---Put your Name and Address here---
September 4, 2007
Honorable ----put Representative’s Name here---
United States House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
By Fax: ---put fax number here, look it up here ---
Dear Representative:
HR811 allows invisible electronic votes to continue to be used in American elections. It is worded to deceive you and the American public, by calling a paper trail a “paper ballot.”
When electronic voting machines, called “touchscreens” or “DREs,” are used, with or without a paper trail, our election night tallies are tabulated from invisible electronic votes that no one has ever seen – not the voter, not any election observer.
Even if 10% of paper trails are “re-counted” weeks after an election, this would mean that 90% of tallies would be based solely on "trust" that the computers worked right and all invisible counting was honest!
The recent Dan Rather Report "The Trouble with Touch Screens" showed new evidence that two major voting system vendors knowingly delivered defective machines and ballots to American jurisdictions for use in our elections. For example, ES&S delivered thousands of DREs, knowing that 30-40% had defective touchscreens. These machines were used in the Christine Jennings race in Florida in November, 2006, where 18,000 votes were lost. www.hd.net/drr227.html
The recent scandals in California are more evidence 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
Our country has wasted money to purchase DREs, but it is better to accept the loss of money and save our democracy!
The Holt election reform bill, H.R. 811, is scheduled for a vote on September 5. I urge you to work for - and vote for -- an amendment to HR811 to ban use of DRE electronic voting machines immediately as of the passage of this bill.
Sincerely yours,