Protect our votes

Alice at GOTV has been keeping us up to date on the stuff going on surrounding the use of touchscreen voting machines. Wednesday, she alerted us to the statement issued by the Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia.

Citizens groups are urging Virginia Governor Tim Kaine not to delay implementation of a recently-passed ban on the purchase of new touchscreen voting machines.

[…]

Numerous reports in the media over the past year have highlighted the security flaws inherent in paperless touchscreen machines.

[…]

In seeking a delay of the ban, VEBA [Virginia Electoral Board Association] claimed an “absence of any reports of failure or malfunction of direct record electronic (DRE) machines in Virginia.” The Coalition points out that this is simply not true; DREs fail to start up, freeze during use, or exhibit other problems frequently during elections. But more importantly, “The real problem with paperless DREs is that there can be totally invisible failures and VEBA would not know,” according to Jeremy Epstein, co-founder of Virginia Verified Voting and a member of two Virginia legislative commissions that studied the issue.

Yesterday, Alice followed up with a pointer to this Richmond Times Dispatch story on the issue.

Thanks, Alice, for staying on top of this critical issue. Let Governor Tim Kaine know that we don’t need a delay in getting rid of these machines and that we want every vote to count.

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