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Editor's
Note: We recommend voting an absentee
ballot in 2004. These leave a paper trail,
and are also available for a recount,
should a problem occur. No problems with
mis-aligned cards, hackers, etc. A better
chance that your vote will actually count
in this election.
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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.
Here's some background on this issue
The companies that perfected touch-screen
voting technology refuse to share it with anyone,
including election officials. This prevents quality
control, audits or just plain monitoring of the
system to ensure it's working as planned. It also
makes fraud easier to perpetrate by private-sector
technicians and hard, if not impossible, to
investigate. This is particularly troublesome
because some of the corporations that make these
machines, such as Diebold, have links to the
Republican Party.
Taking the simple step of demanding a voter
verified paper trail is both affordable and
practical-and will allow our nation to use
touch-screen voting for the benefits of easy
accommodation of multiple languages, arrangements
for people with disabilities and more. But
currently, computer voting systems are too
vulnerable to tampering and failure to risk using
them in this year's elections.
TrueMajority is waging an organizing campaign
because that's what we do. It's based on great
substantive work by experts in computer technology
and democracy protection. To learn more, check out
www.verifiedvoting.org
 or
www.calvoter.org/votingtechnology.html#resources
.
Thanks for helping to make this campaign
possible,
Ben Cohen
President, True Majority.org
Co-founder, Ben & Jerry's
Source: action.truemajority.org/ctt.asp?u=426368&l=305
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