~ ALL YOUR VOTES ARE BELONG TO US ~Election Technology Council Comments on Help America Vote Act Amendments
The Election Technology Council (ETC) consists of companies that offer voting system technology hardware products, software and services to support the electoral process.
...this paper is intended to provide informative responses from the ETC to proposed federal legislation regarding voting system technology requirements....
Listen to us, not those un-informed computer scientists and citizen activists!
The 2006 general election demonstrated the effective utilization of electronic voting stations (many with voter-verifiable paper audit trail printers) and optical scanners...
The 2006 election went well??? Someone tell Christine Jennings.
The members of the ETC are committed to continuing to serve as partners with election officials to ensure that the mandates of HAVA are complied with in full. To achieve that goal, we wish to offer a number of observations and recommendations concerning key items that have been proposed in various items of legislation designed to amend HAVA.
The voting machine lobby has paid good money (on cruises and dinners)to get election officials to listen to them, and wants congress to listen too.
Voters have also expressed their support of early voting and the trend today is to expand this service as well as the concept of “vote centers” whereby an individual is not locked into voting at a certain precinct but rather may vote at a more convenient location.
Vote Centers were pushed by The Election Center, another lobbying arm of the voting machine companies. Vote centers help sell DRE/touch-screens and Electronic Poll Books.
If the requirements placed on electronic voting become too onerous, many jurisdictions will simply
replace their existing electronic voting equipment with optical scan ballots.
While optical scan technology presents a perfectly acceptable form of voting, in many instances it makes early voting impractical and expensive for many jurisdictions, as the need to have all ballot styles on hand in a paper form and in sufficient quantities for all required languages required in the jurisdiction for an early voting location is not always feasible.
The vendor lobby wants congress to think we need early voting (it doesn't increase turnout) and that we need DRE/touch-screens to perform early voting. (We don't, NC, NM and Florida use optical scan for early voting). They also throw the "language" card, to divide and conquer advocacy groups.
VVPAT as the Official Ballot Record
..If a single piece of paper is not readable, regardless of the reason, and the VVPAT is the official record of the ballot, the potential is high that the voter involved will not have his or her vote counted...
The vendor misleads. VVPB state laws address this issue. But - with paperless voting, we can be sure that thousands of ballots wont be counted. Thats why so many states have passed laws to require paper.
Manual Audits
...a required hand counted audit (even in only one race) would cause chaos with runoff election schedules.
The vendor doesn't want you to have proof that their machines can't count votes!
