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Urge SoS McPherson to release all documents about the reliability of Cal. voting systems now!

By Debra Bowen, California State Senator  Posted by Joan Brunwasser (about the submitter)       (Page 1 of 1 pages)   No comments
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On the Friday before Christmas this past December, the Associated Press broke a story that on November 8, a state elections monitoring team "experienced an alarming error on the iVotronic system in Merced County, where a voter chose one candidate but the vote was recorded for another candidate. This error is documented on videotape and demonstrates that it was not an operator error, but was, rather, an error in the system."

The Associated Press article described a letter that the Secretary of State wrote to the president of Election Systems & Software (ES&S) in November, threatening to decertify ES&S voting machines unless the company fixed these problems. But when asked to provide details, Secretary of State McPherson's spokesperson refused to elaborate further, saying only that "they have agreed to address our concerns."

The Secretary of State's unwillingness to share information with the voters that would shed light on these problems is completely unacceptable. Keeping the public in the dark will certainly not help build faith and trust in our elections system.

Tell Secretary of State McPherson to release all documents about the integrity and security of electronic voting systems in California -- send him an email today!

The Secretary of State's office has known about the problems with these ES&S electronic voting machines for many months -- but we didn't hear about them until 2 days before Christmas. And that notification didn't come from the Secretary of State, it came from a newspaper article.

Even now, months later, we still don't know all the details. It makes you wonder what else the Secretary of State's office is hiding.

I've written to Secretary of State McPherson myself, as Chair of the Senate Elections Committee, urging him to release any and all records related to the certification of electronic voting systems.

Now I encourage you to join me.

Urge Secretary of State McPherson to release all documents about the reliability and performance of California voting systems now!

This kind of government secrecy must end -- especially when we're dealing with something as fundamental as the right to vote. How can we restore faith in the integrity of our elections when the Secretary of State won't come clean with the people of California?

Keeping the public in the dark about problems with electronic voting machines doesn't build confidence. It just builds up the perception that our government and voting machine manufacturers have something to hide.

We can't allow public confidence in our elections system to deteriorate any further. That's why I hope you'll join me in urging the Secretary of State to make all of this information public.

Email Secretary of State McPherson today -- tell him to restore confidence in California elections by releasing these documents now!

Sincerely,

Debra Bowen
California State Senator

Visit DebraBowen.com
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Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of (more...)
 

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