Texas lawsuit: Lawsuit Pushes for Public Access to Meetings re: E-voting

[rainbow4321]

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_01.php#002212

Austin, TX - On January 19, a Texas court is scheduled to determine whether to force the state's voting examiners to open their meetings to the public. The ACLU of Texas and a Texas voter filed a lawsuit last year, ACLU of Texas v. Geoffrey S. Connor, demanding that the public be admitted to meetings where the examiners decide which electronic voting machines to certify. While these groups waited for a response from the court, the examiners held yet another closed meeting on January 4 and 5.

"There's no technical reason for keeping these meetings closed to the public," said Dan Wallach, a Rice University computer science professor and outspoken critic of electronic voting systems. "By allowing outside experts in security, accessibility, and election procedure to attend the meetings, the voting system vendors will receive better feedback from the ultimate users of the machines. Likewise, if outside experts find problems, the state can demand the vendors address those problems before the machines are used in the field."

Recently, the Texas Safe Voting Coalition obtained videotapes of previous meetings, including one involving Diebold Election Systems, that suggest a lack of rigor and failure to address properly security and certification compliance issues. If the court grants a temporary injunction on the 19th, the voting examiners will have to admit the public to certification meetings.

"Closed meetings about these controversial voting machines create a troubling perception," said Jon Lebkowsky, President of the Electronic Frontier Foundation-Austin. "How can a citizen trust a certification process that's hidden from view? This sort of thing is exactly why we have an Open Meetings Act." If the injunction is granted, the Texas Secretary of State has promised that the state will host a "public forum" where officials will discuss for the first time the issues they considered in their private meeting earlier this month.

[Bill Bored]

1. Well done Texas!

Next step is to sue them to prove that the votes are being counted as cast! (Or they could just put in voter-verified paper ballots and some auditing rules that would detect errors and fraud.)

I think we need to come up with a name for these people. Fascist sounds to academic and there are too many who might think being a fascist is a good idea. Any suggestions? Never mind, I think I'll start a thread on this!