Tell Kerry to protect your vote against the threat of electronic voting .

[the ether]

Letter to John Kerry, Please ask him to protect your vote against the threat of electronic voting.


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Dear Senator Kerry,


Recently you and Senator Edwards visited Florida and pledged to its voters, that every vote will be counted. I've also read that you have been organizing a legal task force to deal with any voting irregularities. While dealing with voting irregularities and voter disenfranchisement "after the fact" is necessary, I encourage you to take more pro-active measures to make sure that every vote is counted and every voter is allowed to vote.

In Florida and in many other parts of the country, many counties are using paperless electronic voting systems, 'virtual voting' as I like to call it. When these machines have no paper record of the voter's intent, it is only the virtual data that decides the end count. It's hard to imagine a rigorous recount done with only virtual data and I wonder how accurate the vote counts will be using paperless systems.

Some say that paperless voting is reliable, but I find that hard to believe. Recently, it's been reported that a popular kind of E-Voting system in Florida and elsewhere, the iVotronic from ES&S, has a problem with the accuracy of its internal audit procedures.

When the battery is low, the machine scrambles its serial number, making the distinction as to 'which machines had how many votes' impossible. ES&S says that this 'audit bug' does not affect the actual vote count, only if we want to double check and do an audit. This is but one of many serious problems that are being discovered each day with these systems.

Many election officials are telling the people to trust paperless voting, but how can we trust these systems, when it is impossible to prove our votes actually exist.

Senator Kerry, time is running out for any meaningful safeguards to be implemented before November. If you want all of our votes to be counted and counted accurately, one thing you can do is to co-sponsor S1980, which would mandate a paper record for every vote cast on E-Voting machines.

You need to speak out now about the need for better security standards and auditing procedures for electronic voting systems, otherwise the problems of 2004 will make 2000 look like a walk in the park.

If S1980 and HR2239, its House counterpart, do not pass, the results of the election cannot be seriously validated. Without these bills immediately enacted to safeguard our most fundamental democratic right, voter confidence in the US electoral process, will greatly diminish.

I hope you will speak out about this issue to your colleges in the Senate to provide leadership in securing the integrity of our votes.

Sincerely,



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John Kerry for President, Inc.
P.O. Box 34640
Washington, DC 20043
202-712-3000
202-712-3001 (fax)


Washington D.C.
304 Russell Bldg.
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Washington D.C. 20510
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Click here to email Senator Kerry

[papau]

1. BBV - Venezuela e-voting w/paper trail - untested but "solid" system

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/07/13/venezuela.e.voting.a...

Venezuela e-voting furor stirs memory of 2000 glitches

Tuesday, July 13, 2004 Posted: 10:16 AM EDT (1416 GMT)
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Despite an electronic voting fiasco in 2000 and the furor over e-voting in the United States, Venezuela is using untested touchscreen computers for its recall referendum on Hugo Chavez's presidency.<snip>

That didn't deter the Chavez-dominated Venezuelan Elections Council from choosing Smartmatic Corp., a little-known Boca Raton, Florida-based company, to provide similar technology -- albeit with a printed record of each vote -- for the referendum.<snip>

A square piece of paper popped out of the computer, a physical record of his vote. That, Mugica insists, is the system's primary safeguard against fraud: A paper trail that allows for a recount of any contested election.

Voters must deposit the slip into a ballot box before they can retrieve their IDs from polling officials.

The paper trail theoretically spares Smartmatic from a key complaint about touchscreen machines in the United States. Those machines won't have paper records in November, although a growing number of U.S. states will mandate them in future elections.<snip>

"Computers can be made to produce any outcome that you want without anybody really knowing that's what was done," Rubin said.