Action Alert--accurate vote count
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R Alwin
Oct 18, 2012, 2:28:55 PM10/18/12
to Jim Mueller, Grannies, Middleton Action Team
To all who are concerned about elections,
There will be an informational hearing on accurate vote
counting, next Thursday, Oct 25. PLEASE write an email or snail mail to
the members of the WI Senate Committee on Ag, Elections and UW System to demand
accurate vote counting and use of voter-marked paper ballots. Do it now,
testimony must be received before Oct 25, 2012. Also please forward this
to others who may be motivated to express their concern for accurate, verifiable
vote counting in Wisconsin. Below the letter format is some
information on this issue.
or
Senate Committee on Agriculture, Elections and UW
System
Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, Chair
Sen. Jon Erpenbach Vice chair
P.O. Box 7882
Madison, WI 53707
Honorable Senators:
Please accept the following as written testimony for
the information hearing on election practices and procedures scheduled for
October 25, 2012.
Write your testimony. It does not have to be
long. Hopefully you can find a few specific reasons for concern about
accurate counting by electronic voting machines in the information below.
We want a blizzard of written testimony from Wisconsin
citizens.
Sincerely,
Individual name with street address or group
name
From Wisconsin Grassroots network,
election integrity project--
"Voters using touch-screen machines have no way of knowing whether their
votes were accurately recorded. Even if a voter sees a confirmation screen or
paper receipt of his or her vote, the voter has no way of knowing that the
electrical impulses recorded in the computer’s memory match his or her vote. And
when computers count votes—either optically scanned paper ballots or the memory
chips of touch-screen voting machines, voters have no way of observing the
actual counting of votes, and even if they could see the computer program that
counted their votes, could probably not understand it.
Finally, stealing an election no longer needs cooperation among a group of people. One computer programmer—either working for the manufacturer of the election computers or hacking into them—can change election results and can cover up the tracks of the crime in such a way that only computer-security professionals could detect it. Even if no one deliberately steals elections, computer bugs and glitches can disenfranchise voters or ruin elections. Post-election auditing of the performance of voting-casting and vote-counting machines is currently unable to provide proof that our votes were accurately recorded and counted."
From an article at freepress.org after investigation on Ohio elections--
"On December 22, 2011, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) issued
a formal investigative report on Election Systems & Software (ES&S)
DS200 Precinct County optical scanners. The EAC found "three substantial
anomalies":
• Intermittent screen freezes, system lock-ups and shutdowns that prevent the voting system from operating in the manner in which it was designed
• Failure to log all normal and abnormal voting system events
• Skewing of the ballot resulting in a negative effect on system accuracy
The EAC ruled that the ballot scanners made by ES&S electronic voting machine firm failed 10% of the time to read the votes correctly. Ohio is one of 13 states that requires EAC certification before voting machines can be used in elections. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported in 2010 that the voting machines in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County had failed during testing for the 2010 gubernatorial election. Cleveland uses the same Republican-connected ES&S ballot scanners -- the DS200 opti-scan system. Ohio's Mahoning County, home of the Democratic enclave of Youngstown, also uses the DS200s. The same opti-scan system is also used in the key battleground states of Florida, Illionois, Indiana, New York, and Wisconsin."
• Intermittent screen freezes, system lock-ups and shutdowns that prevent the voting system from operating in the manner in which it was designed
• Failure to log all normal and abnormal voting system events
• Skewing of the ballot resulting in a negative effect on system accuracy
The EAC ruled that the ballot scanners made by ES&S electronic voting machine firm failed 10% of the time to read the votes correctly. Ohio is one of 13 states that requires EAC certification before voting machines can be used in elections. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported in 2010 that the voting machines in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County had failed during testing for the 2010 gubernatorial election. Cleveland uses the same Republican-connected ES&S ballot scanners -- the DS200 opti-scan system. Ohio's Mahoning County, home of the Democratic enclave of Youngstown, also uses the DS200s. The same opti-scan system is also used in the key battleground states of Florida, Illionois, Indiana, New York, and Wisconsin."
The November issue of Harpers Magazine has an 8 page
article that covers some history on election machine integrity and many reasons
we should be wary of computerized voting machines.
Here are some websites with information on election
integrity-
Peace & Joy,
Rebecca (Becky) Alwin
reb...@charter.net
(608) 836-5148
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