Austin, 2/28: 8:30 am. Public Voting System Examination.

[crispini]

Can someone pllllleeeease go to this and report back? The Technology Committee of Citizens for Equality, who has given significant input into Pena's evoting bill, would really like to be kept informed

The ACLU and EFF recently won a preliminary injunction in its lawsuit against the State of Texas concerning whether the Texas Open Meetings Act applies to the meetings of Texas' Election Examiners. As part of the ACLU's victory, the state of Texas will be holding its first ever public voting system examination (URLs below). Any vendor who wants to sell a system in Texas, or even ship an upgrade to its existing software, is required to go through this process.

The public meeting will be Monday morning, February 28, from 8:30am noon, in the 2nd floor conference room of the Rusk Building (208 E. 10th St., Austin). Products from three vendors will be discussed: Diebold, ES&S, and AccuPoll. The AccuPoll system includes a ballot printer. If it's certified in Texas, that will make it the first "voter-verifiable paper ballot" electronic voting system available in our state. Diebold and ES&S are already certified in Texas and will be discussing relatively minor software upgrades that, so far as we know, make no significant improvements to the security of their systems.

Original post is here; I asked the OP to post in this forum but have not heard back so far.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x333867

[GOPisEvil]

1. Crap! I can't go.

I actually have to be at work that day. I can't even (cough, cough) take a sick day. I have too much to do.

[Melissa G]

2. I'm going to try to catch the 1st hour n/t

[crispini]

3. sweet! keep us informed.

if there's anyway you can find out if the meeting will be in the public record somewhere or something that would rock! :yourock:

[Zan_of_Texas]

4. Thanks for posting here, Crispini.

I had thought about it, but was way short of time when I posted the original in the Election section.

Hope there is a decent contingent to challenge the crap that's been going on in vendor selection in Texas.

[tavalon]

5. Fascinating

and I happen to be back in Austin right now with nothing much on my agenda for Monday. I'll go. Specifically, what would they like to know about, so I have an angle. I suck at remembering every last little thing, but if I have a specific focus........

Should I dig up a suit for this shindig?

[crispini]

6. Probably just slacks would be fine, I think.

We're doing business casual for our PPNT lobby day so I think that's acceptable.

I shot an email out to the group and if I get anything specific I'll let you know. We, personally, are very interested in tabulator security around ES&S because that's our county machines. (Dallas)

However, if nobody else asks, it would be EXTREMELY funny to ask the Diebold rep what they plan to do to prevent a re-occurence of the Collin county incident where a couple of hundred e-votes got "stuck" in a memory card and they had to be SENT TO CANADA to be read. That's completely unacceptable IMO. (And it would be a damn entertaining question to ask.)

Ooo, and we wanna hear all about the new gizmos from the new vendor that come with paper ballots. I think we want to encourage our local office to trash ES&S and buy these bad boys if they are good.

[Melissa G]

7. Went,Testified, picked up materials and split right after Accupoll n/t

[crispini]

8. Awesome! What did you say?

What were the materials? How did the Accupoll thingy sound?

[Melissa G]

9. i think the materials I picked up were

down loadable from the original post in the election forum. They started 15 minutes earlier than the original time we had posted so i missed the Accupoll presentation. There were some spiffy professors from Rice who gave excellent testimony and asked penetrating questions of the Acupoll folks that i had a chance to listen to. There was an attorney i remembered from the re redistricting fight who kept giving them extra time.(An excellent reason to go even if you are disinclined to speak.)
I felt under prepared. I had emailed the contact person for the Sunday meeting but did not get a reply.
I said I was a blogger but not one of the very knowledgeable ones with all the figures at her fingertips. I cited the study with the 30% figure of folks who did not have confidence in their votes being counted properly. I said in our crowd of bloggers who were doing the documentation the belief in frawd was closer to 100%. I cited the 40,000 EIRS documented incidents. I told them that we were finding the discrepancies mostly in the tabulators and in vote flipping. I told them we had trouble accounting for 8 million votes in the last election. I questioned that 80 plus percent of the vote should be counted by two republican brothers companies. I talked about the importance of what they were doing in the preservation of democracy. Afterwards, I gave a bunch of folks info about our election forum at DU. I had printed out one of the better threads on election fraud and I gave links to the good testifying attorneys. That is pretty much the short version...

[rrocketto]

10. I really wish I could go

sounds really interesting... thanks, but sorry