VOTERESCUE ISSUES REPORT ABOUT TRAVIS COUNTY 2009 ELECTION STUDY GROUP
April 4, 2010
On April 2, 2010, VoteRescue submitted its "Report of ALTERNATE Findings and Recommendations of the Travis County 2009 Election Study Group" to the Travis County Clerk and the Travis County Elections Division for inclusion into the full study group report that will be formerly presented to the Travis County Commissioners Court in an upcoming public meeting yet to be announced.
The 22-page report written by VoteRescue was strongly supported and endorsed by three other Election Study Group members: the Gray Panthers, the Travis County Green Party and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), District 12.
Click here to read the VoteRescue report.
The "Report of ALTERNATE Findings and Recommendations" is important because it presents an eye-opening critique of the study group's format and process that was tightly controlled by the Travis County Clerk and her Election Division staff and reveals their unmitigated bias for electronic voting despite the mission of the group to evaluate concerns such as security, accuracy of the count, transparency, ease of use and cost in regards to (1) paperless DREs (Direct Electronic Recording voting machines - the current type of system used in Travis County), (2) electronic ballot scanners and (3) hand-counted paper ballots.
The report explains how the 2009 Election Study Group was run instead as a series of classroom lectures about the "nuts and bolts" of the different voting systems and the administration of elections with little opportunity for the group to perform a real risk analysis of the negative aspects of each system. For example, none of the more recent in-depth studies of electronic voting, such as the CA Secretary of State's 2007 "Top To Bottom Review" or the OH Secretary of State's 2007 EVEREST study, were even mentioned by the County Clerk to the group participants.
VoteRescue and their fellow study group members representing the Gray Panthers of Austin, the Travis County Green Party and LULAC District 12 strongly recommend that Travis County immediately moves from the DRE voting system (the eSlate by Hart Intercivic) currently in use to hand-counted paper ballots, "the only time-tested solution still used by nearly all the democratic nations in the world that provides voters with 'an accurate, fair, secure, transparent [i.e., viewable and understandable to the public] and accessible voting system'".
The report continues, "To ensure an uninterrupted, publicly observable chain of custody, the paper ballots must be cast and kept secured in a publicly viewable ballot box until they are publicly hand counted at the precinct level immediately after the close of the polls on Election Day with the results publicly posted at the precinct before any election-related information or documents are conveyed in any manner to any other location.
From this “bottom rung” public display of the results at the precinct level, on up to the final tabulation of county, state or nationwide totals, it is just a matter of using simple addition...by anyone, citizens and election officials alike. This system of building up from a publicly-confirmed base of precinct totals is the great equalizer of access to election results that are known, not trusted, to be correct."
"If our votes are counted out of sight [as they are by the machines], how can we know that the persons (or measures) that are declared the winners have received the true consent of the governed? Instead, we are now made to simply “trust” those who tell us that the reported results are correct.
But elections should not be about TRUST or a perception that everything is fine. For the same reasons the structure of our government was established with important checks and balances, elections must be built on implicit DISTRUST. As Benjamin Franklin once said: “Distrust and caution are the parents of security.”
Click here to read the VoteRescue report.