[Voterescue] Beware MoveOn.org Message about New Holt Bill
Karen Renick
karen at voterescue.org
Wed Jan 9 22:56:09 CST 2008
*BEWARE the recent MoveOn.org message about signing a petition in
support of the new Holt Bill!! What follows is my reply to MoveOn.org
about their deceptive and misleading message (which is also included
below). Please pass this on to your friends to caution them as well.
Thank you! ~Karen*
Dear Noah, Jennifer, Laura, Carrie, and the MoveOn.org Political Action
Team,
Well, I'm certainly happy to see that MoveOn.org is /finally/ endorsing
paper ballots - not paper trails or paper records - in the plea sent out
yesterday, Jan. 8, 2008, to your members urging them to sign an
emergency petition in support of the newest reincarnation of the Holt
Bill /"...to stop the threat from electronic voting machines right
away."/. *
*
*BUT, wait! You forgot to mention that (1) **the paper ballots in the
bill will STILL BE COUNTED IN SECRET by // optical scanners that just so
happen to be /electronic voting machines, /too,/ /and (2) that the bill
does not even prohibit the use of the /other/ type of electronic voting
machines, the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic), which display an
electronic ballot on a screen and are paperless.
*
*How deceptive and misleading your message is!
*
In case you just simply aren't aware, ballot scanners are as vulnerable
to fraudulent manipulation as the DRE screen-type voting machines which
was clearly demonstrated in the 2006 HBO Emmy-nominated documentary film
"Hacking Democracy" (www.hackingdemocracy.com). Watch it and you'll see
exactly how easy it was (and is) to manipulate the "official" vote count
using a paper ballot optical scanner and do it right before the eyes of
a very scrupulous election director.
And, if you still believe that "audits" - which are in essence only spot
checks and are quite easy to rig - will serve as the magic bullet to
always catch the miscounting and/or stealing of votes by scanners (or
DREs, for that matter) and will prevent the wrong candidate from taking
office, I suggest you check with a few folks like Christine Jennings or
Francine Busby or Clint Curtis, for starters. All three lost their bid
for a Congressional seat in 2006 based on Election Night "official
totals", but have yet been granted the opportunity to contest the highly
questionable results in their races because their opponents were whisked
off to Washington, D.C. before the elections were even certified and
sworn into the House where they were instantly protected from any
outside protests of their "victories". *The message to candidates and
voters?** * *Audits and recounts, be damned!*
I thought I'd share with you the alert sent out yesterday, January 8,
2008, from Bev Harris of Black Box Voting about the Diebold/Premier
ballot scanner (exactly the same as the one hacked in the HBO
documentary) which was used to count 81% of all the votes cast in the
New Hampshire Primaries held yesterday as well. The content in her
e-mail alert entitled, /"The Cat That Controls New Hampshire Election
Programming"/, can be read on Bev's website at
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/71200.html
<cid:part1.05040308.08080902 at voterescue.org> . Today, as many had
predicted because of the use of scanners, there are calls for a full
recount in New Hampshire due to serious discrepancies and admitted
"mistakes" in reporting and recording the election results.
The name of the game we all - including MoveOn.org - must demand NOW is
*"Get it Right on Election Night"* which means we tell our local
election officials, i.e., our public servants, we want our elections
held using *only paper ballots that are HAND COUNTED at each precinct in
public view with results publicly posted at each precinct immediately
after the counting*. Now, what's so hard about that?
Karen Renick
Director, VoteRescue.org
State Coordinator, Texans for REAL Elections
Austin, TX
karen.renick at grandecom.net
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Did you see The New York Times Magazine?
Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:03:12 -0800
From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org Political Action
<moveon-help at list.moveon.org>
To: Karen Renick <karen at voterescue.org>
Click here to add your name:
"We must act quickly to secure our elections with paper ballots and
audits before November."
<http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=1>
Sign the Petition
<http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=2>
Dear MoveOn member,
This Sunday's cover story in The New York Times Magazine makes plain the
threat: The winner of the 2008 presidential election could be decided by
flawed, insecure, and hackable electronic voting machines.^1
This is the most prominent news coverage this issue has ever gotten, so
it could be our one last chance to get this right before the election in
November.
Congress is poised to consider a new emergency paper ballots bill next
week---but we'll have to convince them to act right away.^2
Can you sign this urgent petition asking local, state, and federal
officials to require paper ballots for our votes? Clicking here will add
your name:
http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=3
<http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=3>
The petition says: "We must act quickly to secure our elections with
paper ballots and audits before November."
Elections are run at the state level, so we'll deliver your signature
and comments to local election officials in addition to members of
Congress.
Electronic voting machines are so unreliable and insecure, we might
elect the wrong person president in 2008. As The New York Times Magazine
reports:
[Voting machines] fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways;
voters report that their choices "flip" from one candidate to another
before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes
simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen
machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006---even
though he's pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the
November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen
machines recorded an 18,000-person "undervote" for a race decided by
fewer than 400 votes.^3
You can read more from this scary report at the end of this email---and
forward it along to your friends and family. It's really compelling.
Congress hasn't been able to solve this problem yet, but there's one
more chance next week. Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey is expected to
introduce an emergency bill to offer funding to states who switch from
unreliable electronic voting machines to paper ballots and audits.^4
We'll ultimately need a mandate for these things, but this bill would be
a crucial first step to prevent some of the most dire threats to the
2008 election.
But to pass the bill in time, we'll need to light a fire under Congress.
At the same time, we'll have to urge local election officials to read
The New York Times Magazine story---and replace electronic voting
machines with paper ballots and audits before November.
Sign this emergency petition to stop the threat from electronic voting
machines right away. Click here to add your name:
http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=4
<http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=4>
Thank you for all you do.
--Noah, Jennifer, Laura, Carrie, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
P.S. Here's more from this week's disturbing New York Times Magazine
story. Please forward this along to all your friends and family.
Can You Count on Voting Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON, The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 2008
*J*ane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with
voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for
22 hours straight. "I guess we've seen how technology can affect an
election," she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were
causing trouble again.
For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board
of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had
trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended
local elections, tapping their choices onto the county's 5,729
touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected
electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the
main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room
fed them into the "GEMS server," a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer
that tallies the votes.
Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting
votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer,
debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from
Diebold---the company that makes the voting machines used in
Cuyahoga---peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one
could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a
misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It
started working---until an hour later, when it crashed a second time.
Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn't
been solved.
Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day,
10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when
Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote---generated by the
Diebold machines as they worked---she discovered that so many printers
had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted
races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren't lost,
technically speaking; Platten could hit "print" and a machine would
generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these
replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only
hope the machines had worked correctly.
Click here to keep reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html
Then sign our urgent petition for paper ballots before the November
election. Just click here to add your name:
http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=5
<http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=5>
Sources:
1. "Can You Count on Voting Machines?," The New York Times Magazine,
January 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/
2. "Rep. Holt To Offer New Election Reform Proposal," National Journal
Tech Daily, December 10, 2007
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3310&id=&id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=6
<http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3310&id=&id=11873-8600441-JAKnnR&t=6>
3. "Can You Count on Voting Machines?," The New York Times Magazine,
January 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/
4. "Rep. Rush Holt to Push for Paper Ballots and Vote Count Audits for
2008," AlterNet, December 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/democracy/71608/
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