What is YOUR state up to on election machine issue????

Lots of posts today on the election machine issue. Kudos to all those who have been working so hard on this for so long, ESPECIALLY Bev!

And lots of talk about contacting state governments. Stanford Prof. David Dill's web site www.verifiedvoting.org has a state section where he hopes to get a summary of the current status for each state. This way activists such as DUers can quickly find out if their state is in any trouble and we can target our energies on those states where the biggest problems are in the making or already exist (e.g. MD, GA, FL, etc.). Common to the situation in each state is the development of a State Plan by each Secretary of State so as to achieve compliance with the federal HAVA.

Below is a call-to-action post where DUers are asked to channel some of their incredible energy into researching their state and passing the info on to Verified Voting.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=106&topic_id=641&mesg_id=641&page=

Leave a post here and/or on the above thread if you think you might be able to help and what state you can help on.

:dem:

the legislation calls for a verifiable paper trail. I believe that is not good enough and we should all be voting on paper ballots. IF someone could shut down all electronic voting it would be fine with me.

from a "voter verified paper trail" to "voting on paper ballots". What you are saying is you want the vote to be tabulated from the actual paper trail, rather than inside the DRE touch-screen machine (paper trail or not). Some states (e.g. MN) are actually planning on doing just this.

But your observation is an important one, and if it was "filled out" with other pertinent PA information and put on Verified Voting's web site, then other DUers would know just how to "kick" PA's Sec'y of State.

The voter verified paper ballots can and should be printed out by an easy to use computerized voting booth front end.

after you have created (and proofread) your paper ballot with the voting booth, you then do what we have done for centuries and put it into the ballot box.

Here is a link to a PDF describing how wonderful and safe electronic voting is:

http://www.secstate.wa.gov/elections/pdf/sec_newsletter-.pdf

It looks like per HAVA, they plan to implement touch-screen voting at least for the disabled. They don't mention what system they'll use or whether it will expand to all citizens by 2006. Oh, and they say the only paper trail possible is to print out what is entered electronically. So the paper trail is no help if fraud occurs.

I sent an email to the Secy of State today with a link to the NY Times article:

elections@secstate.wa.gov:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I understand that the state of Washington will be implementing computer/touch-screen voting to assist the disabled in upcoming elections. I have had concerns about the potential for fraud with these systems, and I hope you have seen today's New York Times, in which security experts tested Diebold's proprietary machines and found serious flaws and a huge potential for fraud:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html
"Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday....."


Thank you in advance for proceeding cautiously with this new technology. Given the reports of voter disenfranchisement in Florida in the 2000 elections, we cannot be too cautious in ensuring that the rights of all citizens to cast a vote (and just a single vote, at that) are not compromised by unscrupulous partisans who place winning by any means possible above all else. The future of our democracy depends on a sound, fool-proof means of casting our votes.

In King County we have the fill in the 0 and then there is a paper trail. Also we buy the code so it's a matter of public record (although we aren't diebold). And I happen to work a precinct that is in a nursing home, and I hope I'm not betraying anyone's trust to say that the disabled and the elderly can vote okay now.

This whole ill-advised idea arose from the specific language of the federal HAVA act. This week I had a very enlightening email conversation with our MN Sec'y of State, Mary Kiffmeyer:

me: From the page http://www.verifiedvoting.org/resolution.asp:
"Deployment of new voting machines that do not provide a voter-verifiable audit trail should be halted, and existing machines should be replaced or modified to produce ballots that can be checked independently by the voter before being submitted, and cannot be altered after submission. These ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic counts."

Kiffmeyer: Do they give information on how blind or severely visually impaired voters will verify their paper ballot?

Me: It would seem to me that a voting machine could also scan the generated paper ballot and convert it to speech for the visually impaired voter. Text to speech (especially machine-generated text) is a mature technology, and with just a little prodding from their customers (such as yourself), I believe you can expect this will soon be provided by many of the election machine manufacturers.

Kiffmeyer: I love the idea of converting the paper back to speech. Of course most all of them provide audio feedback when done with the original voting. However, the idea of converting the paper ballot back to speech concept is new to me and a great idea. We'll see what the vendors can do as we put it on our list for them.

So there you have it. Through a short discussion, we came up with an idea that would solve the voter verification problem for the disabled while keeping intact the paper ballot in MN! I even had a discussion with a small voting machine company (NOT Diebold) that also thought this was a great idea and very doable.

:dem:

since they threw out the punch cards....what a mess.
Maybe Darryl Issa would like to buy CA new voting
machines...with paper trails of course.

:kick: :kick: