House Bill 2894 Introduced

VoteRescue Austin, Texas, is proud to announce the submission yesterday of HB 3894 by Texas Rep. Lon Burnam of Tarrant County, which calls for hand-counted paper ballots and the elimination of electronic voting systems for our elections in Texas. The exception would be ballot marking machines such as Automark. Our founder, Karen Renick, had a major hand in crafting this bill.

Vote-PADS or Equalivote systems, both non-electronic voting systems, will be recommended for use with the disabled community to fulfill the Help American Vote Act mandate. This victory follows many weeks of preparation, lobbying with the state House Committee on Elections and their legislative aides and a multi-pronged presentation to this Committee on February 21 to argue against any bill that would add printers to electronic voting machines (one of which was presented that day; at least two more are in the wings) and for hand-counted paper ballots.

VoteRescue presenters of that perspective at the Capitol that day, February 21, included Karen Renick, Abbe Waldman DeLozier, Vickie Karp, Joni Ashbrook, Kathleen Wynne, Paul Alotto, Babs Warren; from Tarrant County were Doreen Geiger and Jerry Lobdill. Laura Killins was unable to attend due to illness, but did a lot of the preparation with Joni for cost analyses between electronic voting systems and hand-counted paper ballot elections.

This presentation led to a meeting with Rep. Burnam in which he expressed alignment with our HCPB position and a willingness to help us move forward in this direction. We believe this victory is a FIRST in the nation since the "takeover" of our elections by electronic voting system beginning around 2000 - 2002.

Thank you to all VoteRescuers and supporters for your help! We will soon be announcing a date, time and place for a celebration! Press release to follow which will include major points of the bill. Please send congratulations to Karen, without whom this, I assure you, would never have happened!  

Vickie