New Hampshire: All of the state will be voting on a paper ballot-based voting system.
New Mexico: All of the state will be voting on a paper ballot-based voting system.
Ohio: Most of the state will be voting on a touchscreen system that includes a voter verified paper record. Second most common is a paper-based system counted on an optical scan machine. A handful of counties provide a mix of voting systems.
Pennsylvania: Most of the state will be voting on touchscreen systems without any paper record. The next most common system will be a paper ballot-based voting system. And a handful of counties will be voting on a mixed system of paperless and paper-based voting.
Virginia: Most of the state will be voting on paperless touchscreen voting machines. Some of the state will be voting on touchscreen systems with a voter verified paper record.
Wisconsin: Most of the state will be voting on a paper-based system either with or without touchscreens. The next most common will be a paper ballot-based system. One county mixed systems with and without a paper record.
The challenge with paperless electronic voting is that the machines make mistakes or can be programmed to corrupt the election result, but without a paper record there will be no way to see the corruption. The smoothest election can actually be the most corrupt.
The Good News and What We Can Do
There is an active voting integrity movement in the Untied States. Most of the organizations with a grass roots base are state-based organizations. As a result there are now places where people can get involved in working to make sure their elections have as much integrity as possible. (See links at end of article.)One thing you can do is tell Congress you want a voter verified paper ballot.
You can write Congress by clicking here. This will also get you in the TrueVote.US data base so you can be kept informed of major developments in voting integrity and activism to secure our elections.
Litigation in Ohio is being pursued challenging electronic voting in the most important battleground state in the nation. The RICO suit is based on the testimomy of Karl Rove's IT guru from 2000 until sometime last year, Stephen Spoonamore. The attorneys, Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis, intend to depose Karl Rove, Bob Ney and other alleged perpetrators of Republican election fraud.
The Election Assistance Commission has urged all voters to check to make sure they are registered to vote. This is something you should do and urge everyone you know to do. You can register on-line by clicking here. The Obama campaign has set up a web page that allows you to check your registration online. If you are having problems with registration contact Election Protection at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (687-8683).
Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has put out a tool kit that can provide you everything you need to know to be an effective voter integrity activist. We cannot count on other people to protect our democracy, we need to do it ourselves. You can get the took kit by clicking here. The kit will tell you how we can take back our elections, educate our communities, work with the media, pressure public officials, get public record documents, monitor the testing of voting machines, monitor the voting and the vote count, watch the chain of custody of ballots and audit the election and even file a lawsuit. Thousands of eyes watching makes election theft more difficult.
There are many problems in American democracy – influence of big business money, ballot laws that make independent and third party runs difficult, debates limited to two parties, voting systems that push voters to vote for the lesser evil rather than the greater good, manipulated voting districts to protect incumbents, elections being administered by partisan election officials, to name a few among problems U.S. elections face. But, if we are unable to get these two basic things right – registering voters and counting the vote accurately – then not much else matters because the democracy is a farce and a fraud on the most basic fundamentals.
This year the proportion of voters using touchscreen voting systems – the least reliable system available – is expected to fall to 36 percent in November, down from a high of 44 percent in 2006. In addition, more voters are expected to use paper ballots in 2008 than did back in 2000. Now a majority of voters in the country will vote on paper ballots. Thus, there will be a voting record that will allow for a meaningful audit or recount in many states and counties.
But more work needs to be done. You need to play a role. Democracy is not a spectator sport, but one in which voters must participate – and not by merely voting – but by working to move the United States toward the ideal of the greatest representative democracy on Earth – an ideal that we have nowhere near achieved.
