From A Damaging Paper Chase In Voting by Timothy J. Ryan for the Washington Post comes this piece opposing HR811. Among other things it points out that HR811 would conflict with voting systems that cannot provide a paper trail (like Prime III, an Auburn University project that I am not familiar with and hence do not endorse in any way) or cannot preserve all paper records (like punchscan) I would be interested in hearing the reaction of people involved with punchscan to this piece.
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, punchscan, security, votingmachines
Avi Rubin is a professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University who is famous for bringing to light vulnerabilities in Diebold Election Systems’s Accuvote electronic voting machines.
(read about his book about the experience: Brave new ballot; The battle to safeguard democracy in the age of electronic voting)
Continue reading
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
In a true display of democracy, a town hall meeting held at the New Bedford High School auditorium Monday gave the crowd of approximately 550 residents the opportunity to publicly voice every last one of the inane thoughts and concerns they would normally only have the chance to utter to themselves.
Though the meeting was ostensibly held to discuss a proposed $21,000 project to replace the high school’s grass football field with synthetic turf, City Councilman Thomas Reed inadvertently opened the floodgates to a deluge of ill-informed, off-topic diatribes on inconsequential bull**** when he allowed those in attendance to demonstrate their God-given gift of language.
Posted in humor
From the Ballot Access News:
HR 811, the bill in Congress to require vote-counting machines to produce a paper trail, will not be taken up in the House until September 17 at the earliest. Congressman Rush Holt (D-N.J.) had hoped it would pass the House this week, but it has fierce opposition, both from elections officials who don’t want a paper trail, and from activists who want to eventually eliminate all electronic vote-counting machines. Thus the bill has enemies from both directions.
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
I am nuetral / undecided about HR811. If you have decided one way or another, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has an advocacy page for supporting HR811. You should be able to edit the message to indicate whatever view you have; support/rejection/something more nuanced.
From the the EFF HR811 advocacy page:
Along with requiring machines to produce a voter-verified paper ballot, H.R. 811 mandates random audits and many other critical reforms. For over three years, EFF has been helping Rep. Rush Holt move this legislation forward, and support from individuals like you has been crucial in garnering an astounding 215 cosponsors. Hundreds of activists joined EFF for Washington, D.C. lobby days in 2005 and 2006, and thousands of letters have poured in to Congress.
Now those efforts are paying off, and victory in the House is within reach — take action now and fight for fair, transparent elections.
Quoting the New York Times (care of the Brad blog):
It is unfortunate that the bill does not contain a provision banning the use of touch-screen voting machines. A touch-screen ban would encourage states to use optical scan machines, which rely on paper ballots read by a computer, like a standardized test form. Optical scans are less expensive and less vulnerable to vote theft.
There is still time before the bill becomes law to add a ban on touch-screen voting. If the House fails to do so, the Senate should, and it should fight for it to be in the final bill.
There has been a spirited debate about how quickly to require reforms to be implemented. There have been calls for putting a solution off until 2012. That is too long to wait.
Posted in HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
A good summary from Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog:
H.R. 811, the e-voting bill originally introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, is reportedly up for a vote of the full House of Representatives tomorrow.
…
H.R. 811 gets the big issues right, requiring a voter-verified paper ballot with post-election audits to verify that the electronic records are consistent with the paper ballots.The bill is cautious where caution is warranted. For example, it gives states and counties the flexibility to choose optical-scan or touch-screen systems (or others), as long as there is a suitable voter-verified paper record. Though some e-voting activists want to ban touch-screens altogether, I think that would be a mistake. Touch screens, if done correctly — which no vendor has managed yet, I’ll admit — do offer some advantages.
Posted in EFF, electronic_frontier_foundation, HR811, legislation, news, votingmachines
All About Voting 