Did you know that the Government Accountability Office issued a report last month CONFIRMING problems with Electronic Voting Machines during last year’s election? We (meaning Mary) don’t think there were problems. We (meaning Mary) think they did exactly what the Republican’s wanted them to do.

The GAO report stated that “Concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”

The bipartisan report, which was requested by several high-ranking members of the U.S. House of Representatives ( including Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) and Ranking Member Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), Judiciary Committee Chair F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI), and Science Committee Chair Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Ranking Member Bart Gordon (D-TN)), culminated a year-long investigation. (Democratic Rep. Gordon stated, “The foundation of democracy rests upon the accuracy, integrity and security of our voting system.” )

Voting System Vulnerabilities Identified by GAO:

· Cast ballots, ballot definition files, memory cards, and audit logs could be modified.

· Supervisor functions were protected with weak or easily guessed passwords, and memory cards that allowed individuals access to voting machines were inadequately protected.

· Systems had easily picked locks and power switches that were exposed and unprotected.

· Voting machine vendors had weak security practices, including the failure to conduct background checks on programmers and system developers, and the failure to establish clear chain of custody procedures for handling software.

Voting System Failures Have Already Occurred During Elections. In addition to identifying potential vulnerabilities, GAO identified a number of cases of operational failures in real elections. These examples included:

· In California, a county presented voters with an incorrect electronic ballot, meaning they could not vote in certain races.

· In Pennsylvania, a county made a ballot error on an electronic voting system that resulted in the county’s undervote percentage reaching 80% in some precincts.

· In North Carolina, electronic voting machines continued to accept votes after their memories were full, causing over 4,000 votes to be lost.

· In Florida, a county reported that touch screens took up to an hour to activate and had to be activated sequentially, resulting in long delays.

In Tennessee, the State Election Commission will decide at their next meeting (November 15) how they will spend the federal dollars given to improve the way Tennesseans vote. In other words, what kinds of machines we will purchase.

What we must do BEFORE November 15
1) Call and/or email the Tennessee State Election Commissioner from your area (Davidson County residents please contact Judge Bobby Sands) or call and leave a message at the Election Commission, (615) 741-7956. The Tennessee Election Commission members are:

Ask them to make the following recommendations:
1. All voting equipment purchased after 9/1/05 must produce a VOTER VERIFIED PAPER BALLOT
2. Phase out existing machines that cannot produce a VOTER VERIFIED PAPER BALLOT by 11/01/06.
3. Implement a process to implement MANDATORY random small scale (5% of votes in each county) manual recounts by 11/01/06.
4. Encourage use of HAVA (Help America Vote Act) funds be spent to purchase Optical Scan Systems instead of Direct Record Electronic Equipment (DRE): paper ballot-based system, less costly, more efficient.
5. To meet HAVA requirements for disabled voters: choose either Automark ballot marking device or the Accupoll e-voting machine.
6. NO WIRELESS ACCESS CAPABILITY on any machine. All voting equipment purchased by Tennessee or sold in Tennessee should come without wireless capabiity. Any machines currently being used that have wireless should have that function disabled before May ‘06.

2) Email your State Senators and House Representatives who are on the State and Local Committee and ask them to encourage the Election Commission to adopt these guidelines.
Senators:
THELMA HARPER ( District 19 -Davidson County) (615) 741-2453, sen.thelma.harper@legislature.state.tn.us
JOE HAYNES D-Nashville District 20 - (Davidson County), (615) 741-6679
sen.joe.haynes@legislature.state.tn.us
House Representatives:
EDITH TAYLOR LANGSTER - Vice-Chair (District 54 - Part of Davidson County), (615) 741-1997, rep.edith.taylor.langster@legislature.state.tn.us
GARY W. MOORE, SR. (District 50 - Part of Davidson county), (615) 741-4317, rep.gary.moore@legislature.state.tn.us
MARY PRUITT (District 58 - Part of Davidson County), (615) 741-3853, rep.mary.pruitt@legislature.state.tn.us
BEN WEST, JR.(District 60 - Part of Davidson County) (615) 741-6959, rep.ben.west@legislature.state.tn.us

3) Attend the next meeting of the state Election Commission to show support for these initiatives:
Tuesday, November 15, 11am
Division of Elections
312 Eighth Avenue North

4) Read more stories here.

5) Eternal Vigilance! ‘Cause Democracy won’t fix itself…

This post was written by Mary Mancini