BBV: Disability rights group *opposes* verifiable paper trail

[KamaAina]

The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) is normally a pretty progressive group, too. Here, though, they appear to have bought the (GOP) party line hook, line and sinker:

http://www.aapd.com/dvpmain/votemachines/aapdballots.html

The clique of VVPB supporters disputes the fact that touch screen voting machines are safe, secure, and reliable. They theorize that it is likely that computerized voting systems will accidentally miscount the ballots or that a rogue programmer will steal an election. Therefore, every touch screen must be attached to a printer and give the voter a paper ballot. If implemented in state initiatives, VVPB will violate the letter and spirit of HAVA by once again denying people with disabilities their right to a secret and independent vote. Not only will the rights of people with disabilities be stripped, but the costs of local elections will rise significantly with no promise or guarantee of future federal funding to absorb these new costs.

The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) opposes VVPB for four primary reasons:

It does not substantially address the issue of election fraud.
It violates the accessibility requirements under HAVA.
It will raise the costs of local elections and threaten Title III funding.
Touch screen voting systems that provide a VVPB do not exist, have not been tested in the real world, and are not certified.

As to accessibility, why not have each polling place (not necessarily each machine) equipped with a Braille embosser (printer)? And of course we all know that there are NO rogue programmers in the world, except for the ones who wrote MSBlaster and sobig </sarcasm>

And finally,

In addition to these factors, there is also the concern that none of the DRE systems certified by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) specifically for HAVA funds have the capacity to produce a paper ballot.

Gee, what rotten luck! What were the chances of that happening?</sarcasm>

Once again I fear that the disability community is being used by the far right to further its own agenda, much as the religious right has done on assisted suicide issues and, to some extent, on abortion.

[pw]

1. You would think they would realize

that they're the ones most at risk for not having their votes counted.

[Wwagsthedog]

2. What is the nature of these (AAPD) people's disability?

n/t

[KamaAina]

6. AAPD is a cross-disability organization

that is, they advocate for people with all types of disabilities, including blindness, deafness, paralysis, and so on.

Unless, of course, you meant that their disability was their inability to see through the smokescreen surrounding BBV... :evilgrin:

[seemslikeadream]

3. I just called Jim

but he's on vacation till after Labor Day. We'll talk next week.

[Pastiche423]

17. Who is Jim?

Is he disabled, and if he is, what is his disabilty?

My biggest question is, how many PDW did he poll to decide that disability rights group *opposes* verifiable paper trail? Does that disability rights group speak for all PDW?

Would you please answer these questions, if you can, before I shoot off my email to him.

Thanks!

:mad:

[jimmynochad]

18. Jim is blind

He is big on using his disability for people to feel sorry for him. Read my other post in this thread to read more about him.

[cprise]

4. What are they thinking?

That because it's a computer it will print your name and SSN along with your vote?

[Pastiche423]

5. What a crock!

The majority of PWD that I know, have voted absentee ballot for years! I did until I moved to Oregon, where everyone votes by mail.

I would like to see a breakdown on which PWD are against paper ballots. Is it just the blind? Help me out here.

This makes no sense to me.

[KamaAina]

7. Excellent point. Absentee voting opens up another whole can of worms.

Think back to the manipulation of the military absentee votes in FL, for instance.

Also note that HI had by far the highest proportion of absentee and early (walk-in) votes in its history in 2002, and is coincidentally (?) saddled with a Repuke governor* for the first time in 40 years... :tinfoilhat:

[preciousdove]

8. The trouble with a lot of Non-profits

Some groups were set up strictly to counter the real advocacy groups. "Trust us we can help." I am sure that this is one of them.
And then the nature of non-profits make this kind of thing happen too.

When an MS support group in Wisconsin tried an experiment with a clinic in that area to see if antibiotic treatment would be of any benefit the first thing that happened is that the State MS society flew the President and a doctor up to talk them out of it. This was before the current crop of medicines were being routinely used. When a third, about nine of the support group taking antibiotics for 6 months to 2 years made almost complete recoveries. When the results were reported to the State MS society the support group was immediately dropped and threatened them with lawsuits if they mentioned their association with the MS Support Group. All members of the SG had had positive diagnoses of MS. At least 50% of MS in the US is spirochetal in origin. Spirochetes are killed with high dose long term antibiotics. But they had so much investeted in the virus and unknown theories that a simple answer was a threat.

