on the Library of Congress website -- http://thomas.loc.gov. Just type in HR 2239 where the bill number is called for, either on the top line or under "Bill Summary and Status". In addition, you may access Congressman Holt's statement upon introduction of the bill under "Congressional Record", by clicking on "Text Search", selecting for Congressman Holt and typing in the phrase "voter verified".
Computerized Voting Petition
Greg Palast and Martin Luther King III are circulating a petition to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft on the subject of computerized voter registration and touch-screen voting.
Stop the Florida-tion of the 2004 election Computers threaten accountability of voting system Today, there is a new and real threat to voters, this time coming from touchscreen voting machines with no paper trails and the computerized purges of voter rolls. You can join SCLC President Martin Luther King III and investigative reporter Greg Palast in opposing the "Florida-tion" of the 2004 Presidential election by signing this petition. A complete copy of the petition will be delivered by Working Assets to Attorney General John Ashcroft.
This has only been up for a few days, but, as of a moment ago, it already had 21,511 signatures. I would love to be able to harness some of this energy to back the Holt bill, or efforts in individual states. I have not been able to contact the people behind in this petition, though. If anyone can help, please let me know.
Fraud vs. Potential Fraud
If you find yourself debating about voting machines, do not be put in the position of needing to prove that fraud is actually occurring. You don't need to. I've been working on this issue intensively for five months now, and I have yet to see any convincing proof (or disproof) of fraud having occurred with touch-screen machines. I may have missed something, because I haven't researched every suggestion exhaustively; I would rather spend my time fixing the problem in the future than investigating possible problems of the past. Here is what bothers me:
- With the existing touch-screen systems, no one can provide solid evidence that fraud is not occurring, since that evidence would need to include a voter-verifiable audit trail.
- I'm confident that there are several people, such as programmers at election equipment companies, who could easily steal elections running on touch-screen machines, with a good chance of avoiding detection. I'm not suggesting that they would do so, but I strongly feel it is wrong to force voters to trust people they don't know with something so important.
Democracy depends on trustworthy elections. Losing candidates and their supporters know that they lost fair and square, otherwise they stop accepting the results of elections. The main issue in this battle is whether we know our elections are honest. Since we can't know this with touch-screen machines, we have a major problem regardless of whether any errors or fraud actually occur.
Partisanship
Winning this battle is going to be vastly easier if people of different political persuasions can work together. We don't have to agree on the Iraq war or abortion to get trustworthy elections. In my communications with people on the issue, I haven't noticed any real partisan divide. I'm hearing more from people on the liberal/progressive/left end of the spectrum (which is also where I'm getting opposition). There seem to be some strong conservative supporters, and (at this point) no apparent opposition. And, of course, many people aren't easily categorized, and I don't know the political leanings of many of the people I communicate with. I also have not seen any sign of a constituency for election theft (although I certainly hear a lot of theories!). This is really not an ideological issue: if you believe that elections should be honest and accurate, the only remaining question is how great the risk of touch-screen machines, and whether their other potential advantages outweigh those risks. It seems to me that few people opposed to the idea of a voter verifiable audit trail. The biggest problem is that much of the rest of the population is uninformed or apathetic. At this point, the opposition I see has several sources:
- Certain advocacy groups. This phenomenon continues to baffle me. Few of this groups return my calls or debate the issues directly. People forward me various emails which insinuate that I must have some hidden agenda (my agenda is right out in the open), or dismiss the issue with lame arguments. There seems to have been no significant effort to understand the issue by these groups.
- Vendors, to varying degrees. The most obvious motive is that a voter-verifiable audit trail requirement might disrupt planned sales or change the competitive landscape. I see signs that they are coming around, though. ES&S is actively promoting their voter-verifiable printer, and Sequoia and Diebold have both signed contracts promising to provide voter-verifiable printers (or provide them if requested).
- People who have publicly committed to touch-screen machines, such as election officials who have bought them or plan to buy them. These folks were convinced that the machines were desireable a long time ago, and sometimes have a long history of promoting them, so this phenomenon is understandable (and unfortunate).
- At the national level, people who fought over the Help America Vote Act, hammered out a compromise, and just don't want to revisit the issue.
So, please do not assume that you can predict people's views on this issue from their affiliations. Lets take advantage of the lack partisanship to win!
Accessibility with optical scan ballots?
I received email announcing an add-on to optical scan systems to make them usable by people with disabilities, non-speakers of English, and so on. It seems to be something like a touch-screen machine that writes on the optical ballot. Until now, the only way to provide private unassisted voting for voters with some kinds of disabilities, such as blindness, was to use a DRE. The advantages of marking an optical scan ballot are (1) it provides a voter verifiable audit trail for everyone, and (2) it integrates more nicely with the optical scan systems that other voters use. The product is apparently not yet available. I don't endorse it (or any other products), and I haven't heard what voters with disabilities actually think of it.
Election Administration Commission
The Election Administration Commission was created by the Help America Vote Act. This press released describes some Democratic nominees. I don't know whether the Republican nominees are known yet. Obviously, these individuals could have a lot to say about the voter verifiable audit trail requirement. Excerpts from a press release, May 28, 2003:
Daschle, Pelosi Announce Nominations to Election Assistance Commission
Washington, D.C. -- Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi today announced the nominations of Ray Martinez and Gracia Hillman to the Election Assistance Commission. C reated by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the Election Assistance Commission is charged with compili ng information on and reviewing the procedures of federal elections. ... Martinez is currently a lawyer in Austin, Texas. He served as Deputy Assistant to the President for In tergovernmental Affairs during the Clinton Administration. He has also served as Regional Director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Dallas and as co-chair of the Administration's Interagency Task Force on the economic development of the Southwest border. He also runs the Every Texan Foundation, a non-partisan voter registration and education effort dedicated to increasing voter partici pation in Texas. ... Hillman has served as the Executive Director of the League of Women Voters, as the Executive Director of the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation, as a Senior Advisor for a Presidential campaign, and as the Senior Coordinator for International Women's Issues at the State Department. Hillman is currently the President and CEO of The Hillman Group, which provides professional consultant services to nonprofit and corporate clients. The Election Assistance Commission serves as the national clearinghouse for information on state and local experiences with conducting federal elections and implementing the new law, ensures that voting systems function properly and that poll workers have access to appropriate training, and promotes the effective administration of federal elections. Under the terms of the Act, the commision's four members are appointed by the President. The Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the House and Senate Minority Leaders are each required to submit one candidate recommendation to the President.
California task force
The California Ad Hoc Task Force report that I keep mentioning, and that you're tired of hearing about, went to Secretary of State Shelley's office early last week, but has not yet been released. Apparently, it is being tweaked. I have seen some misleading claims about the contents of this report, by people who might otherwise be considered reliable, who are not supposed to have seen it. Don't believe anything until it has definitely been released by the Secretary of State's office. Given what I've seen already, people will then start spinning it in various directions. If that happens, you can count on hearing my side of the story.
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