No More Paperless Presidential Elections!
by Sean Flaherty, Iowans for Voting Integrity
Now is the time to take action to protect the accuracy of the 2008 elections. Please act, and spread the word.
HR 811, a federal bill requiring voter-verified paper records combined with random hand count audits in 2008, will soon get a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Passage of the bill is not guaranteed. Election officials who are weary of making changes before 2008 are lobbying against the bill. We respect the pressures that election officials work under, but a drumbeat of security reports by computer scientists show that paperless voting in another Presidential election is risky and foolish. As Stanford University computer scientist David Dill wrote of HR 811, “it’s time to outlaw paperless electronic voting in the U.S.”
States have proven that changes in voting equipment can be made in a year or less. Florida is converting to paper ballots statewide in time for the 2008 primaries [correction: most counties will not convert until the November 2008 election, the same deadline for paperless counties in the Holt bill]. New Mexico, Connecticut and North Carolina implemented major equipment changes in a matter of months. Iowa is planning to implement a paper trail by 2008, but we depend on the nation at large, and too many states will not have a paper trail by 2008, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia among them. Most important, the concerns of election officials have been heard, and the 2008 deadline will apply only to areas that have no voter-verified paper trail at all.
Contact your Congressman and call on him to support HR 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. Tell him we are a can-do nation and able to end paperless, unverifiable voting in over a year!
Call the House switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to your Representative’s office. Or click any of the Representative’s names below for other contact information.
Congressmen Bruce Braley, Leonard Boswell, and Dave Loebsack are cosponsors. Thank them for their support and tell them to keep the pressure on.
Even though they are cosponsors, they need to hear from you!
If you live in Tom Latham’s or Steve King’s districts, tell them to join Republicans Frank Wolf of Virginia, Darrell Issa of California, and Greg Walden of Oregon and get on board!
Thank you for your help. There will be more work after the bill passes the House, but this fight is as important as it gets.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:57 am
HR 811, a federal bill requiring voter-verified paper records combined with random hand count audits in 2008, is coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives. Can we count on your support for this bill?
Many reports by recognized computer experts and the negative experiences in elections since the adoption of electronic voting in the last ten years make passage of this bill imperative for clean and fair elections in the future. Will you please join your colleagues in the Iowa Congressional delegation and Republicans like Frank Wolf of Virginia, Darrell Issa of California, and Greg Walden of Oregon and vote for this bill.
Thank you for your consideration.
Frankly, I don’t expect him to. I expect to receive a long, dense, semi-literate treatise on voter fraud and the need to keep too many of the wrong people from voting. But we try. Support Spencer in 08.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:31 am
You can’t have fair elections if you don’t have fair and open debates! What good is counting the votes of an uninformed or misinformed electorate?
May 29th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Counting the votes of the misinformed (or those we think have been misinformed) along with the votes of the most thoughtful is what makes a democracy a democracy.
One thing at a time, I say. I’ll grant this, though: an electorate more informed about the process would never have allowed the country’s system of counting votes to get into the shape it is in now.