What I told City Council; response

[Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>]

Folks, below is approximately what I said to City Council tonight. 4
of the 9 were nodding in apparent agreement. Crystal Gray remarked
that she is one of the 130 who volunteered to hand count the
election.

The City Clerk noted that there is going to be a special election
3/8/05 to select Will Toor's replacement when he becomes County
Commissioner. Another man spoke to say he didn't want them to use
electronic voting.


Council,

Boulder County COULD have set a model for the rest of the country IF
it did what ALL who testified at 2 long hearings wanted who were not
on the County or Hart Intercivic payroll: We ALL said DON'T buy an
expensive proprietary, secret electronic system to count votes
BEFORE NIST and IEEE have issued standards for electronic voting.

MOST of us asked for hand-counted paper ballots. This is what's
still used in Canada, Britain, Germany and many other countries.
Hand counting is:

	Public: Poll watchers watch as their neighbors count. Poll
watchers can only stare at a computer now, as the software is
secret.
	Cheaper  $1.82/vote in Canada  vs. $3-6 here
	Most accurate according to an MIT/Caltech study
	Employs lower-income locals, instead of high-priced
outsiders

	MUCH faster than last week's Boulder election: the same poll
workers count their precinct's ballots.

In 3 days I got over 130 Boulder County voters to volunteer over
1000 hours of their time to count this election FOR FREE! If the
county had cooperated, they could have found thousands of volunteers
by asking for them in our utility bills, and other media.

Instead the County spent our millions for an inferior system using
secret software in the scanner, the central tabulator, and the
Windows operating system used by the tabulator. EVERY security
expert knows Windows is the most hackable and unstable system.

If government was by the people, instead of politicians, we would
learn from this hard lesson and change our direction. But the County
shows NO inclination to use hand counting until NIST has established
voting standards.

So, since YOUR images aren't on the line, and since the City is the
largest client of Boulder County Elections, we ask you to either get
the County to do what the citizens want, or for the City to hold
elections for its citizens using hand-counted paper ballots at least
until NIST issues its standards.