Texas Safe Voting News

Tell Local Officials to support safe voting

If you're in concerned about ensuring a voter-verifiable paper trail, tell Texas officials. Voting systems are purchased and implemented at the county level. The Secretary of State is responsible for certifying and approving voting machines for use in Texas.

Urge the Secretary of State
Geoffrey Connor to review voting machines for certification that have a voter-verifiable paper ballot. And tell him that the process for certifying voting machines should be open to the public. "The only thing that should be secret in the voting process is your vote."

If you are in Travis County, encourage Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County Clerk, to request voting systems with a voter-verifiable paper trail be submitted for approval, based on demand from voters and taxpayers.

Party Resolution supporting verified voting

Democratic and Republican party activists are calling on both parties to support a platform resolution requiring a voter-verifiable paper trail. If you are concerned about the issue, bring the resolution to your precinct meeting on election day.

Austin Chronicle Covers Evoting

Lee Nichols of the chronicle covers the local controversy surrounding electronic voting.

"The main point about the Hart InterCivic machine is the same main point that electronic-voting activists and computer security professionals have been making across the board, which is, without a voter-verifiable paper trail, no all-electronic voting system can be considered really secure and reliable," says Adina Levin, director of the Cyber Liberties Project of the ACLU-Texas and chair of the E-Voting Project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation of Austin. "

Voting Systems in Texas

Dallas County: ES&S

Houston: Hart InterCivic

Travis County: Hart InterCivic

El Paso: Diebold

EVENT: The Battle for Accountable Voting Systems

Featured Speaker - Dr. David Dill of Stanford University

Panelists:
Bob Stein, Dean of Social Sciences
Dan Wallach, assistant professor of computer science at Rice
Adina Levin of Electronic Frontier Foundation Austin.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Time: 4:00 PM
Duncan Hall McMurtry Auditorium
Rice University
6100 Main Street
Houston, Texas, US

See this page for further details.

Democracy rests on the public accepting the results of elections. But
why should they? In general, trustworthiness stems from accountability.
The ability to independently check the performance of a person,
institution, or system allows errors to be caught and corrected, and,
more importantly, deters errors.

Touch-screen voting machines store records of cast votes in internal
memory, where the voter cannot check them. Because of our system of
secret ballots, once the voter leaves the polling place there is no way
anyone can determine whether the vote captured was what the voter
intended. This system lacks accountability.

Last December, I drafted a "Resolution on Electronic Voting" stating
that every voting system should have a "voter verifiable audit trail,"
which is a permanent record of the vote that can be checked for accuracy
by the voter, and which is saved for a recount if it is required. I
posted the page in January with endorsements from many prominent
computer scientists. At that point, I became embroiled in a lively
debate that continues today.

We still don't have an answer for why we should trust electronic voting
machines, but a lot of evidence has emerged for why we should */not/*.

I will discuss some principles, the basic technical issues with
electronic voting, and describe some of what has happened over the last
year.