California Voting Systems Panel Public Hearing January 15, 2004 - Let's fill the room this time!

The next meeting of the California Voting Systems Panel will be held on January 15, 2004 at 10:00 AM. If you have followed recent events, an audit of installed Diebold hardware, firmware and software produced ZERO fully certified installations when reviewing random systems over 17 counties. However, information provided to the State's offices arrived too late to be fully scrutinized in time for the most-recent meeting. Further, the State has now ordered a wider audit - covering all counties.

This is a critical meeting that all verified voting advocates should attend. In the last meeting, we were literally outnumbered by voting manufacturer employees and management. It would be best if we reversed that at the upcoming meeting.

The VSP encourages the public to submit written comments on agenda items. Comments must be received no later than 5:00 p.m. on January 6th to ensure their delivery to the VSP members prior to the meeting. If you wish to provide information or present an oral statement at the meeting, please contact Michael Wagaman at (916) 657-2166 or mwagaman@ss.ca.gov.

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?articleid=978

http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/vsp_011504.pdf

This is just a tiny thing, but during hearings, Diebold tried to beg off on adding printers to give receipts to voters. They said that it was difficult because there would be paper jams.

Diebold makes ATM machines. These machines dispense hundreds of slips of paper, called $20 bills, daily. I've never gotten the wrong number of bills in over a decade of using the ATMs.

Not only was Diebold trying to weasel out of a paper audit trail, they were straight out lying. Odds are, for the past 20 years, they've boasted about being able to print receipts with fewer paper jams than the competition. So, when pushed to be more accountable and honest, they turn around and say they *can't* handle printing paper.

That sounds like a liar to me.

This company, with a habit of lying and keeping secrets, is trying to run the voting machines for public elections. This is completely and utterly foolish.

Moreover, Diebold is a big fundraiser for the Republican party. How many corporations out there are *not* corrupt in some way? What percentage? 10%? 15%? Am I being too generous?

Privatized voting is wrong.

Voting machines should be designed by the federal government, and the plans to build them made completely public. Companies should be allowed to build the machines, and have them submitted to certification by not only the fed and state, but also by private verification companies and individuals.

Touchscreen voting should be eliminated, and ink-voting reinstated. The computers should just help you ink the ballot correctly, and deliver preliminary numbers to the polls. The actual ballots should be counted by hand, or scanned.