[VoteRescue] [Fwd: Thanks for the support at Tuesday's Meeting!]

[Karen Renick]

/Sorry, folks. I wrote this last night, but it got stuck in the 
moderator's box and am just now finding it!  ~Karen/

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Thanks for the support at Tuesday's Meeting!
Date: 	Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:34:24 -0500
From: 	Karen Renick <karen at voterescue.org>
Reply-To: 	karen at voterescue.org
Organization: 	VoteRescue.org
To: 	Vote Rescue <voterescue at voterescue.org>



A HUGE thank you goes out to all of the 30+ people who came to the 
Travis County Commissioners Court this morning to show the Judge and the 
Commissioners that there /are/ many Travis County citizens who do NOT 
want their tax dollars used to buy 35 additional Hart Intercivic eSlate 
voting machines just for the November election and do not want to vote 
on voting machines ever again!

To those of you who presented your personal statements to the Court, 
every single one of you were awesome and handled questions from the 
Commissioners and Judge with confidence and steadfast determination. And 
even though the request for $162,000 by the County Clerk, Dana 
DeBeauvoir, was approved today, we took a giant leap forward in our 
fight for hand-counted paper ballots.  Every media story that I've 
managed to see about the session today has included our presence and our 
reason for being there. This is an immeasurable amount of free exposure 
to our fellow Travis County citizens. The online story by the Austin 
American Statesman even titled their article from our perspective.  Here 
is the link to that article:
_
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/cityhall/entries/2008/08/26/residents_urge_county_to_dump.html
_
My comment (below) to the Statesman's article will hopefully give you an 
idea of the performance put on today by our County Clerk, Dana Debeauvoir:
/
None, zero, zippo of the tests that our County Clerk, Dana DeBeauvoir, 
uses could EVER find the two or three lines of malicious vote-changing 
code slipped into the 100,000+ lines of code in a voting machine's 
secret software. Computer scientists at the highest academic levels in 
our country have been saying this for years, and yet their 
research-based warnings are arrogantly scoffed at as simply "opinions" 
by Ms. DeBeauvoir and pitifully, our County Commissioners and State 
Representatives on the House Elections Committee just nod in unison and 
let her get away with it time after time. Ms. DeBeauvoir is playing us 
for fools when she tells us that comparing the number of voter 
signatures in the poll books to the number of voters who used the 
machines will prove that the machines are working properly. All this 
proves is that the machines can figure out how many people pressed the 
"cast vote" button. This comparison is totally meaningless in proving 
that the votes were both recorded and counted correctly. But, hey, when 
efficiency is more important to our government officials than accuracy, 
who cares that the tests are a joke?

/A written transcript of today's meeting will be posted on the 
Commissioners Court website by tomorrow.  Unfortunately, they are having 
problems right now with the video archives on their site, so you won't 
be able to watch the footage just yet. Soon, hopefully.  And, kudos to 
Sue Ann Campbell for coming today to video the entire proceeding.

We are planning to issue a follow-up press release about the meeting and 
will probably post some "Best of" video clips with our comments 
interspersed..

Thanks, again, for all the support  you gave our common cause today!

Karen

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