UTAH to buy into the Paperless Voting SCAM - ACTION NEEDED!

[the ether]

I thought I would bring you up--to-date on what is happening in Utah re.
e-voting.

You may know that in 2002 Oct Congress passed the Help America Vote Act
(HAVA) that requires any states using punch-card ballots (that's Utah) to
"upgrade" to e-voting machines or scanning machines by January 1, 2006.

The last public hearing for the Utah State Voting Equipment Selection Cmte
is July 1st (I don't know where but perhaps it is published on
http://www.elections.utah.gov) and the RFP will be made public on July 6th
just 5 days later! It appears that the County Clerks are leaning towards
purchasing an e-voting system with no paper ballot.

I just spoke with my own County Clerk. The 29 counties are in charge of
making an RFP to release July 6th for the new systems. The County Clerk
I spoke with said that paper ballots were too expensive and printers would
break down and be troublesome and that there is no need for them because
voting systems are like ATMs (reliable). (Perhaps she has never heard of
all the ATMs that were hacked and all the money that was stolen.) She
said that security breaches were only possible if the EVMs (e-voting
machines) are hooked to the Internet, and that there is only 1 program on
the EVMs so they are really simple, and other misperceptions. She said
that the one county in Utah which previously used scanning machines with
paper ballots complained a lot about them and they are not likely to
select those in Utah. She and I both agreed that it would be best just to
continue to use the punch-card ballots which have a lower error rate than
touch screen machines according to an MIT/CalTech study. But HAVA does
not permit that and punch cards will be unavailable in the near future.


The Election Equipment Selection Committee includes 8 County Clerks (Salt
Lake (2), Iron, Carbon, Weber, Davis, Box Elder) and the following:

Amy Naccarato, Director of Elections, 801-538-1041
Val Oveson, Chief IO of Utah
Bill Gibson, Div of Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Liz McCoy, Disability Advocate, Disability Law Center
Ray Palmer, Director of Information Tech, State of Utah

So, if you feel that proprietary (Not open source) paperless e-voting
machines are a sure-fire way to have our votes Mis-counted (Refer to
www.verifiedvoting.org by CS Professor David Dill, Stanford U for a 52
page list of cases since 2000 where e-voting systems have failed and not
counted votes accurately), then now would be a good time to call and make
an appointment to talk to your local County Clerk. (even those not on the
committee will select voting equipment for your county and have input to
the committee).

You might refer them to http://votersunite.org "Myth Breakers" report, or
http://verifiedvoting.org or to Alan Dechert's new project in Open Source
voting systems http://openvotingconsortium.org

The sales reps for e-voting equipment is mostly who bends the ear of these
committee members, so they really need input from knowlegeable folks like
you guys.

Also, I am going to be interviewed on KPCW Tuesday at about 5 p.m. in Park
City, UT on e-voting, so any advice you have on what to say, please send
it this way.

It is not too late to stop this mistake in Utah. The County Clerks are
generally nice people who want to do the right thing, who need to hear
from you experts and the public to counter the e-voting machine sales
reps.

Please pass this on to anyone who might be interested.