cananian

Just got back from DC at 8am this morning after a travel disaster: a smoke alarm in one of the restaurants in DC's Union Station went off just before 7pm, causing a full evacuation of the building, which is a metro, bus, and light-rail hub. Somehow by the time the false alarm had been resolved, a power-outage had occurred in the train terminal which "started affecting the signals". When power came back, the outage had let air pressure out of the track-switching equipment, and so a *further* delay was required while it was repressurized. Two hours later (9:05pm), trains finally started leaving the station again, by which time I had thoroughly missed the flight from BWI which I was supposed to be taking. Of course that was the last flight of the day...

I ended up taking the overnight Amtrak. Sleeping on trains is not my idea of a good night's rest.

I'll try to write up a fuller account of my part in Verified Voting's Lobby Days Monday-Wednesday of this week, but in the interim here are some links I don't want to lose track of.

First is some coverage of the verifiedvoting.org press conference Wednesday morning. I know that CNN and other organizations were there with video cameras, but the only print writeups I can find via google news this morning are by Grant Gross from the IDG News Service. There are versions of the article in ComputerWorld, PCWorld, and ITWorld. Our press release is on PRNewsWire and directly on the verifiedvoting.org site.

It also came to my attention that Maine has passed state law requiring a voter-verified paper trail for elections. The two Republican Senators from Maine were on my target list for lobbying, but I ran out of time on Wednesday. If I'd have known of Maine's success here, I would have put them much higher on my priority list. We need more Republican support for Senate bull S.1980: these two should certainly hear from us!

This article reports on the evoting hearing on 9 April 2004. Rebecca Mercuri was the only non-DRE voice allowed to be heard; sadly the League of Women Voters (who should know better!), the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the American Association of People with Disabilities (which is known not to know better), and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials all gave testimony harmful to the best interests of their constituents.

It appears that voting technology is a topic that the Republican leadership wants to tightly control. It is without doubt that Republicans own most of the companies that manufacture, sell, and service voting machines. And President Bush and the Republican Congress appear determined to control and limit oversight of the elections industry. The Bush Administration has stacked the Election Assistance Commission with supporters of paperless voting technology, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) got walloped with a $22 million budget cut in fiscal 2004, which means that NIST will have to cut back substantially on its cyber security work, as well as completely stop all work on voting technology for the Help America Vote Act.

With no mandatory federal standards or certification in place and no funding available, the Bush Administration and Republican-controlled Congress have ensured that their friends in the elections industry maintain control of voting technology and, in effect, election results.

So, at Friday's hearing, Republican members of the Commission of Civil Rights decided that the issue of voting - the lynchpin of democracy - should take a back seat to employee contract buyouts. ... And that's when the second big disappointment of the hearing became apparent. Some of America's largest civil rights organizations have lined up with the Republicans on this subject. They support 'paperless' voting technology. No fuss, no muss. ... Only one panelist at Friday's hearing spoke out against paperless elections, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, one of the nation's leading experts on computer voting security. ... [A]t Friday's hearing Mercuri found herself the only panelist invited in to defend the voter's right to verify their own paper ballot. ... The hearing was a replay of many meetings this writer has attended on the subject of voting machines. The focus was on regaining the voters' trust and confidence in voting machines, while blaming poll workers for machine "glitches" and malfunctions, and blaming the public for not being computer savvy. The over-all request of the panelists was for increased education of poll workers and the public.

This ought to be a non-partisan issue. It's about democracy, and the people's right to have their choices recorded as accurately as possible.

I plan on attending Verified Voting's April Lobby Days in Washington to do my part to raise a ruckus about this. Email me if you'd like to come down and help (or just go to VerifiedVoting.org and sign up on their lists and write letters to your congress-people).