[VoteRescue] Residents urge county to dump voting machines

[Jenny Clark]

Thanks to all the folks who showed up to support this action!

ok, now ya'll write your letters to the editor, 150 words allowed, 
send to <letters at statesman.com>

Full transcript of meeting available here:

Item #35

http://www.co.travis.tx.us/commissioners_court/agendas/2008/08/text/vs080826_35.asp


http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/cityhall/entries/2008/08/26/residents_urge_county_to_dump.html

Residents urge county to dump voting machines
By Marty Toohey | Tuesday, August 26, 2008, 01:04 PM
About two-dozen residents, mostly members of the paper-ballot 
advocacy group Vote Rescue, brought buttons that read "Prevent 
Unwanted Presidencies" to the Travis County commissioners today and 
urged the county to stop using electronic voting machines.
"I believe these machines are manipulatable and unreliable," Austin 
resident Elizabeth Baar told the commissioners.
The subject came up because the commissioners were considering 
whether to spend $102,000 to buy another 35 voting machines from Hart 
Intercivic. County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir asked for the extra voting 
machines to supplement the approximately 2,100 now owned by the 
county, in anticipation of a large turnout in November. The 
commissioners decided to buy the machines.
Before they did, audience members spent more than an hour airing 
concerns, primarily about the fact that the machines' software is 
proprietary, meaning only the company can track the electronic path 
that each ballot takes between the time a voter hits the submit 
button and when it arrives in the hands of voting officials.
Residents complained that amounted to not being able to establish an 
audit trail should problems arise, and could prevent people from even 
knowing if problems occur.
"I don't know why it's any more complicated than that," Mitchell Stein said.
DeBeauvoir said the county does checks to verify the machines are 
working properly, such as checking if the number of ballots cast at a 
polling place matches the number of signatures provided when voters 
sign in at the polls. DeBeauvoir also said the county performs more 
detailed spot checks at randomly determined polling locations.
She contended that election fraud is also less likely when public 
officials don't have the ability to access ballot information as it's 
being processed by the voting machines.
If the county went back to paper ballots, DeBeauvoir said, it would 
probably take about 18 days to count the approximately 440,000 
ballots the county expects to be cast in the November election. That 
timeline was based on DeBeauvoir's estimate that the county could 
expect to get maybe 800 volunteers to count ballots. Vote Rescue 
members said they could easily find far more than 800 volunteers and 
significantly reduce the ballot-counting time.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://voterescue.org/pipermail/voterescue_voterescue.org/attachments/20080827/d05e465e/attachment.html