The Protect The Vote Two-Step: Tennessee's Myth Breakers campaign

[Fly by night]

I thought you DUers who are working for election reform in your home states might enjoy this cover letter that we will use (starting this weekend) to combat the proliferation of DREs without paper ballots here in the Orange State. This letter will be email blasted to all affinity groups statewide with contact email addresses to the State and Local Government and Finance committees in both houses of our legislature. We are using several sections of "Myth Breakers" as accompanying documentation as well as providing the entire report to key legislators and to all 95 county election commissions. We'd love your comments, suggestions and support.
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The Protect the Vote Two-Step: Let’s Dance Together for Democracy in Tennessee
Sponsored by: Gathering To Save Our Democracy
April 28, 2005

In the next month here in Tennessee, important decisions will be made about the future of our election process and about the voting systems that we will use in the future to cast our votes. These decisions are among the most important ones that our Tennessee legislature and our 95 county election commissions will have to make to preserve our democracy. Their decisions will determine the future integrity of our election process, and the value of our individual votes, for years to come. The time to make necessary changes to protect our vote in Tennessee is NOW.

In recent years, Tennessee has joined with other states in efforts to improve and modernize the voting process. Unfortunately, this upgrading of our voting systems has led to a large-scale adoption of electronic “touch screen” voting machines that record votes electronically but that produce no paper ballot or other visible record of the voter’s choices. Without these paper ballots, the voters cannot check and verify that their votes were counted properly, and nothing is available to be recounted in the event of an election problem or challenge. In 2004, more than half of all votes cast in Tennessee were recorded on these “paperless” machines. These machines have produced many headaches for election officials around the country, as they have malfunctioned or otherwise developed “glitches” that failed to record accurately the intent of the voters. (See the attached handouts, “Election 2004: A Partial List of Incidents Reported in the News” and “No Review for Key Component of Voting System” for a short review of voting machine-related problems. If you want more evidence of election-related problems related to these voting machines, read the 14-page “Facts About Electronic Voting” or the larger booklet, “Myth Breakers”. We would be happy to provide you copies of these reports.)

Here in Tennessee, we wouldn’t deposit our money in a bank that keeps no good records of our transactions or whose records could not be audited. Why then have we entrusted our elections to such a non-verifiable and unaccountable system of paperless voting machines? Today, too many Tennesseans cast their votes on “vapor ballots”, not on paper ballots. For the sake of our democracy and to regain the trust of the voters, this has to change. That’s why we are proposing this Protect The Vote Two-Step and we’re asking you to support two important and necessary improvements in our election process right away, before the 2006 election.

What is the Protect The Vote Two-Step?

1) Voter-Verified Paper Ballots: By 2006, every person who votes in Tennessee should be able to examine a paper ballot showing their choices as part of the voting process. Those voter-verified paper ballots should be the “ballots of record” and should be maintained for purposes of recounts or other election audit purposes. Producing voter-verified paper ballots, and maintaining them as the “ballots of record”, will insure that Tennesseans can be confident that their votes were cast as they were intended. All voting systems judged acceptable for use in the 2006 election must be capable of producing this voter-verified paper ballot.

2) Mandatory Random Manual Recounts: In a nutshell, this step means hand-counting a portion of the ballots in every election in counties that use electronic counting methods in order to insure that our votes were counted properly on those machines. We must do a “quality control” check of the accuracy of the reported vote counts wherever electronic methods are used to count the votes. These small-scale manual recounts (involving 5-10% of the votes cast in a county) will help safeguard the election process from electronic machines which incorrectly count the votes, either through accidental computer problems, mistaken software coding or intentional election fraud.

The Protect the Vote Two-Step is the right place to start to protect and expand voting here in Tennessee. Let’s work together for these necessary reforms to our Tennessee voting process. Regardless of your political affiliation, your support for the Protect the Vote Two-Step will help improve and safeguard the integrity of our elections.

Let’s dance the Protect The Vote Two-Step together to save our democracy here in Tennessee,
while we still can.

[liam_laddie]

1. kick

Superb input, FbN..Thank you!!

[Fly by night]

2. kick

[Stevepol]

3. A succinct and, I believe, accurate way of putting it.

I hope other states will follow suit. Maybe you could email the heads of the political parties of every other state a copy as well.

[Fly by night]

4. kick

[Senator]

5. Suggestion

I would suggest moving up your lead content. Sadly, too many people have been trained to resist reading much.

My suggestion would be to use only the first and last sentences of the first paragraph, then follow it directly with your "What is the Protect The..." section.

The rest of your content could then follow (perhaps subheaded under a "why" or "why now" heading).

Aside from the short-attention-span problem, this arrangement would also begin your letter with your common sense demands. This gets the reader on your side before you ask them to agree that there is a crisis.

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