CA State Sen Debra will be on KLSD Radio, San Diego Sunday. Listen Live.

Senator Debra Bowen will be on KLSD Radio in San Diego on Sunday, January 15, at 10:35 a.m. to talk about electronic voting issues.

She’ll be on with the KLSD Watchdog, Craig Elsten.

If you’d like to listen on-line, you can do so by going to http://www.klsd1360.com/streaming.html

Governor Signs A Pair Of Bowen Election Reform Measures And Vetoes Two Others

2005/10/11

SACRAMENTO – “People need and deserve to know their votes have been counted accurately, and the best way to ensure that happens is to use the paper printout that the voter has already verified as being accurate and check it against the results tallied by the electronic machine.”

That’s how Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee responded to the Governor’s decision to sign SB 370 into law tonight.

“I don’t see how the Secretary of State, who led the opposition to the bill, could say with straight face that he’s for fair elections, he’s for having a paper trail on electronic voting machines, yet he’s against using that paper trail to ensure the accuracy of the vote count,” said Bowen.

California law requires all electronic voting machines to be equipped with an accessible voter-verified paper audit trail (AVVPAT) as of January 1, 2006. Under a separate 40-year-old California law, elections officials are required to conduct a public manual tally of the ballots cast in at least 1% of the precincts chosen at random to check the accuracy of votes tabulated by an electronic or mechanical voting system. SB 370 requires elections officials to use the AVVPAT to comply with California’s 1% manual law and to use the AVVPAT it in the event of a recount.

The California Association of Clerks & Elections Officials opposed SB 370 even though it noted that the “. . . the possibility exists that the internal audit trail . . . could be programmed to print different results.”

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