I just received a letter from Kathy Dopp, of the National Election Data Archive, asking for support of a letter she is delivering to congress. Kathy is very well informed about the ins and outs of electronic voting, and so I knew this was probably going to be good.
You can see the current version of the letter here.
Brief Synopsis of the letter and what you can do over the fold.
I won't go into all the things that are wrong with electronic voting, because I'm sure they've been written a million times, if you feel like looking.
The theme of the letter is the ability to audit vote results. As it says:
One of the key methods to ensure integrity of our elections is citizen oversight of manual audits of election results.
It provides a brief overview of the reasons why the current voting machine requirements are flawed, and then an overview of common voting systems. The letter then goes on to detail what critical changes are needed:
We believe it is critical to the integrity of elections for sufficient manual counts of voter verifiable paper ballots to occur, and for these audits to be done with independent citizen oversight by a separate and
distinct group of auditorsvi using one of these methods:
- Manual counts of 100% of all vote counts or
- Manual counts of sufficient numbers of randomly selected vote counts
- as determined exactly using a program or
- as looked up in a table or
- as estimated by a formula or
- Manual counts of 10% of randomly sampled ballots of all vote counts.
There is a lot of good information in the letter that I'm not posting here, so I hope you will all go read it. I think it's a really great thing that Kathy will be hand delivering this to Congress.
What you can do!
I asked Kathy for permission to write about the letter, and to link to it, here. Anyone that wants to support this, you can contact Kathy and ask for your name to be put on the letter. Anyone doing this by tomorrow (Wednesday, 2/6) will have their names on it when it goes to Congress, but she will continue to accept names after that time. Also - anyone with "suggestions for small, but crucial revisions" can also let her know about that.
Update, from Kathy:
Please ask people to sign the letter to Congress by sending their name and full address along with any credentials or affiliations they want included (within reason) and email it to kathy.dopp at gmail.com