Liberadio(!) - Nashville Talk Radio with Mary Mancini and Freddie O'Connell

Tell Them You Want to Vote on Paper in Tennessee in November

Tennessee is one of 6 states at “High” risk for voting machine mishaps come November. Can we change that? Yes, we can!

We’re close to achieving verifiable elections in Tennessee! We finally have the money, and we have time to switch to paper ballots for this year’s general election. All the pieces are in place. What we need now is to get the paper ballot bill - Voter Confidence Act - out of committee and onto the floor of the legislature to be voted into law. Currently, the bill is in the House Budget Subcommittee. Time is short, but we can do it. Your emails have and will make the difference. Please write today; our Legislators will HEAR you. Thank you so much.

What you can do right now:
Please email or call the House Budget Subcommittee members and ask them to act now, and pass the bill, so it will go to the full Finance Committee. If any of the committee members are your Representative, please let them know and include your zip code in the subject line and your address in the body. The bill, HB 1256, will be heard in committee starting 11:00 am, tomorrow, Wednesday, April 30:

Requires any voting system purchased after the effective date of this act to provide the ballot of record be a paper ballot marked by the voter with appropriate accommodation for persons with disabilities; requires such ballot to be available to voter to verify the vote; requires that secrecy of the voter’s choice be maintained. - Amends TCA Title 2.

House Budget Subcommittee members:

Get on the phone. Send an email.

This post was written by Mary Mancini

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Voting, Voting Irregularities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Responses to “Tell Them You Want to Vote on Paper in Tennessee in November”

Terri Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 3:16 am
Hi mary and Freddie,

Thank you for covering this VITAL issue. America stopped being a democracy in any meaningful since in 2000, and the pattern has continued ever since. What most Americans do not realize is that we have turned the process of vote tabulation over to private Republican corporations with strong anti-democratic ideologues running them. The money that went to start up these companies came from Christian nationalists, theocrats, not believers in the American way of life. ES&S and Diebold have an 80% share of the vote tabulation market, and taxpayers have paid the bill to bring these hooligan crooks into our states to count our votes for us (although they steal them instead). This is the height of insanity!!! Here is my doc about the topic, looking at Ohio in 2004:
Terri Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 3:16 am
Terri Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 3:17 am
OK, so I can’t embed it, so here is a LINK to my documentary on the topic:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4204340160730151734

Thanks for watching!
Terri
Alex Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 6:20 am
What if we just get a receipt after we vote? Would that satisfy a paper trail?
Mary Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Thanks for the link Terri!
Mary Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Hi Alex,

A receipt after voting that is verifiable by the voter would be OK but it, instead of the tabulation spit out by the machine, would have to be used as the ballot of record. I am more comfortable starting out with a ballot that I mark rather than starting out with the machine and having it spit out a receipt for me. Others feel differently. I am most comfortable with a piece of paper and a pencil and no machine at all.

Mary
Trust But Verify : Post Politics: Political News and Views in Tennessee Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 7:15 am
[…] SEE ALSO: TennViews Liberadio […]
James Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 8:10 am
This bring back the whole idea of use credit cards vs checks. While touching a piece of paper is nice I remember the hanging chad circus in Florida. You use ATM’s, check cards daily, email, etc. you just have to trust and fight for appropriate safe guards and oversight. Electronic is safer, secure and quicker and we don’t have the repeat of Florida or Ohio again.
Mary Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
James,

Electronic, at this point, is not safer or secure. Until we get rid of the privatization of the machines, closed software development and updating, and easy access to the machines themselves, they will not be.

Trust is not an option. Fighting for appropriate safeguards and oversight is, but we can get that with paper as well. The process for getting safeguards and oversight applied to electronic machines is painfully slow and is being fought all the way by state and local governments and election commissions. Election integrity activists in states using these machines are having to file lawsuits to get access to the software. Not a very open process and quick process.

Mary
Mary Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Vote in private, count in public.
G. MacLeamh Says:
May 10th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Having worked a polling site on the “bad” side of town during the 2004 election hijacking, I saw firsthand some of the tried n’ true GOP methods…

Fake voter “registration” drives… messages left on answering machines (in housing projects or adjacent neighborhoods) telling voters to arrive prepared to pay overdue traffic fines and/or utility bills… extra-heavy police prescence around working-class polling places.

I also saw what happened after local Democrat organizers urged us to report any irregularities (”we have a team of lawyers who will take your information…”) — NOTHING. Despite similar, numerous reports to HQ, no action was taken. There was no “team of lawyers.”

Worst of all there was no explanation for those of us who worked so hard for the Tenn. Kerry campaign. ‘Twas as if party leaders were told to ignore our queries.

Two things became immediately clear:

1. The Tenn. Democratic Party has little respect for its volunteer campaigners.
2. The state and national party orgs — given that no one has raised election fraud as a campaign issue for 2008 — seems to have no regard for, or interest in, our right to a fair election.

Seems that voting is, at best, futile.

Tell Them You Want to Vote on Paper in Tennessee in November

11 Responses to “Tell Them You Want to Vote on Paper in Tennessee in November”

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