Also a lot of fake advocacy groups were set up to counter real groups. The American Lyme Disease Association is set up to protect the interests of the Lyme genome patent, test and vaccine patent holders. They testify against other doctors and patients at insurance hearings. They are tight with the Pharmaceutical company the CDC and NIH.

I just learned a year ago that the CDC and NIH are arms of the US military and everyone who works there has a commission. We were forutnate to get an MD who had a law degree and a top US secruity clearance, had worked on Lyme on both coasts and in Wisconsin. She managed to stop a lot of outrageous things California was trying to do such as making all Lyme Disease discussions in the state health department secret.

I emailed Jim with my take on all this before I read the whole message.

(Don't get me started on Plum Island, bio-warfare and the young NYT journalist that died of a brown recluse spider bite. 3 medical abstracts describe doctors making this wrong diagnosis in NY when the spiders do not live there.)

[KamaAina]

12. Actually, if there is an "Astro-Turf" disability group, it's probably NOD

the National Organization on Disability.

Its directors include (gulp) Rich De Vos, founder of Amway (yes, the Amway that is considered by some to qualify as a cult!). :scared:

http://www.nod.org/content.cfm?id=62

Jack Valenti, in his I (heart) Censorship T-shirt, is there, too.

And then, of course, there's the Honorary Chairman*, presently on yet another interminable vacation in Crawford.

Edit: In the past, AAPD has been fairly reliably progressive. Its Justice for All mailing list:

http://www.jfanow.org

was recently chastised by some of its readers (not me!) for Republican-bashing!

[BevHarris]

9. Not just a crock, but lies

Touch screen voting systems that provide a VVPB do not exist, have not been tested in the real world, and are not certified.

Avante has been certified for quite a while and has been used in elections in Sacramento County, California. Avante also has a provision in the system for the blind to verify the ballot using a ballot reader and headphones. Accupoll also prints a paper trail, and there is a new one, starts with a "P"...I think we've got three companies that do touch screens with paper trails.

It violates the accessibility requirements under HAVA.
Yeah right. You can vote on a touch screen but if you load paper into the printer, that violates accessibility? Give me a break.

It will raise the costs of local elections and threaten Title III funding.

Printers are already in the touch screen machines. Cost of paper for a large urban precinct: $15.

Bev Harris

[PATRICK]

10. The inevitable mean question

On the line of preciousdove's reasoning is it fait to ask if any spevcial funding has beenprovided to this organization? The rationale is over the top to the point of deliberate ignorance and flat out wrong. The underlying point of making a compromised and defrauded actiivity equally accessible to the disabled only lets them join the legion of suckers in a meaningless show.

The tactics seem set. Finding ANy type of support for noble Diebold no matter how ignorant. Have them spout the TV commercial sales line WHILE sneering at detractors. Stall. Bury the facts. Introduce arbitators(SAIC) and discussions where penitent Diebold promises to fix everything(ehich ironically is the chief complaint). Obfuscate. Stall.

Meanwhile the half-wise, half-bought, all indoctrinated unqualified heads of various organizations backing and buying this crap do not, choose not to, recognize how much they cannot know about the digital universe. Look under the hood? Nuts, they have already gone into denial about the possibility of being hoodwinked by the PR guts and the "voter reform" Republicans. This is a HARD stage for people to get over. That their judgment has been wrong, that they have been foolishly had. The naifs trust the wrong people, Bush rusts the Right machines.

And the clock is ticking, machines still in place or moving in. If you only hold the line in states still fair and democratic that would be something but the breakthrough impact has not reached critical mass yet. Remember too, once fraud puts someone in, the power of incumbency
takes over. Notch by notch this invisible theft becomes entrenched. IF people get disgruntled about these new but clunky gizmos under a suspicious cloud, the next GOP stampede is already set for the Internet- already rushing ahead against all rational objection.

You might think that at least, the very least the political organizations of the Dems and smaller parties would be the first with the most. Their failure to use their minds flexibly adapted to real science is killing America.

[PATRICK]

11. OK quick study of site

No list of donors. The board has some interesting names like Tony Coelho, Edward Kennedy Jr of Connecticut. Most interesting is their high visibility connection to PC Squared the two Bush administration keynote speakers at the WCD convention in Orlando, a proclivity to trust the new tech solutions for the disabled which are many and good, and try to work with the government. They have some critique on Sen. Bond concerning vote reform legislation.

