Tags for This Article:

USA United States Of America (7165)  Electronic Voting (2809)  Election-Voting Issues (2003)  Election Reform (1063)  Election Theft (699)  Election Recounts Protests (393)  Election Law (355)  Election Reform HR 550 (234) 

Populum Tag Cloud
       Control Panel
Fine tune your search to access content
Articles
Diaries Products
Events All
All time
Last 6 mos
Last month
Last week
Last 24 hrs
From:
Month  Day   Year

To:
Month  Day   Year
Alphabet
Popularity
Count ON
Count OFF
This Level
Sub-levels

 

 

 

Tag(s): ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Add to My Group
April 15, 2007 at 13:48:45

Open Letter to Congressman Ehlers

by David Griscom     Page 1 of 1 page(s)

www.opednews.com

 

Tell A Friend

View Ratings | Rate It  

From: David L. Griscom
Residence: San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico (not mailing address)
U.S. mailing address: 3938 E Grant Rd #131, Tucson, AZ 85712-2559

To: The Honorable Vernon J. Ehlers
2182 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

15 April 2007

RE: The Holt Bill, HR 811

Dear Congressman Ehlers,

After long and careful consideration, I am asking you to OPPOSE The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 (HR 811) because it is insufficiently protective of our democracy.

By way of introduction, I too have my Ph.D. in physics. I am a Fellow of the American Physical Society and also of the American Ceramic Society, where I listened to you speak at an annual meeting about a decade ago. I retired from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, in 2001 after 33 years of civilian service and took up a succession of invited professorships of research at the Universities of Paris-6, Lyon-1, and St-Etienne in France and Tokyo Institute of Technology. Subsequently I was Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Arizona before moving to Mexico.

While I see very many reasons to reject HR 811 (too many to have any hope of easy correction by amendments), I will emphasize only the following three here:

I. Touch screen voting machines (DREs) must be abolished because the only record of cast votes is electronic, making it impossible for "We the People" to know for sure how many votes were truly cast for each candidate. "Toilet-paper" roles of thermal paper are seldom verified by the voter, cannot be proven to correspond to the electronically recorded vote, are not durable, and will probably never be audited. Moreover, the blind and handicapped realize that there are far better systems than DREs available to enable them to vote http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-friedman/blind-disabled-voters-fi_b_43450.html.

II. Optical scanners must also be abolished. They are actually worse than DREs because they give a false impression of invulnerability to electronic election fraud by virtue of the ability to audit and/or recount the paper ballots inside them. Unfortunately however, recent history has shown that (1) the memory cards on the optical scanners are easily hackable (as are the GEMS central tabulators), (2) the public is led to believe that the first (machine) count is accurate and that anyone contesting the vote is a "sore loser," (3) the courts commonly deny lawsuits requesting hand recounts or delay their decisions until the matter is moot, and (4) election officials have been convicted of rigging supposedly random recounts. Please check the following link to understand the breadth and depth of my personal familiarity with these issues and how they all fit together: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__070313_the_long_road_to_dem.htm

III. The Election Assistance Commission absolutely must be abolished because its members are presidential appointees – a flagrant conflict of interest. In the April 12th issue of the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html I read that the EAC "played down" consultants' reports showing little evidence of "voter fraud" (a "two bit" individual activity with minimal national impact). This is the same EAC that has never, ever decried the possibility of ballot box stuffing by small groups of colluding poll workers (a "retail" activity with potentially larger impact than voter fraud) – or the vulnerability of all electronic voting systems to hacking by a small number of insiders (a "wholesale" activity with the potential to alter the vote nationwide!).

I am among those who believe that there are certain inalienable rights flowing from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which include at their heart the right of "We the People" to remove any government that ignores our wishes. In order to accomplish this right peacefully, "We the People" also have the right to know as certainly as humanly possible that our votes are actually being counted as we cast them. Secret counting within the guts of voting machines and computers that are invisible to the public but easily accessible by the companies that manufacture them and/or other insiders, denies us this right!

In summary, I believe that HR 811 cannot be sufficiently amended to alleviate these threats to our democracy. Therefore I urge its abandonment.

Thank you very much for considering these thoughts.

Very truly yours,

David L. Griscom

 

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Oppose HR 811

Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

David L. Griscom, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, retired in 2001 from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, where he had been a research physicist for 33 years. He has subsequently held visiting professorships of research at the Universities of Paris, Lyon, and Saint-Etienne, France, and Tokyo Institute of Technology; he was also Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at The University of Arizona in Tucson. By virtue of his collaboration with John Brakey in an investigation of poll-worker fraud in Tucson, Griscom was an invited presenter at both the National Election Reform Conference (Nashville, April 2005) and the Election Assessment Hearing (Houston, June 2005), as well as the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (San Francisco, February 2007). He is a Coordinator of the Election Defense Alliance.

Contact Author
Contact Editor
View Other Articles by Author

 

Bookmark this page: (what's this?)

NETSCAPE      DIGG THIS      Add This Page to Mr Wong!           NEWSVINE      DEl.ICIO.US      Looksmart Furl      My Web      Tag!RawSugar      Blink List     (More...)
Comments: Expand   Shrink   Hide  
1 comments

 

1 comments

 

Tell A Friend

 


Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2008

Blog Ads

 

 

 

 

Most Popular Articles
in the Last 2 Days
(by Recommend Emails)

The Mailer That Put the Final Nail in the McCain Campaign Coffin by Rob Kall

BARACK OBAMA On Gandhi's Birthday by Stephen Fox

PECK, PECK... SQUAWK! by Rip Rense

The dangerous McCain/Palin character assassination of Obama by Sherman Yellen

Sarah Palin; Secessionist-- powerful new Youtube Video by youtube

Race in the 2008 Election by Sally Liuzzo-Prado

On Naomi Wolf's Sounding the Alarm by Dr. Dennis Loo

Obama Must Appoint a Consumer Protectionist as FDA Commissioner by Stephen Fox

Sarah Palin Broke The Ethics Law In Alaska, And Can Be Impeached by Rev. Bill McGinnis

Naomi Wolf Must Watch Video: A Coup Took Place on October 1, 2008 by youtube

Go To Top 50 Most Popular