Tuesday, February 21, 2006

ACTION ALERT- PROTECT YOUR VOTE PIMA


If unchallenged, Pima County will receive unreliable and insecure Diebold AccuVote-TSx (Touchscreen) DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines at least one per precinct, plus more for early voting stations to provide accessibility for disabled voters mandated by an Orwellian-named Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Here are just a few demonstrated serious reliability and security vulnerabilities:

• Unreliable New Mexico just dumped touchscreens in favor of optical scans. Undervotes for President were as high as 37% in some Hispanic and Native American precincts. Diebold’s spotty record caused California to decertify AccuVote-TSX DRE touch screens last July due to jammed printers, lost voting records and screen freezes that required frequent reboots during testing. The machine overall failure rate was 30%, with a 1.37% loss of the paper ballots. Could your vote be the one to disappear?

• Inadequately Tested Maryland’s Republican Gov Ehrlich announced last week that he, too, has lost confidence in the state's ability to conduct fair and secure elections this fall. He demanded a return to paper ballots and sent a letter calling on Maryland’s Elections department to decertify Diebold election equipment subject to further Federal testing.

• Inefficient/Costly Use of two completely different voting systems requires poll worker training on two systems and two separate procedures for transmitting votes to central tabulators, produces confusion and long lines. Maryland’s Governor estimated that DRE’s add a 1000% increase in annual maintenance costs.

• Un-recountable Machine-generated printed records on paper rolls are not the same as voter-marked paper ballots. They are incompatible with the optical scan equipment already used by Pima county. In an event of a recount it is not clear how officials will be able to use these paper rolls. If current legislation under consideration in the Arizona House of Representatives becomes law, the use of these paper rolls will be disallowed entirely, leaving no independent means of verifying the tabulated electronic vote!

• Compromised Ballot Secrecy The paper record stores votes in sequence matched to voter rolls. Ballot secrecy is not guaranteed.

• Hackable The memory cards on TSX voting machines use so-called “interpreted code” that is prohibited by FEC standards. With interpreted code, the system is vulnerable to malicious tampering. Therefore, a voter can verify the printed record on a continuous roll of paper tape, but can’t know if that printed record matches the invisible data stored on the memory card.

• Illegally certified The Arizona secretary of state has approved a TSx version that is different from the version federally approved.

• Unaccountable No public hearings were ever held by the Arizona Secretary of State on the purchase and or the reliability testing of these machines. This is unacceptable!

• Reliable alternatives to the TSX The Arizona Secretary of State has already tested and certified a far more suitable alternative voting system that would provide accessibility for disabled voters, the ES&S AutoMark, for use in other Arizona counties. The AutoMark produces a marked paper ballot that can be fed through an existing optical scanner. Illinois uses Diebold optical scans with ES&S AutoMark. Why not use them here in Pima?
  

ACTION STEPS

Join other concerned county voters and demand action from our Pima County board of supervisors to block the purchase and receipt of Diebold AccuVote-TSX machines for Pima County. County citizens demand their vote be secure from fraud, manipulation, and unreliable hardware and software.

Contact our County Supervisors today:
Ann Day - District 1 - (520) 740-2738 - ann.day@pima.gov

Ramon Valadez - District 2- (520) 740-8126 - Online form

Sharon Bronson - District 3- (520) 740-8051 - district3@pima.gov

Ray Carroll - District 4- (520) 740-8094 - district4@pima.gov

Richard Elias - District 5- (520) 740-8126 - Online form

To quote Thomas Paine; “The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is reduce a man to slavery…” For more information contact John at John@AUDITAZ.org

Posted by Protect Democracy :: 10:48 AM :: ---------------oOo---------------