Protect your vote in Centre County!

Why is the type of voting machine important to me?

As American citizens, we are very proud of our representative democracy and our right to vote. We like to think that our votes do count. Many of us take it for granted that our votes will be properly processed and counted. Newer technologies for voting sound great and they can be very useful and effective, if they are properly implemented and if they provide a good paper audit trail. Most every retail business in the USA uses some type of electronic system to record purchases. These systems vary widely, yet most all of them have a very strong audit trail, including paper receipts. Many of the electronic voting systems out there would like us to do away with a paper audit trail all-together. There is no good argument for doing this, especially with the myriad issues and questions surrounding recent elections. A federal law called HAVA or the “Help America Vote Act” is purportedly designed to help with these issues and is providing some funding to states, which is why this issue has come before us at this point. No electronic media is failsafe. Paper is not failsafe either of course, but it is a good lowest common denominator that anyone can use to determine how someone voted. This type of audit trail makes voting fraud or “fixing” the vote more difficult. In a purely electronic medium where you vote is stored in some type of database (with Diebold systems it is Microsoft Access!) it becomes much easier to fix, as there is no “physical” auditable trail to look at if fraud is suspected. No system is completely secure, but with more transparency, and an easy to follow paper audit trail, we can move in the right direction with our new voting machines. The direction we should go is clear in the acronym SARA. We need a system that is Secure, Accurate, Recountable, and Accessible. We also need what is being called (in the mad rush to have an acronym for everything) VVPT or VVPAT a “Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail”.

You can read more online at the following web sites:

http://www.votepa.us/

http://www.wheresthepaper.org/

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/

http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

http://www.votetrustusa.org/

http://blackboxvoting.com/

http://www.progressivevote.org/

http://www.electronic-vote.org/

http://www.fec.gov/hava/hava.htm

http://www.hava.state.pa.us/hava/site/default.asp

Please SIGN THE PETITION if you live in Centre County.