The bill to delay the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act passes (mostly along party lines) in the Senate, 22-10. It now goes to the Governor for his signature. Here’s the roll call:
All Republican Senators, except Sen. Tim Burchett (R-Knoxville), voted to delay implementation of the TVCA along with three four Democratic Senators, Sens. Charlotte Burks (D-Monterey)Thelma Harper (D-Nashville), Doug Jackson (D-Dickson), and Reginald Tate (D-Memphis).
Email your Tennessee Senator to vote NO on SB0872 tomorrow. A YES vote on SB0872 means that in November, Tennesseans in 93 out of 95 counties will vote on machines that can be as easily hacked as the ones above.
No paper trail. Lost votes. Stolen Votes. Or the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act with paper ballots that leave a paper trail for recounts and audits?
See the entire Princeton study. Or if you still need to be convince, go watch clips from Uncounted. I recommend this one:
Are you crying for our almost lost election integrity? Homer is here for you.
Tomorrow, the State Senate votes on SB0872, the bill that would delay implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act.
If you want a 100% unverifiable election come November with no ability to recount or audit the results, do nothing.
But if you want a paper ballot system that will record your vote as intended on a piece of paper that can then be audited and recounted in the case of a close election (and let’s face it, some of our House races are going to be close), then email your Tennessee Senator NOW and ask him to vote NO tomorrow on SB0872 – the bill that would kill any chance of a reliable voting system in Tennessee.
Go to this webpage, fill in your address and email will be sent to your Senator.
While the rest of the country is moving away from the kind of voting machines we use in 93 out of 95 counties in Tennessee – 100% unverifiable and unauditable touch screen electronic voting machines – after tomorrow our state may be stuck with them for good.
Tomorrow, a regular Senate Session will be wedged into the day in which the Special Session on education will start. Wedged. Between Noon and 2pm. The regular session will have a sparse calendar [pdf] of only 5 bills.
The last item on tomorrow’s regular calendar is SB0872, a bill that would delay implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA) until 2012.
Please take the time today to contact your State Senator and ask them to vote “no” against SB0872.
The TVCA – which would give Tennesseans fair and accurate elections in the form of verifiable and auditable paper ballots by the November 2010 election – was passed almost unanimously in the State House and State Senate in 2008. It was a bi-partisan effort and ceremoniously signed into law by a supportive Governor Bredesen.
If the delay bill is passed tomorrow, come November 2010 Tennessee voters will still be voting on machines that break easily, don’t tally votes correctly, vote for you, and count votes and issue vote totals using software we can’t see.
If the delay bill is passed tomorrow, come November 2010 Tennessee voters will have no way to do a meaningful recount.
If the delay bill is passed tomorrow, come November 2010 Tennessee voters will have no way to audit their voter to make sure they were counted correctly.
Again, please take the time today to contact your State Senator and ask them to vote “no” against SB0872.
When you call or email, please:
More info is also available if you’d like to be prepared to argue against reasons for the delay.
Perhaps that’s why we have to find out about his incorrect usage of words like “want to” and “can’t” and “The act is very specific, it requires counties to use only certified equipment that meets the security and reliability standards adopted by the federal Election Assistance Commission in 2005” from the neighbors (Hiya, AC! Can I borrow a cup of sugar, sugar?)
Uh-huh. I’m not sure what Tennessee Voter Confidence Act Mr. Hargett is looking at, but the one in my Tennessee code is not at all specific.
I’ve been through the Voter Confidence Act (and so can you!) and I cannot locate this language anywhere.
Again, there is no mention of requiring counties “to use only certified equipment that meets the security and reliability standards adopted by the federal Election Assistance Commission in 2005.”
Mr. Hargett is being very disingenuous in his press release. Instead of wanting to follow the law and give the voters of Tennessee secure and verifiable elections by implementing the very thorough Voter Confidence Act, he’s offering every excuse available – as he did during the last legislative session – to keep from complying with the law.
UPDATE: Election Integrity Activist Bernie Ellis responds to Mr. Hargett’s release:
When Secretary of State Hargett says that it will be “impossible ” for him to implement the Voter Confidence Act by 2010, the truth is that the only thing that is impossible in Tennessee these days seems to be to get our secretary of state to respect the law.
The 2005 EAC standards are the 2002 EAC standards in the main. The only differences between them deal more with accessibility issues for disabled voters, not with basic vote-counting or security procedures. Besides, these EAC are completely voluntary standards — there is no federal requirement that any state follow these voluntary standards.
More important, SoS Hargett does not tell us that none of the equipment now in use in Tennessee has been certified to either the 2002 or 2005 EAC standards. So if his principal concern was meeting some voluntary standards (which is what the EAC standards are — voluntary), he would have to do away with all of our existing voting equipment.
That is not the issue. Tre Hargett is less concerned about our voting on equipment that is not certified to some national voluntary standards just so long as the uncertified equipment we vote on is also untrustworthy and unverifiable. His principal goal seems to be to prevent us (at all costs) from voting on paper ballots counted by optical scan equipment, a voting system that will meet the Tennessee standard — the only meaningful standard in this state today. Why is that, exactly?”
