HB 4653, THE "TX HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOT BILL OF 2009," WILL HAVE A PUBLIC HEARING AT THE STATE CAPITOL, MONDAY, APRIL 27

YOUR HELP IS NEEDED!
Monday, April 27, is a big day for all Texans who seek a return to hand-counted paper ballot elections! WE NEED A HUGE TURNOUT of SUPPORT FOR THIS BILL to show the House Elections Committee that We, the People of Texas, want OUR elections back!

HB 4653, the "TX Hand-Counted Paper Ballot Bill of 2009", was filed this session by Representative Donna Howard. Read the text of the bill.

The fundamental components of the bill (1) eliminate electronic voting machines (except ballot-marking devices that assist the disabled to vote privately and independently); (2) call for reduction in the maximum size of precincts to no more than 2000 voters - down from 5,000; (3) call for citizen teams of four (instead of three) to count ballots at the precinct level; (4) add the additional security component of video cameras on the ballot box at all times during the election, including taping of the entire counting process and (5) require that the final vote totals are posted at the precinct level immediately after the counting is completed and must remain posted and unharmed for 24 hours so that the citizens of each precinct are the first to know the results.

If you can make it, please arrive around 1:45 pm to fill out the short form to indicate your support of HB 4653. You can check on the form if you wish to present oral testimony to the Elections Committee. Please consider telling the committee members what's on your mind!

If you're not sure what to say, you can put together some comments that might include some of the following points:

• Electronic voting has been proven by numerous studies and intentional hacks to be capable of undetectable tampering and fraud.
• Electronic voting is a non-transparent voting system that does not allow the voter to ever know if their vote is being properly counted.
• No type of electronic voting system - not paperless touchscreens, not optical scanners, or even machines with printers for a Voter Verified Paper Trail - are secure against undetectable tampering.
• Electronic voting equates to secret vote counting - the modern version of the locked back rooms of yesterday.
• Corporations, not citizens, are running our elections with their secret, proprietary software protected by trade secret laws.
• With electronic voting machines, citizens are being omitted from the process of counting our votes
• Hand-counted paper ballot elections are subject to the least amount of fraud.
• Hand-counted paper ballot elections were found to have the lowest error rate on the count by a 2001 Cal-Tech/ MIT study.
• Hand-counted paper ballot elections restore the democratic process to the citizens.
• Hand-counted paper ballot elections cost less to the taxpayers and keep their money in their local economies by hiring local printers and paying citizens instead of the big voting system vendors.
• The voting process should be understood by ALL the voters and not just computer and auditing experts.

PLEASE e-mail us if you think you can make it and/or you have any questions!

Karen Renick
Director, VoteRescue
(512) 496-7408

Vickie Karp
PR Director, VoteRescue
( 512) 775-3737

BRIEF BACKGROUND
The myriad of critical security issues with electronic voting began to reach the public in 2003 when Bev Harris of election watchdog group Black Box Voting discovered the secret election software of the second largest vendor of electronic voting systems in the country, Diebold, when they accidentally left it on their website.

After analyzing it, Harris and some computer experts pronounced the election software "a handbook on how to tamper with elections", and added that it was so simple to hack an election with these instructions, "any hacker with a laptop" could do it. She then set up a mock election on her own laptop, and using the instructions in Diebold's software, she was able to hack in through a hidden backdoor, "flip" election results, and exit without a trace, all in under three minutes.

Today, this hack can be executed in less than a minute. Bev Harris proved how simple it was when she taught a chimp to hack an election and posted a video of it under video archives, known as "The Baxter Video," which can still be viewed on her website.

Another dramatic hack of real voting equipment in Florida in 2005 by the Black Box Voting hacking team can be seen on the Emmy-award nominated HBO documentary, "Hacking Democracy".

Since then, numerous scholarly studies, as well as many other hacks on real electronic voting equipment by world class computer experts and teams at universities such as Princeton, have been conducted on the Diebold machines, as well as the other top-four vendors' equipment: ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia. (Texas currently allows voting equipment from Diebold, ES&S and Hart.) The results have led to the decertification of paperless voting systems in California, Colorado, Ohio, and Florida. Diebold has even changed the name of their elections division to "Premier" because of all the bad press and lawsuits.