Overall I get the impression this is yet another well meaning organization bulling ahead with its issues, pleased by tech advances in general and impatient to spread their implementation. I hope Bev and others contact this Jim Dickson politely, supportive and eager to learn how to make this better. Or other board members. Regardless of beliefs, Dickson is making BIG reasoning mistakes that raise four alarms, such as touting the record of NO FRAUD compared to paper systems. Well, there is one reason whether there is fraud or not. You can't prove it. And there always is pressure to fraud.

I like the example of the Venetian great families trying to end corruption and partisanship by a complex multiple lottery system of many drawings, controlled bowls and entries for the Dogeship. It was ended when they discovered it was rigged, and probably discovered when the RESULTS became suspicious to the losing families. More on the ball than our Dems it seems.

[hunter]

13. The "pigeon drop" scam...

Patrick said, This is a HARD stage for people to get over. That their judgment has been wrong, that they have been foolishly had.

In a "pigeon drop" the victim may refuse to acknowledge that any crime has been committed, or will be too embarassed to assist in the investigation.

Some of the people caught up in the Black Box Voting scandals will be actual criminals, but many of them, especially public officials, will be victims of the "pigeon drop."

[gristy]

14. Vogue Election Systems

I think is adding the feature to read a paper ballot and convert it to speech.

[Eloriel]

15. Sigh

Okay, so we go with their program, so we're careful not to "deny people with disabilities their right to a secret and independent vote," and in the process we deny a LOT of people their right to ANY vote, or the right vote.

Yeah, makes perfect sense to me.


The clique of VVPB supporters disputes the fact that touch screen voting machines are safe, secure, and reliable. They theorize that it is likely that computerized voting systems will accidentally miscount the ballots or that a rogue programmer will steal an election.

Not all that much theory to it, from my standpoint.

Clique. Well, my high school dream comes true. Who else wanted to be in a clique in h.s.?

American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) opposes VVPB for four primary reasons:

It does not substantially address the issue of election fraud.

It sure as hell addresses one very serious, impossible-to-detect (since no one but the companies ever get to look at the code) avenue of election fraud. Are there other ways to steal votes Yeah, and there always have been. Probably always will be. But the rest aren't on quite as massive a scale as is possible with computerized voting.

violates the accessibility requirements under HAVA.

Then we'll have to change HAVA. And do something different for accessibility.

will raise the costs of local elections and threaten Title III funding.

Maybe we could stop spending $4billion a month on "incidentals."

ch screen voting systems that provide a VVPB do not exist,

which isn't to say they can't exist...
haven't been tested in the real world,

we can fix that too...

and are not certified.

Oh, honey, if you only knew what a joke certification is, you wouldn't embarrass yourself with this line.

Ridiculous.

I can completely empathasize with the plight of the disabled, but NOT when it threatens MY vote, and your vote, and thousands of people's votes (possibly hundreds of thousands, even millions).

Eloriel

[jimmynochad]

16. Some info on Jim and others

Jim crashed (almost literally) the Voter Verifiable Elections meeting in Denver. He brought several disabled people with him. After the shouting died down, he debated David Dill and Rebecca Mercuri. It was pointed out that TruVote and Avante are certified, have paper trails, and are ADA compliant. Accupoll and Populex are also systems (not certified) that can do both. Jim basically backed down. The Avante rep (some tall football player looking guy) talked to Jim after the meeting and I overheard that Jim has tried the Avante system several times but it took the rep several minutes of coaxing for Jim to admit trying it.

The big rumor (only confirmed by two people) was that Jim had a meal with an ESS rep prior to the outburst. It was interesting that the interuption of the meeting occured after ESS talked and that the ESS guy was missing from the room during the outburst.

Can anyone find a way to look at tax records or something that could show that vendors donate to his group?

[seemslikeadream]

19. Testimony of James C. Dickson

before Committe on Rules and Administration United States Senate
June 27, 2001

.....I am Chair of the Disabilty Vote Project, a coalition of 36 national disability-related organizations that worked for over a year to increase the political participation of Americans with disabilities.......

We need accurate, effective and accessible voting systems. These systems already exist..... Texas has already led the way. In 1999, the state legislature passed and Governor Bush signed into law legislation that requires any new voting system purchased to be fully accessible to voters with disabilities and the system must offer a secret and independent ballot to voters who are blind.....

http://rules.senate.gov/hearings/2001/062701_dickinson.htm

Would it help to go directly to those 36 national disability-related organizations?

Nice that Governor Bush was leading the way.

[ibegurpard]

20. Absolutely astonishing

What point is there in guaranteeing access to a system that is so potentially vulnerable to fraud that it has the potential to nullify that access?