Put another way: “There’s only one standard that matters now, and that’s the Tennessee standard — paper ballots and hand-counted audits, a standard that our General Assembly has affirmed not once, but twice. Everything else is just smoke-and-mirrors from a secretary of state who, for some reason, don’t want elections in Tennessee that we can trust and verify.”
Bernie Ellis, founder of the group Gathering to Save Our Democracy, who has been working for secure and verifiable elections in Tennessee since 2004, had two visitors over in his holler today:
Well, things are getting interesting. I was just visited by two officers of the TBI, investigating a complaint they had received from the Secretary of State’s office (complainant unnamed), saying that I had recently sent an email directly to the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office, threatening violence against that office by invoking the memory of the Battle of Athens (TN). They were here to investigate my “terrorist threat against a government official”.
Well, I’ve never sent any emails to this SoS’s office on any subject, now or at any other time. However, I told the TBI agents that I have several times invoked the Battle of Athens (TN) in my writings as the only alternative available to the citizenry if the sanctity of the ballot box cannot be assured. (If you don’t know about the Battle of Athens, you need to Google it now. The agents said they had to Google it before they came out, and that it was a pretty impressive story)
We had a good conversation on my front porch and I explained the nature of the people who might have made this complaint against me. I also mentioned that one of them had issued a not-so-veiled threat against Mary Mancini two weeks ago at Legislative Plaza. (Mary has blogged about that). Before they left, I printed out my last letter to the state Senators that I sent the day they voted to protect the Voter Confidence Act, as well as a copy of my recent effusive tribute of Senator Tim Burchett. (Sorry, Dick, I just couldn’t help myself.)
I also asked the two TBI agents to deliver a message from me to whoever had caused them to have to drive to my farm today. Before they left, the lead agent repeated my message verbatim to make sure he had it right:
“Mr. Ellis would like whoever issued the complaint against him to grow a pair of balls, ‘man up’ (the agent’s words) and call him at any time to discuss any concerns they may have with him or with anything Mr. Ellis has ever said.”
The agent looked to me like he is going to be happy to deliver that message personally.
BTW, the lead agent said he called my sheriff and several others before coming out and was told that I was a reasonable man who could sit down and talk to anyone at any time about anything. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had government officials in our Secretary of State’s office who could do the same thing? Maybe one day, when we start counting ballots the way they’re cast.
Wow. Bernie is having a day. And before I have one (although I wouldn’t really mind having some coffee – and pie, maybe? – with some agents from TBI), I’d like to make clear that during my conversation with Coordinator Goins he did not threaten me personally. Rather, he threatened the implementation of paper ballots in Tennessee.
In the midst of the end of session and the bill that would have delayed bringing paper ballots to Tennesseans failing to make it out of the Senate, Memphian Steve Ross of Vibinc.com asks a most valid question, “What next?”:
The question facing Election Commissions in 97.8% of the counties in Tennessee is a much more practical, “What next?†Are they going to hang back and wait to see what happens in court…should any case appear, or are they going to start making plans to comply with the law? What about all the training that will be necessary for their employees? This stuff doesn’t just happen overnight. It seems to me that in order to be in compliance with the law, as it stands now, Election Commissions have to get going on this, no matter what happens or could potentially happen. So I decided to ask around and find out some answers.
Turns out, it’s not only been on their radar, they’ve been looking at solutions since the beginning of the delay debate. Shelby Co. budgeted money to deal with any shortfall that may from HAVA funding not that there should be any. Obviously, it sucks for the taxpayers that Shelby and some 92 other counties have spent scads of money on touch screen voting machines, but there are lots of lingering questions out there about these machines, and Diebold the company that makes the machines we have here in Shelby Co., hasn’t done ANYTHING to answer these questions.
These allegations would be less unsettling if there were some other mechanism than just the “word of the computer and its programmerâ€. Unfortunately, the idea of using a receipt printer or some such other device isn’t within the letter of the law, and to my knowledge, no such device is certified under the necessary standards. So, it looks like some unfortunate state is going to be buying a whole bunch of used touch screen voting machines from Tennessee Election Commissions…or not Turns out nobody wants these so the market may be saturated with these unwanted beasts. In short, we may just have to let them rot in some warehouse somewhere.
Of course, until Mr. Goins [Tennessee State Election Coordinator Mark Goins] makes a decision on whether to take this case to court, all of this is just speculation. It is good to know that, at least here in Shelby Co. someone’s thinking about the consequences and ready to deal with it when they become reality. I just hope, for the safety of our votes that we don’t have a long and costly legal fight on our hands.
Like the quote at the beginning of this post says, “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
True. True.
During yesterday’s floor debate on bringing secure and verifiable elections to Tennessee, Senator Jim Kyle (D-Memphis) asked a very pertinent question, “What’s the difference between elections in Iran and elections in Tennessee?”
True.
