-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Ensuring Election Integrity Is Not a Partisan Issue Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 10:39:44 -0700 From: Cindy Cohn <cindy@private> To: Declan@private Hi Declan, Here is what I submitted to the WSJ in response to the e-voting piece today. An earlier version of this is up on the EFF blog at: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001739.php Cindy Election Integrity is Not a Partisan Issue Over the past week we've seen several media stories suggesting that the electronic voting machine issue is partisan. My organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been one of the many calling for additional security measures for these machines, including a voter-verified paper ballot. While there are certainly folks who would like to portray it that way, including Jeb Bush, it's not true. Far more importantly, it's not true in terms of who should care. In a recent court case, EFF presented evidence of 18 serious direct recording electronic (DRE) problems over the past two years, and in the majority of the cases that we've seen, electronic voting systems don't fail in any partisan way -- they just fail. In Virginia, for instance, the DRE machine switched one out of every 100 votes for the Republican to the Democrat. And given the many ways that they can be cracked, no political party has a "lock" on programmers who could sway an election. It's especially puzzling to see this "partisan" spin emerge now, in the face of a number of Republican and bipartisan efforts to ensure the integrity of our elections: * Senator John Ensign, a Republican from Nevada, is sponsoring the leading Senate bill to establish a voter-verified paper ballot (VVPB). He has been a stalwart on these issues since long before most of us even thought about them. * The National Federation of Republican Women supports the use of paper trail machines. * Congressman Rush Holt's (D-NJ) bill, HR 2239, has bipartisan co-sponsorship, and chapters of political parties from across the spectrum have endorsed it. * Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute endorses VVPB, and EFF has been working with several other conservative groups on the issue. Just a week ago, EFF helped a bipartisan group of voters in California's Riverside County in an ongoing effort to recount electronic votes in a very close election. While the race itself was nonpartisan, the candidate demanding the recount, Linda Soubirous, is not left-wing. When e-voting is dismissed as partisan, voters from both parties lose. Election integrity is far too important an issue to be sidetracked by this diversion. And when the media falls for this sort of spin, they fall into the hands of people who want to push the very real problems with electronic voting back under the rug. The bi-partisan recount lawsuit filed in Riverside County, CA: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/media/releases/article.asp?id%14 Linda Soubirous with John Ashcroft at a COPS event http://www.nleomf.com/WhatsNew/PressReleases/vigil03.html EFF's amicus brief detailing the 18 DRE incidents: http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/Benavidez/20040518-benavidez-Amicus.pdf Virginia incident that hurt a Republican: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51595-2004May24_2.html Ornstein's piece: http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.20129,filter./news_detail.asp Jeb Bush in the Miami Herald on July 10 (I don't have the link handy): ''Every time that liberal Democrats say that the election is in question, every vote should count, it is an effort to try to mobilize their base and that's it,'' Bush said. ``And it should be discounted, deeply, because it is purely politics.'' -- ********************************************* Cindy Cohn Cindy@private Legal Director www.eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation 454 Shotwell Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415-436-9333 x 108 (tel) 415-436-9993 (fax) Join EFF today! <https://secure.eff.org/> _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Jul 29 2004 - 23:32:32 PDT