Adopt Newly Revised Election Audit Procedures Now!

Support Adoption of Newly Revised Election Audit Procedures Now

Now that the November, 2006 election is over, we have a very short time period to ensure that future U.S. election outcomes are accurate and honest.

Despite some mainstream media reports, there were significant serious problems with electronic voter registration records, with electronic voting machine malfunctions, ballot definition programming errors, memory card failures, with missing electronic votes; with triple-counted electronic votes, or with wrong electronic vote counts (in the tens of thousands) in almost every state; and the exit poll evidence once again shows likely evidence of significant vote miscount.

Experts agree that our voting system is vulnerable to fraud and error in the United States today:

http://utahcountvotes.org/docs/WhatdotheExpertsSay.pdf

U.S. election systems are vulnerable to innocent miscount, electronic error, and fraud because almost 100% of ballots, even paper ballots, are counted electronically, without sufficient manual counts to detect or correct outcome-altering vote miscount. Unless we take action within the next year to pass legislation requiring sufficient, routine, transparent, verifiable, independent manual audits of voter verifiable paper records, we may irrevocably lose our democracy!

Unfortunately some groups, like Common Cause are pushing for fast passage of the ill-advised Holt HR550 bill as it was written in the prior Congress. The Holt HR550 audit provisions, while having admirable intent, as now written are:

1. insufficient to detect outcome-altering vote miscount,
2. are not transparent,
3. are not verifiable, and
4. have many other significant flaws.

Using voter verfiable paper ballots is only false assurance if the electronic counts are not manually independently checked. In Florida 2000 the optical scan paper ballot electronic counts wrongly gave Florida to Bush rather than Gore, as the Miami Herald recount afterwards showed, and there is much evidence of wrongly counted optical scan paper ballots since then.

Here is a recently revised proposal for independent manual vote count audits for Utah based on NEDA's recent 'Election Integrity Audit' paper that still needs revisions. Although not perfect yet, it is important for us to begin to work immediately to promote similar legislation at state and federal levels. Please read it. Thank you.

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudit-UT.pdf

There is a short reference list at the end of our Utah legislative proposal that you can use for further research. You can see that it also pulls some ideas from the Utah Lt. Governor's vote count audit policies, so it should work for election officials.

Please urge your U.S. and state congressional representatives and senators to pass legislation requiring sufficient, routine, manual, independent, transparent, verifiable audits of electronic vote counts based on our work, which is agreed upon by the scientific community as being the correct way to calculate the minimum amount of vote counts that must be manual audited to detect any outcome-altering electronic miscount. No state in America today does sufficient, manual, independent, transparent, verifiable, scientific vote count audits.

For anyone who is working on election integrity, our "election integrity audit" paper, while long, is a "must-read". Skip the math sections if you want to because most of it is common sense and the charts and tables are informative.

http://vote.nist.gov/ElectionIntegrityAudit.pdf

We must insist now on verifiably accurate election outcomes in the United States!

If any of you rewrite and improve our Utah proposal for your state, or for a proposal for federal legislation, please let us know, so we can all benefit from it. We could someone's use help writing a more concise version.

This is no time to relax or give up!

We are have a critically short time now to ensure that we have honest, accurate election outcomes in the United States.

If you can help put the brakes on Common Cause and others who are unwisely pushing through the Holt HR550 amendment as written (just as Common Cause unwisely pushed through the Help America Vote Act that exacerbated US election problems tenfold in 2002), please urge Common Cause to slow down and first consult with experts to rewrite the Holt audit provision ensure that required election audits are sufficient, verifiable, transparent, scientific, independent, and constitutional. Plus there are many other good ideas that need to be incorporated into new Holt election legislation before it is put out on the floor.

Thank you for your help and support. I hope that our rewrite of the Utah vote count audit proposal will be helpful to your efforts to ensure that we can fix U.S. voting systems by 2008.

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudit-UT.pdfM.a<

Kathy Dopp
http://electionarchive.org
National Election Data Archive
Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections

© Scoop Media