Yesterday, the Tennessee General Assembly adjourned for the year without passing HB0614/SB0872 – the bill that would have delayed implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA – the paper ballot bill).
The TVCA is a rare-breed among bills because the way in which it was crafted makes it nearly perfect.* Not only does it give Tennessee voters paper ballots that register the voter’s intent BEFORE any machine touches the ballots, but it also requires mandatory hand-counted recounts in a certain percentage of precincts (to make sure the totals from the machines match the actual ballot totals) AND requires that the paper ballots that recorded the voter’s original intent become the ballot of record (incredibly handy in the case of a close election or necessary recount).
So during yesterday’s Senate session, not only did Senator Roy Herron save paper ballots, but he also saved secure and verifiable elections by keeping the strongest bits of the TVCA – mandatory recounts and ballots of record – intact.
Senator Roy Herron: “Electronic voting machines can steal elections. They can steal your election….Yet today we decide whether to jeopardize our 2010 elections by allowing electronic voting machines without paper verification. Machines that are absolutely unreliable and unverifiable.
In Iowa in 2006, an auditor noticed a 20-year incumbent being beaten 10 to 1 by a newcomer, but when she checked the paper vote against the electronic vote, she discovered that the incumbent actually was way ahead of the challenger. This error would not have been caught without a paper trail….
In voting last year here in Tennessee, citizens experienced so-called “vote flipping.” The New York Times reported, “…voters complained that [electronic] voting machines registered their votes for Mr. McCain as votes for Mr. Obama.” How can this happen? Researchers at Princeton discovered it is all too easy to infect voting machines with a virus that, in seconds, can flip vote counts.
All it takes to hack into the electronic machine is a common flash drive. This is why the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations strongly recommended that Tennessee “implement voter-verified paper audit trails statewide.” That is why just last year we passed – and you voted for – the current law. TACIR recommends optical scan machines, like those used by Pickett County and Hamilton County. Hamilton says it is “very satisfied” and “would highly recommend [optical scan systems] to other interested counties.”
But now some say we cannot – or should not – have voter verifiable paper trails in Tennessee in 2010. But counties as large as Hamilton and as small as Pickett have them.
They have them from “sea to shining sea” – from Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida.
They have them in our neighbors like North Carolina, Missouri, Alabama.
They have them in large states with big cities like New York and California.
They have them in states as rural as the Dakotas, Idaho, West Virginia.
In fact, 33 states – 33 states – currently use or require a voter verifiable paper trail. Why can’t we?
Sure we’ve new Election Commissioners and Registrars, and even a new Coordinator of Elections, but with all this change, what about change we can believe in?
What about elections we can believe in?
*The reason why it’s “nearly perfect” is that in a perfect world we’d be counting all the ballots by hand.
If I heard it once I hear it a thousand times, if you want to kill a piece of legislation then attach a fiscal note. Which is exactly what the Secretary of State’s office tried to do to kill the Tennessee Voter Confidence (TVCA).
If passed this session, HB614 would have not only delayed the implementation of the TVCA but would have also attached a $11 million dollar fiscal note. The note was crafted using wildly discordant numbers provided to the Secretary of State’s office by the county mayors and/or election officials.
Senator Roy Herron (D-Dresden), while trying to stop the delay in today’s Senate session, eviscerated the numbers by pointing out the disparity in estimated costs given by each county and also cites evidence that elections using paper ballots and optical scan machines instead of electronic voting machines are much less expensive to run.
Senator Herron: “If you look and do comparison in four of our counties in Tennessee they estimate it will cost $50 a ballot to audit a few hundred ballots. $50 a ballot. Do you know what the cost is in states using optical scan machines right now? 9 cents. 9 cents. And we have some counties that say it’s gonna cost them $50 dollars a ballot when other states are doing it for 9 cents a ballot. There are counties that estimate it will cost them $20,000 extra to deliver 70% fewer machines. There are counties that estimate it will cost $700 for privacy screens, ladies and gentlemen, when there are other counties that say they can get them for $20 a piece. 1/35th as much. There are counties that say they can get security containers for $25 a piece. You know what some counties estimate when we came up with figures that we’re talking about tonigt? $2800 a security container. $25 vs. $2800. In Williamson County, to conduct one single poll worker training session they estimate it will cost $39,000. $39,000. There’s one county that says it will cost theym $70,000 extra dollars to store ballots that would not fill up a single filing cabinet. And ladies and gentlemen, Shelby County was referred to earlier, they estimate it would cost them $4.1 million more to implement it, that county has never in its history spent that much for its total annual election-related expenses in the history of the county. So I would tell you ladies and gentlemen that I think the numbers vary so widely on the face of the numbers when you look at variances as much as 35x as much I think the numbers are questionable suspect….
Monday, 7:00 to 9:00 am CT, on WRVU 91.1 FM, Nashville, TN & streaming online at WRVU.org
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Call in: 615-322-7625
GUESTS: Monday, February 8, 2010 Graham Perry Social Curator for the Tennessee State Museum and Karl Frisch of of Media Matters for America.
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