Letter to State Representative and State Senator
SUBJECT LINE: "Digital Ballot Images Are Public Record Act"
Dear [NAME OF YOUR STATE SENATOR OR STATE REPRESENTATIVE],
We your constituents are asking election officials and our state house members to support a law which will result in the preservation of important electronic documents for the verification of election results: the digital ballot images created of each ballot by modern ballot scanning machines.
We are all familiar with these machines in our state. When you push your ballot into the slot of the machine at your polling place, it takes a jpeg picture of each ballot in milliseconds, and stores it in the memory. It is supposed to be part of the audit trail, which can be examined by citizens who obtain the electronic files.
Although not all jurisdictions have this feature, soon all will. The machines purchased under previous Help America Vote Act (HAVA) grants are in the process of being phased out. They are over 10 years old and were never meant to be in service this long. But some election officials are fighting tooth-and-nail to keep these images secret, and have even claimed the authority to destroy them, clearly against public records laws.
Our law at Digital Ballot Images are Public Record would explicitly declare these images be preserved as part of the public record, and for election departments to post them online, or be made available on DVD.. SINCE BALLOTS ARE ENTIRELY ANONYMOUS, THE IMAGES ARE ANONYMOUS TOO. It is impossible to trace a ballot to any person, as it should be.
This advance in technology can make our elections more secure from any kind of hacking. It has been shown and is in the news every day that our optical scan vote-tabulating systems are extremely prone to hacking. This was demonstrated in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
With a check on the ballot counts like this, it is unlikely hacking will be attempted.
Please incorporate the following principles into state legislation governing all elections, called the December Principles Tier 1:
We your constituents and other citizens in the election integrity movement across ask you to file and actively support a petition for this law to begin its legislative journey through the State House, into law. Our members will be calling you soon to ascertain your position on the issue, and to answer your questions.
Please see the Facebook page for the National Annual Election Integrity Conference 2017 on Oct. 7 - 8 in Berkeley, California: https://www.facebook.com/
Best and Thank You,
Background article, by election integrity activist Bev Harris: http://blackboxvoting.org/ball
Scene from Hacking Democracy, "The Hack"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
CONTACT US: Ralph Lopez: ralphlopez at hotmail dot com
Dear [NAME OF YOUR STATE SENATOR OR STATE REPRESENTATIVE],
We your constituents are asking election officials and our state house members to support a law which will result in the preservation of important electronic documents for the verification of election results: the digital ballot images created of each ballot by modern ballot scanning machines.
We are all familiar with these machines in our state. When you push your ballot into the slot of the machine at your polling place, it takes a jpeg picture of each ballot in milliseconds, and stores it in the memory. It is supposed to be part of the audit trail, which can be examined by citizens who obtain the electronic files.
Although not all jurisdictions have this feature, soon all will. The machines purchased under previous Help America Vote Act (HAVA) grants are in the process of being phased out. They are over 10 years old and were never meant to be in service this long. But some election officials are fighting tooth-and-nail to keep these images secret, and have even claimed the authority to destroy them, clearly against public records laws.
Our law at Digital Ballot Images are Public Record would explicitly declare these images be preserved as part of the public record, and for election departments to post them online, or be made available on DVD.. SINCE BALLOTS ARE ENTIRELY ANONYMOUS, THE IMAGES ARE ANONYMOUS TOO. It is impossible to trace a ballot to any person, as it should be.
This advance in technology can make our elections more secure from any kind of hacking. It has been shown and is in the news every day that our optical scan vote-tabulating systems are extremely prone to hacking. This was demonstrated in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
With a check on the ballot counts like this, it is unlikely hacking will be attempted.
Please incorporate the following principles into state legislation governing all elections, called the December Principles Tier 1:
- Voter-marked paper ballots everywhere, in all states, except asaccommodation for physical disability requires.
- Ballot images, which are anonymous just like the paper ballots, bepreserved and either made available on DVD at nominal cost or postedonline. Ballot images must have unique ID which matches unique ID onphysical ballot. Ballot images must be promptly released to thepublic and the physical ballots must be inspectable by the publicunder freedom of information rights. If option is available, ballotimage scans should be run in grayscale rather than black and white.
- A rollback from large-scale, no-excuse mail-in voting. Havingbatches of ballots sitting in election departments out of the sight ofthe public is asking for trouble. With broad accommodation for excuselike work, deployment, handicap, and all the other situations wherethe law is already pretty well developed, and local.
- Statistically sound, meaningful audit after every election,precincts to be chosen at random after closing of the polls, notpreselected, subjected to hand count of ballots, not only re-runningthem through the machines.
We your constituents and other citizens in the election integrity movement across ask you to file and actively support a petition for this law to begin its legislative journey through the State House, into law. Our members will be calling you soon to ascertain your position on the issue, and to answer your questions.
Please see the Facebook page for the National Annual Election Integrity Conference 2017 on Oct. 7 - 8 in Berkeley, California: https://www.facebook.com/
Best and Thank You,
Background article, by election integrity activist Bev Harris: http://blackboxvoting.org/ball
Scene from Hacking Democracy, "The Hack"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
CONTACT US: Ralph Lopez: ralphlopez at hotmail dot com
Comments
Post a Comment