-- Andrew Jackson
If every New Yorker wrote her/his senator, governor, assembly person, election commissioner - we could collectively hold government accountable before they sell us out.
– If you only have time for one letter start with the governor and fax it, 518 474 1513, or if you can't fax email Click here to email the Governor and copy James Clancy, Director of Legislative Affairs, James.Clancy@chamber.state.ny.us). – If you're feeling responsible , here's the contacts for your elected officials who are counting on you to re-elect them, http://www.assembly.state.ny.us/mem/http://www.senate.state.ny.us/senatehomepage.nsf/senators?OpenForm .
– If you're feeling vigilante, here's the contacts for the State Board of Elections: Co-Executive Directors Peter S. Kosinski pkosinski@elections.state.ny.us and Stan Zalen, zalen@elections.state.ny.us, and to reach Election Commissioners, Neil Kelleher and Helena Moses Donahue, contact Allison Carr, acarr@elections.state.ny.us, for Commissioners Douglas Kellner and Evelyn Aquila contact Anna Svizzero asvizzero@elections.state.ny.us, also contact Todd Valentine tvalentine@elections.state.ny.us and Bob Brehm rbrehm@elections.state.ny.us.
If we're not responsible enough to take the time to write letters, I guess we're all going down in one big sea of irresponsibility. Democracy is something you do.
Endnotes:
ENDNOTES
1. http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/ttbr/diebold.pdf
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/ttbr/hart.pdf
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/ttbr/sequoia.pdf.
2.McKinney's NY Public Officers Law, § 84:
The legislature hereby finds that a free society is maintained when government is responsive and responsible to the public, and when the public is aware of governmental actions. The more open a government is with its citizenry, the greater the understanding and participation of the public in government.
As state and local government services increase and public problems become more sophisticated and complex and therefore harder to solve, and with the resultant increase in revenues and expenditures, it is incumbent upon the state and its localities to extend public accountability wherever and whenever feasible.
The people's right to know the process of governmental decision-making and to review the documents and statistics leading to determinations is basic to our society. Access to such information should not be thwarted by shrouding it with the cloak of secrecy or confidentiality.
The legislature therefore declares that government is the public's business and that the public, individually and collectively and represented by a free press ,should have access to the records of government in accordance with the provisions of this article.
3. McKinney's NY Election Law sec. 7-202 1 (r)
4. I am not advocating for the merits of lever machines which do not leave any evidence of voter intent. I am advocating for not going from the fire into the frying pan and for the need to understand that substituting mechanical lever machines with computerized DREs or PBOSs is not as simple as swapping one machine for another.
5. Bruce O'Dell has spent his career working with very large-scale computer systems with stringent security, audit and accountability requirements-systems for financial accounting, insurance claims processing, mortgage origination, bond trading, stock trading, loan servicing, and on-line financial account aggregation. At American Express he was lead software architect for a project to create a company-wide security component, and received their Chairman's Award for Quality, in 1998, for helping to develop methods for securely deploying new software to networks of thousands of computers. He is also the co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, a national coordinating body which seeks to promote and support citizen activism at the local and state level and to restore integrity and public accountability to the electoral processes of the United States.
6. See, Even a Remote Chance? http://www.votersunite.org/info/EvenARemoteChance.pdf:
Even a 50-state ban of wireless components in elections could be problematic to verify, as technological innovation accelerates. Imagine a memory device about the size of a grain of rice or a freckle, with its own antenna built in, that could be embedded in a sheet of paper or stuck to any surface. Imagine that the device could contain 4 MB of memory which could be accessed or altered wirelessly by a nearby cell phone. Although it sounds like science fiction, this tiny wireless memory chip, called a Memory Spot, was announced July 17, 2006 by Hewlett Packard.
