BBV bill being drafted.

[Kelvin Mace]

I met this morning along with Andrew Silver and Joyce McCloy with Senator Kinnaird about introducing a bill to prohibit "paperless" voting machines and address other issues related to voting machine vendor practices (proprietary code, technicians working on voting machines unsupervised, last-minute patches, etc).

A bill is being drafted and I will post links as soon as I have a copy.

Also, in a stunning about-face, the editor of the High Point Enterprise (very conservative) has now joined the critics in questioning BBV and BBV vendors.

In a Sunday editorial he wrote:

In Johnson's "Making votes count" story, Guilford County Board of Elections Director George Gilbert said critics "are at best misinformed, at worst alarmist."

Further study and recent revelations indicate we were a bit hasty in saying, in an editorial, that Gilbert probably was correct in his assessment, as both David Allen and Richard Stimson, a couple of High Pointers who have studied the subject in depth, quickly pointed out.

At the end of April and the beginning of May, because of (a) opposition by computer experts to the electronic voting machines now on the market, (b) action taken by government officials in some states, (c) situations that have exposed the flaws and vulnerability of electronic voting machines, and (d) an electronic voting machine manufacturer who seems to be seriously politically challenged, the topic seems to be cooking on nearly everybody's front burner.

Allow me to list some of the negative twists this story has taken:

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=11616043&BRD=1332&PAG=461&dept_id=414363&rfi=8&xb=murit

He then went on to list the problems with Diebold, et al.

My father-in-law has read this paper for 30 years and said he cannot remember ever seeing this guy backtrack.

David Allen
Publisher, CEO, Janitor
Plan Nine Publishing
High Point, NC
http://www.plan9.org
http://www.blackboxvoting.com

[blm]

1. Great report.

Hope to join the efforts in NC soon

[Kelvin Mace]

2. You're welcome any time.

[cprise]

3. The Triangle area no doubt

...is beginning to grow in influence. Lots of tech-savvy people work there.

[struggle4progress]

4. How do you beat the fact that GA can't really do anything ...

that didn't cross-over before the end of last year's session?

[jdj]

5. They are asking everyone to start calling their state reps.

I got this e-mail from [e-mail].

here is the address to find your reps:

http://www.ncleg.net/GIS/Representation/Who_Represents_Me/Who_Represents_Me.html

From the e-mail
.... " It does not need to be ready before May 20, so we can expect it to be written by then, and then it will need to be introduced by May 27.  I wondered whether it helps for us to call our representatives about it before it has a number and is introduced.  Ms. Young said that it definitely is worthwhile to let them know that they should support a v-vpb (Following  David's urging, we decided to say voter-verified "paper ballot," rather than "paper audit trail," to be sure that the official count will be of the ballots, which shall be paper - and the paper will not just be available for a recount which may or may not occur.)  But we cannot specify the bill that they should support until it exists.

To lobby effectively once the bill is introduced, we need to identify key legislators and find people in their districts.  It is generally useless to lobby a legislator without being from their district - waste of breath. "