Cross-posted at Daily Kos and Open Left.
What’s wrong with New Jersey? The state passed a law requiring voter-verifiable paper records in July of 2005. Now, unless Governor Corzine vetoes legislation passed last week, the Garden State will have an unverifiable Presidential election, cast on insecure, unreliable electronic voting machines. And the nation will have 15 more electoral votes dependent entirely on ones and zeroes.
Pamela Smith of the Verified Voting Foundation gives background in an OpEd piece in today’s Times of Trenton. The gist: instead of choosing a system of voter-marked paper ballots read by optical scanners, New Jersey’s Division of Elections decided to recommend adding $2,000 printers to aging electronic machines that were never designed with paper records in mind.
There is something you can do: whether or not you live in New Jersey, urge Governor Corzine to veto the legislation extending the deadline for voter-verifiable paper records, and propose instead a system of paper ballots, optical scanners, and accessible ballot-marking devices. Action links after the flip.
Click here if you live in New Jersey.
Click here if you live outside New Jersey. This message is tailored to say “hey, I don’t live in your state, but we all depend on your state’s voting process, so please do the right thing.”
This effort comes at a disturbing but opportune time. You may have heard about the anomalies reported in the electronic records of the Sequoia voting machines in New Jersey’s February 5 primary, and Sequoia’s attempts to stop an analysis of the problem by Princeton computer scientists. If not, read here and here. Princeton University computer scientist Edward Felten has an excellent summary of the problem at his blog, Freedom to Tinker.
There will be a number of states using paperless electronic voting machines in November: Georgia, Maryland, and much of Texas and Pennsylania. New Jersey does not have to be one the unverifiable states. Not when the machines’ deficiencies are creating a news buzz, not when there are better voting systems available, and not when the Legislature took action on the problem almost three
years ago.
