Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Say no to audit-trail-less voting

Ronnie Dugger has a fairly lengthy article on electronic voting in The Nation--"How They Could Steal the Election This Time." It's too long to quote extensively. A sidebar to the story notes:
Ronnie Dugger wrote the definitive warning essay about the dangers of computerized vote-counting in The New Yorker of November 7, 1988.
The final page of the article talks about what people can do and are doing to help ensure valid elections. They include:
  • Demand a verifiable paper trail for touchscreen voting--see the Annotated Best Practices [PDF] with standards for touchscreen voting (from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government).
  • Various public interest groups support the report calling for new security measures for electronic voting [PDF] (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Brennan Center for Justice)
  • Stay current on election developments at these websites:
  • People should go down to their local election departments and ask their supervisor of elections how they are going to know that their votes are counted--and refuse to take "Trust us," or "Trust the machines," for an answer.
  • Support passage of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003: H.R. 2239 [which has been sitting in the House Committee on House Administration since May 2003] and S. 1980 [Read twice and referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration in December 2003]
  • Be a poll watcher--see the People for the American Way's Election Protection 2004 project

Note: Oklahoma has optical scan voting equipment--when you have finished marking your ballot, you place it in a slot in the counting machine/ballot box. If you made a mistake, (for example, by 'double-voting') the machine is supposed to spit your ballot back out so you have a chance fix your mistake. I don't know why more states don't have similar voting equipment...

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

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