WHAT WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO DO IF YOU KNEW YOUR RIGHT TO YOUR VOTE WAS BEING TAKEN FROM YOU?
THIS IS A RIGHT SO PRECIOUS, MANY HAVE DIED FOR IT
WE DON'T HAVE TO GIVE OUR LIVES, BUT WE DO NEED TO GIVE OUR TIME
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THIS SUNDAY- TOMORROW, JANUARY 27TH, 2:00
THE MUDDY CUP, 305 MAIN ST, POUGHKEEPSIE
LEARN HOW YOU CAN PREVENT THE THEFT OF OUR DEMOCRACY
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"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke (and he was a conservative!)
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A number of you have written expressing confusion about what's going on with voting in NY and the best way to count votes. That's good- means people are reading emails. Let me clarify:
A few years ago, when it looked like NY might become another DRE state, election activists- like New Yorkers for Verified Voting (NYVV) and the League of Women Voters (LWV) - waged a successful campaign against the touchscreen DREs. They took the position that Paper Ballot Optical Scanners were what we needed to fight for to prevent NY from having to vote on DREs. That was good as far as it went and this week the State Board of Elections (SBOE) approved of Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) which permit disabled voters to independently create their own paper ballots. BMDs do not count votes- they only enable the creation of a paper ballot. As a result of the SBOE's decision this week, it is highly unlikely that NY will purchase DREs when it comes time to choose a means to count the ballots, given that each polling place will have bought a BMD that creates a paper ballot. NY does not have to decide how it's going to count votes just yet because we can still use our lever machines for the 2008 election.
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The trouble with Optical Scanners
The next step in the battle is the counting because as everyone knows- it's the counting that counts!
Optical Scanners are computers and have repeatedly been shown to be easily riggable without detection. The evidence is fairly overwhelming - just ask me for it if you want to see it. The reports from numerous independent studies by computer scientists demonstrates how unreliable Optical Scanners are. So why would we buy machines that can steal our votes so dramatically as to alter the outcome of an election and what part of such an election can we call democratic?
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That's what we'll be discussing this Sunday at the Muddy Cup in Poughkeepise at 2:00. We are at a critical junction and we can make a difference in our counties if we learn and ban together. There is positive movement towards secure, reliable, accurate elections and we can't stop here. We must be able to see that our votes are being counted as cast because trusting someone else to tell us what the election result is means the death of democracy. You can't trust what you can't see and you can't see the inside of a computer.
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Thanks
andi novick
Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media (Re-Media)
This public discussion is co-sponsored by The Dutchess Peace Coalition, Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Poughkeepsie's Social Justice Committee and The Real Majority Project.
