Demand paper ballots for all elections in 2008

by Ginger Harris
The National Sierra Club funded two temporary, part-time staff positions in Missouri to encourage voters to support a campaign finance reform measure on the November 2000 ballot. Why?… because the Club recognized that as long as big campaign contributions continued to control who got elected to office and who got appointed to state regulatory commissions, the Sierra Club would have difficulty achieving environmental protections and sustainability goals.

In 2000, controversy over “hanging chads” gave the U.S. Supreme Court an excuse for stopping further re-counting of votes in Florida, handing victory to the candidate who had lost the popular vote. The controversy also gave voting machine vendors an opportunity to write and lobby for enactment of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandated that by 2004 (later extended to 2006), election officials throughout the country would have to provide a way for disabled voters to cast their ballot in private. HAVA provided almost four billion dollars to purchase new voting equipment for all jurisdictions. Though HAVA didn’t specifically require touch-screen vote-counting machines (DREs) for disabled voters, voting machine vendors rushed production of hackable DREs (using proprietary software and initially no paper trails), and convinced some states to buy these for all their voters.

The vendors also revised widely used optical scanners for use by “abled” voters and notified local election officials that they would no longer support currently used equipment (e.g. punchcards).

Thus, even jurisdictions that did not need new equipment ended up buying it. What were the consequences for the Sierra Club?

All our hard work for candidates or issues may have been for naught, because wherever the new machines were used, we cannot be sure if the will of the voters was recorded accurately. Because the software is proprietary, we voters cannot know whether a promised “update” really solves the security flaws. Thus, Governors or Secretaries of State (both Republican and Democrat) in at least six states have since decided to ban or decertify most brands of DREs, plus in one state several optiscans too, based on studies by computer scientists who found significant security flaws. (See non-partisan websites like MoHonestElections.org, VotersUnite.org, VoterAction.org, BlackBoxVoting.org.)
Missouri is not among the states that have thoroughly tested their voting machines, so we risk being stuck with them through the November 2008 election.
What steps can we take to reduce our vulnerability to voting-machine fraud?