First 24 hrs: 34 pledge 200 hrs to HAND COUNT the 2004 election in Boulder! (fwd)

[Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>]

Friends, Boulderites, Voters, lend me your ears:

I'm pleased to report that in the first 24 hours of this last-minute
effort to sway the County Commissioners we had over 34 volunteers
pledge their very hands for almost 200 person-hours to HAND COUNT
the 2004 election! If you haven't, you can click here:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/hand/petition.html

We ask you to forward this message! We have about 40 hours until
the Commissioners instead sign away our $1.5 million on Hart
InterCivic's dotted line -BEFORE NIST issues electronic voting
standards!

Pledge your hands for democracy! Spring into Pledge Drive now to
prevent that post-Halloween election free-fall depression!

Evan

sent yesterday:

Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 17:07:17 -0600 (MDT)
From: Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Please sign up to hand-count ballots this November!


Boulder County Voters,

I've taken the initiative to implement an idea of Mary Eberle, a
Citizens for Verifiable Voting (www.ColoradoVoter.net) member, who
said that in Boulder it would be easy to get VOLUNTEERS to
hand-count the 2004 election.

I've started a petition Boulder County Voters can sign at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/hand/petition.html

If we could present a few hundred volunteers (Please DO let us see
your email address!!) to the County Commissioners BEFORE they sign
away our $1.5 million to Hart, TUESDAY AT 10:30, maybe they'll do
the right thing and let citizens make sure our votes count.

PLEASE circulate this to everyone on your local email lists!!


For some background, here's a repeat of what happened at the final
Commissioners hearing on Thursday... Evan


Folks,

As expected, the Boulder County Commissioners yesterday voted to
sign a contract with Hart InterCivic for some $1.7 million to buy
-not lease- a proprietary (secret) software voting system based on
the highly unstable windows operating system, BEFORE NIST and other
authorities come up with standards for electronic voting.

As in 2 previous meetings, 100% of citizens attending asked that
they NOT do this.

Our last resort is the courts. Boulder ACLU Chair Barry Satlow said
he would bring this up at their annual meeting Monday 7PM at the CU
Law School, room 154. The meeting is mostly on the city's minor
revisions of occupancy laws, but I hope you'll come to show our
support for elections that count.

Commissioner Paul Danish closely questioned the envoy from the Colo.
Sec'y of State about the crucial Colorado law which makes electronic
voting particularly insecure here: Any recount must be done by the
same method as the original count. So, our election bureaucrats'
assertion that the paper ballot is the official record is very
misleading, because, after an electronic count, ONLY a repeated,
identical electronic recount is allowed. Danish asked the envoy to
beg the SoS to repeal the law.

The majority of citizens testifying asked for hand-counted paper
ballots -UNTIL NIST issues standards. This took me 5 months of work
to convince the techies who've dominated Citizens for Verifiable
Voting that arguing abstruse points on which electronic systems were
less bad was leaving the vast majority out.

Commissioner Mayer did some serious questioning, too. Commissioner
Stewart looking bored, probably because he know the other two were
only putting on a show: the outcome was already determined.
Evidence: tomorrow at noon, County Clerk Linda Sales has long been
scheduled to talk on "Questions and Answers Regarding Our New Voting
Machines." See http://bcn.boulder.co.us/planboulder/friday.html

The Commissioners also withheld their trump card until AFTER the
public hearing was finished: they quickly calculated it would take
"hundreds" of extra election judges to hand-count an election here,
and declared it, variously, "very difficult", "impractical" and
"impossible."

(For $1.7 million, I'd be happy to organize a crew to do so. Hell,
for $50,000.)

As Citizens for Verifiable Voting member Mary Eberle pointed out to
me later, it would be fairly easy for volunteers to be found in a
place like Boulder. A simple email appeal would probably do it.

Plan Boulder is the powerhouse political organization of Boulder,
for over 40 years, responsible for growth control, open space and
other protections. They did write a very good letter supporting our
position to the Commissioners:

http://coloradovoter.net/bcv-archive/msg00827.html

Our last resort is the courts. I propose we each ask our local
lawyer friends if they would sue for an injunction against
electronic voting UNTIL NIST sets the standards. Here is the final
precedent cited in an article saying e-voting should be illegal:

Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) - "It is in the light of such history
that we must construe Art. I, 2, of the Constitution, which,
carrying out the ideas of Madison and those of like views, provides
that Representatives shall be chosen "by the People of the several
States"... This means that our leaders should be chosen by us, NOT
by machines whose workings can not be seen -or understood because
the software is proprietary.

http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachinesUnconstitutional.htm

Evan

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Evan Ravitz         303 440 6838         evan@xxxxxxxx
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