At the highest levels in this state there is satisfaction with the DREs, she said.
She recalled that three states have already thrown out their Danahers in favor of opscans: Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. “If Bucks doesn’t change, the rest of the state won’t either. She quoted CVI researcher Madeline Rawley, whose three C’s relevant to the commissioners are “confused, complacent, or complicit.”
Gould promised to work to remove the commissioners from office. Any official who deprives the citizenry of real data does not deserve to be an elected official. The commissioners can spend a fortune on a golf course, but ignore the will of the entire county.
Electec, vendors of the Danahers, receive their money, she continued. If you google them, you will find an association with a convicted felon. The commissioners won’t tell us who owns the company, the stockholders, and other customers. She predicted that Pennsylvania will be a gehenna that far overshadows the disasters in New Hampshire (the primary) and even Florida 2000.
She said that Gov. Rendell already has the support of Democrats in Philadelphia, so is not motivated to extend himself to CVI and other activist groups.
She asked for contributions to a lawsuit that is thriving and that the state is doing all it can to delay. Mail checks to P.O. Box 536, Doylestown, PA 18901. And she entreated listeners to write and go to the commissioners to tell them to throw out their Danahers, with or without the support of the Holt bill. The phone number of the court house, locus of their offices, is 215-348-6000. To reach Bob Brady, chair of the House, phone 202-225-0088.
She would even consider a centrally based opscan (she favors precinct-based ones)
If it were well guarded and available at a reasonable price.
Next to follow this “hard act to follow” was the founder of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, Bo Lipari, a familiar presence on VoV. To him Lori and Jim turned to tell the latest goings-on in the Empire State.
In this “famously late” state, last to comply with HAVA, an agreement has finally been reached with the Department of Justice. There was a decision to eliminate one recent on the scene DRE, the Liberty model, manufactured in the Netherlands. But subsequently, the Dutch company took their complaint to the New York supreme court, “snatching victory from the state board of electors.”
The court never got to the real issues, continued Lipari, but honored the contract with Liberty, which claims to have a paper trail that election integrity activists refer to as a cash register tape, inside the machine duplicating whatever the machine decides to interpret as one’s vote.
An appeal from the Democratic commissioners may yet succeed in removing Liberty from the list of considered machines. Only five to ten counties are interested in retaining their DREs. Lipari and the new coalition he is forming with an organization of advocates on behalf of handicapped people and other groups plan to approach these few counties and attempt to dissuade them from their folly.
The issue will be resolved quickly, he said, by order of the federal court. By Friday the counties must indicate which machines they want to purchase. The machines will be ordered at the end of this month—their last chance to opposed the use of DREs within their state.
New York will probably still vote on its old lever machines in November, Lipari said. They haven’t put much effort into poll watching and exit polls. He called the machines “mechanical DREs.”
The good news is that much of New York State has the right idea—a goal NYVV has been working toward for five years. That’s only step one, he added quickly. There is lots of lobbying in his state, after friendship and money, he said. Their influence is “dysfunctional and corrupt”—and one of the ways things are accomplished. The Republican and Democratic election commissions are doing battle.
There was time for John Gideon to report on California’s “double bubble trouble” [a Brad Friedman coinage]. Problems reported by the media represent maybe 10 percent of what’s really going on, he said.
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