Feds May Pass Verified Voting: Help Them!

By Sean Flaherty, IVI

Dear Friends,

Now is the time to take action to protect the accuracy of the 2008 elections.  Please act, and pass this on.

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.  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!


BACKGROUND

On Tuesday, May 8, HR 811 was reported out of committee. Here are some of the things HR 811 will do to protect federal elections:

    * Require a durable, voter-verified paper ballot for all voting machines. States that already have a voter-verified paper trail don't have to make any changes by 2008.

    * Require hand audits of federal elections in randomly chosen precincts.

    * Allocate $10 million for Iowa to purchase paper ballot voting systems! The bill allocates $1 billion for new equipment, and each state gets at least 1% of that amount. Last month the Iowa General Assembly passed Senate File 369, which requires counties to gradually replace all direct-recording touch screens with paper ballots and optical scanners, as the touch screens wear out. The total cost of all counties switching to optical scan systems now? At least $9 million. $10 million in federal money would allow Iowa's counties to convert to paper ballots and optical scan by 2008!

    * Ban connection of any election system to the Internet.

    * Eliminate the terrible testing system in which voting machine companies choose and pay the testing laboratories that sign off on the security of their products. The present system has failed to detect a litany of security flaws in voting equipment. For people who follow this issue closely, the testing process has been one of  the most disturbing aspects of the story of American elections in the electronic age.

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.

Best regards,
Sean Flaherty
Co-Chair, Iowans for Voting Integrity
www.IowansForVotingIntegrity.org