It's been one month since the Wisconsin Wave and our coalition partners at Hand Count Votes Now launched a
Citizen Audit to verify the integrity of the June 5th recall election.
In that short amount of time the overwhelming response to this historic campaign has allowed us to make a tremendous amount of progress. Some of our accomplishments so far include:
Recruiting and training over 750 volunteers from all over Wisconsin and beyond
Hand counting ballots in more than 10 high-priority counties
Educating people across the state and the country about the importance of hand counting ballots
Click here to support this work right now!
Unfortunately what we've found so far is not encouraging.
In many parts of the state there are serious election integrity issues including lax ballot bag security, widespread use of unverifiable touch screen voting machines, and most disturbingly, wards where the hand counts differ significantly from election night machine reported totals!
It is still too early to know the overall impact these discrepancies had on the recall election. What the preliminary results do affirm is the extent to which the machines that count our ballots are prone to systemic error and abuse. Further, these results powerfully support the idea that only paper ballots counted by hand on election night can guarantee a free and fair election.
Right now we are on target to count ballots in an additional 10 counties over the next two weeks. With your volunteer and by financial support, counting in 20 or even 30 additional counties will be possible!
However while many County Clerks' offices are being extremely cooperative, some are still putting up onerous financial and logistical barriers.
Some, like Waukesha County's Kathy Nickolaus, have actually outright denied our open records request for access to ballots!
To fight these barriers and to gain access to areas like Waukesha County we need the resources to continue to expand our operation. The more data we are able to collect through the Citizen Audit, the more hard evidence we'll have in the fight for real changes to the way our ballots are cast, stored, and counted. With the 2012 general election just around the corner, the stakes couldn't be higher.
=> To volunteer as a ballot counter at locations throughout the state click
here:
=> To contribute to this important effort to safeguard our democracy click
here:
Be sure to forward this email to as many friends, family members, and political contacts as you can!
In Solidarity,
The Wisconsin Wave
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