Questions for Voter Participation Groups

Why are so many Good Government Groups:

· Complacent about private corporations counting our votes?

· Uninformed about the use of computerized voting to target minorities for “blank votes”?

· Unwilling to inform themselves, or meet with activists for paper ballots, optical scanners, and accessible ballot-markers for voters with disabilities or minority languages?

· Waiting for someone else to take a position or leadership on “who’s counting the votes”

· Convinced that the voter populations they serve will continue to trust our elections and turn out to vote -- even after election returns that are obviously wrong?

There is no “neutral” stand -- if we don’t oppose electronic voting this year, we will have it in New York State next year.

FACTS:

• There has never been an audit of an electronic election. There is NO OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE that the machines work, & hundreds of failures that show it doesn’t.
• New York’s mandated 3% spot-check of the paper trail leaves 97% of votes to be counted in secret.
• The FBI says 87% of companies’ computers were broken into, 44% by insiders. Do you think our Boards of Elections will beat the odds? Especially if they refuse to admit there’s a problem? Especially if they look forward to state-mandated vendor assistance for the first 5 years of computerized elections?
• With computers, one insider can control an entire state election and not leave any evidence of tampering.

For a briefing on electronic voting/paper ballots/optical scanners/accessible ballot-markers, call: Teresa Hommel, www.WheresThePaper.org, admin@wheresthepaper.org

Inform yourself: www.VoteTrustUSA.org www.VotersUnite.org www.VerifiedVoting.org www.WheresThePaper.org and www.nyvv.org (New Yorkers for Verified Voting)