The argument
On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Cheryl Lilienstein
wrote:
As part of the California Election Protection
Network, I am helping to work on strategy for upcoming legislation about voting
in the special election and beyond, in CA. Please give me your honest feedback
about this proposal for hand counted paper ballots. It is not the only idea on
the table: the other has to do with offering the voter a paper ballot at every
precinct, and doing a 100% hand counted audit of a random sample of 5% of the
precincts: but of course, if you have no paper trail, you've got nothing to
audit, do you? So, that "solution" would only work after 2006,
assuming that the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail is maintained as
necessary...
Cheryl
Lilienstein
So: I would like your opinion. Would YOU volunteer to hand count a paper
balloted election? And, would you trust a hand counted paper ballot election?
Thank you in advance for your time.
Cheryl
Lilienstein
Because every vote in the state, whether
entered on an inauditable DRE, or an optical scan ballot, is ultimately counted
on secret software running on proprietary precinct scanners and/or central
tabulators, and central vote accumulation software, all of which are implicated
in stolen elections documented from 2000 forward.
Because DRE machines count 40% of the CA
vote with no auditability, and the remaining 60% of the vote--including
absentee ballots and paper ballots on demand cast in lieu of a DRE vote--will
all be counted on secret vote tabulating software. Each of the vendor systems
has been documented to lose and reassign votes in hundreds of thousands of
instances as recently as the 2004 elections.
David Bayer has demonstrated that
Schwarzenegger owes his supposed gubernatorial victory to his margin of votes
in the 11 Diebold- tabulated counties, where Arnold "won" by a
remarkably consistent margin that reduces to a steady ratio across those counties
that is 1.5 times higher than he won in the state at large. On every other kind
of (non-Diebold) voting system in that election, Bustamante won.
If you
would like to volunteer or comment, please send an email to:
mailto:Volinteer@PetitionForPaperBallots.org
And
I will put you in touch.
Philip
Harlan
Petition
for Paper Ballots