---Put your Name and Address here---

August 29, 2007

Honorable ----put name of your US Senator here---

United States Senate

Washington D.C. 20510

By Fax: ---put your Senators fax number here, look it up here ---

Dear Senator:

Dan Rather's report "The Trouble with Touch Screens" shows new evidence that two major voting system vendors knowingly delivered defective machines and ballots to American jurisdictions for use in our elections.

-- ES&S delivered thousands of touchscreen voting systems knowing that 30-40% had defective touchscreens. ES&S touchscreens were used in the Christine Jennings race in Florida's 13th Congressional race in November, 2006, where 18,000 votes were lost.

-- Sequoia used paper that was known to be defective to print the punchcard ballots for Palm Beach county in November, 2000, and instructed their employees to prepare the ballots in a defective manner. This caused the "hanging chad" problems that not only prevented many votes from being counted, but was also trumpeted in the media and used as a reason to replace paper-based ballots with invisible electronic ballots, courtesy of the Help America Vote Act in passed in 2002.

Archived program www.hd.net/drr227.html

Transcript www.wheresthepaper.org/HDnet070814DanRatherTranscript.htm

VoterAction call for Congressional Investigation www.voteraction.org/release.html

Sequoia Fails to Answer Questions Raised in Dan Rather Report www.bradblog.com/?p=4998

Congress must investigate the information that Dan Rather revealed!

Congress must also take the next step—ban the use of invisible electronic ballots. Electronic voting machines and privatization have turned our elections into a "confidence game,” because invisible ballots and secret procedures can never be trusted.

"Voter confidence" needs to be based on observed handling of votes and vote-counting. Voter-marked paper ballots enable voters to directly observe their own votes. They also enable ballot-handling and counting to be easily observed as well as filmed with feeds to the internet.

Paper trails do not solve the problems caused by electronic voting machines (touchscreens or DRE "Direct Recording Electronic" voting systems). Regardless of the waste of money that was spent to purchase them, such systems are an invitation to fraud -- the computer screen and paper trail are placebos because neither is counted to determine election tallies. Most voters are incapable of verifying a paper trail http://chil.rice.edu/research/pdf/EverettDissertation.pdf, and vendors have delivered such shoddy printers that many paper trails are unreadable.

Most of our local election administrators are neither interested in, nor capable of, managing computer security. And the recent scandals in California show that private vendors are not the proper guardians of democracy -- they delivered defective, illegal equipment, and local election administrators were none the wiser. Meanwhile these same election administrators have made clear their resistance to implementing security procedures appropriate to computer technology. www.wheresthepaper.org/news.html#CA_TopToBottomReview

Doug Lewis of the Election Center has testified to both houses of Congress that election administrators don't wish to audit their computer equipment. www.wheresthepaper.org/DougLewisTestimonyJuly25_2007.pdf

www.wheresthepaper.org/HouseAdminTestimonyDougLewis3_20_2007.pdf

Congress must require the use of voter-marked paper ballots! Paper ballots are understandable to all, easily observed by citizens, and easily manageable to our local election administrators.

The Feinstein bill, S1487 fails to ban DRE electronic voting machines. I urge you speak with Senator Feinstein and to work among your colleagues in the U. S. Senate for a ban on use of DRE electronic voting machines.

Sincerely yours,