Never underestimate the power of creativity.
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Three New Jerseyans next took the mike: NJ Senator Nia Gill, Renee Steinhagen, Executive Director of the NJ Appleseed Public Interest Law Center; and Howard Stanislevic, founder of the E-Voter Education Project. The subject was NJ Senate Bill 507, which many consider to be model post-election audit legislation.
Said Stanislevic, the bill in the New Jersey legislature, S. 507, will require audits of the DRE counts, a segue to the previous bill that requires voter-verifiable paper records,” said Steinhagen. "The audit will count enough ballots in all audited elections to confirm outcomes independently of software with either 99% or 90% statistical power depending on the race. Statewide and federal elections are audited to the higher standard. There is NO maximum audit size and a 2% minimum," according to Stanislevic. The idea is to have enough hand counting to yield real results.
The pressure needs to be maintained. “We need a software-independent voting system,” said Stanislevic, that is, if an undetected error in the software doesn’t guarantee an error in the election results. We must examine paper trails. The voters must be educated.
If optical scanners are used, he continued, audits will still be required; they are used for absentee ballots in New Jersey. The cost of hand-counting the paper is ten to twenty-five cents per vote.
“Auditing is not a significant expense,” added Steinhagen. “You can’t run elections on the cheap. This will reassure voters that their votes do count.”
Said state senator Nia Gill, people died for the right to vote—no higher cost can be paid than that. But Governor Corzine, who campaigned for voting integrity, now opposes this bill and opts for a less secure method, a tiered system like that delineated in HR 811. “Here the rubber meets the road,” she said. Corzine must be inundated with expressions of the popular will, like letters and calls, to be pulled back into his campaign promises.
The second bill being considered on Monday is the waiver on the attached printers until June 2008. In it the attorney general wants the authority to continue with the DREs, printerless.
At this point both Mary Ann and the senator quoted Abraham Lincoln.
Mary Ann: “Elections belong to the people.”
Senator Gill: “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
S. 507 should be a model for the nation. Government officials should be made aware of this at all levels—from municipal to federal.
Other legislators don’t realize the importance of this bill,” said Steinhagen.
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