---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:
H.R. 811 has been modified
since you signed on as a sponsor. Activists are now calling the bill “Microsoft
811” because it is so favorable to vendors and software makers. Citizens’
voices were drowned out when Microsoft and voting machine vendors started to
re-write the bill earlier this year.
H.R. 811 allows American
elections to continue to be held with secret software and invisible electronic
votes and voting counting. The bill is worded to deceive you and the American
public, by calling a paper trail a “paper ballot.”
Paper trails are a placebo
unless they are counted to determine election tallies. But they will not be
counted for tallies under H.R. 811, which only requires 3-10% of paper trails
to be used for “recounts” many days after elections -- after the winner has
already been accepted by public opinion based on “trust-based” electronic
tallies. Besides, many voters are incapable of verifying a paper trail, and
vendors have delivered such shoddy printers that many paper trails are unreadable.
Congress must ban DREs
(“touchscreens” or “Direct Recording Electronic” voting machines).
Congress must require voter-marked
paper ballots,which are understandable to all, easily observed by citizens,
and easily manageable to local election staffs.
I urge you to work for –
and vote for -- an amendment to H.R. 811 to ban DRE electronic voting machines.
If H.R. 811 is not amended
to ban DREs, please Vote NO on Microsoft 811.
Sincerely yours,