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
------------------------------------------------- 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