How to make "representatives" represent

[Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear voters,

We've been unsuccessful at getting either the Boulder County
Commissioners or the state legislature to do anything significant
to insure fair elections. I was voted "Best Activist" by Boulder
Daily Camera readers. Here's my diagnosis and prescription:

Various Commissioners and legislators have challenged us to prove
we have wide support. I have personally seen how a packed hearing
room can turn both the Boulder City Council and the Commissioners
around. 2 examples: we stopped the giant Safeway which would have
turned N. Broadway into a traffic nightmare (it was later logically
located on 28th St. at the old K-mart site) and we stopped the
giant Selby "church" in Fourmile Canyon, which would have been a
traffic, fire and erosion danger.

If we want lots of people to show up for hearings we need to look
at this as a "marketing" problem. It's pretty easy to get everyone
saying the same thing to representatives to stop something. We held
up signs saying "Wrong Way, Safeway" and wore buttons "No BS
Church"

It's impossible to get everyone to agree on and say we want
"voter-verifiable, full-text paper ballots counted by open-source
software not running on Windows and statistically-significant,
randomly-sampled hand counts" you get the idea. Most people who
care about fair elections don't and won't understand all the tech
stuff and how all the parts interact. So people drift away from our
meetings. The joint CVV/CFVI meeting Wednesday attracted about 15
people, down from 50 who used to attend CVV meetings alone.
Remember, our taxes are paying the County Clerks, etc. to oppose
us, working as amateurs. So we have to be smart.

Today at the CU Business School, the man who wrote the best-selling
intro marketing text "Marketing Management" spoke. His first words
explained what we need: He said consumers have a need for
simplification and a need for risk reduction.

My proposal: Until electronic voting standards (like those coming
from NIST and IEEE) are set and implemented in public software, and
inspected and debugged by thousands of programmers, we should
demand the simplest, most time-tested solution, which according to
the recent MIT/Caltech study is also one of the most accurate:

"HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS"

Everyone can understand and lobby for it. It fits on a button. It
makes it possible to motivate enough people to force
representatives to represent us. If we do that, it won't matter
what our group is called, how our web site is structured, how
beautiful our PowerPoint presentations are, etc.

Dr. Charles Corry of Colorado Springs, who serves on the IEEE
Voting Standards committee, today joined me in supporting this.

Techies will get their chance to design and perfect the system;
now's the time to temporarily put away the technical debates and
the organizational debates and see if we can agree on a simple,
temporary solution that people understand and support.

If we get dozens of people to write letters to editors asking for
hand-counted paper ballots, attending legislative hearings asking
for hand-counted paper ballots, talking to their neighbors about
hand-counted paper ballots, etc., we have a good chance. It might
sound trite and boring, but that's politics.

This is a perfect example of "Occam's Razor," which says the
simplest solution is best.

If you agree, please respond to this email saying so. If enough do,
let's organize a  short meeting to formalize it and to get started.
You can contact me: evan@xxxxxxxx

Evan

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Evan Ravitz      303 440 6838       evan@xxxxxxxx
Ratify the National Initiative!   http://Vote.org
Photo Adventures:          http://Vote.org/photos
Bush vs the Pope!            http://Vote.org/Bush
Sins of the father Bush   http://Vote.org/silence


"Simplify, simplify, simplify." -Henry David Thoreau