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[ThatHawaiiGuy]

Who Counts the Votes?

Those slick new touch screen voting machines promise to get rid of hanging chads forever. But how do you know your vote was recorded as you intended? You might as well be handing it to a stranger who promises to deliver it to the polling place unchanged.

Maybe you thought that some computer wizard worked out some way to record those votes without errors. If so, you've been duped! Voting machines are just as subject to program bugs as other computers, and very tempting for computer hackers. Indeed, from the viewpoint of secure computing, voting is a uniquely hard problem: harder than flying airplanes, and harder than electronic banking.

This is why hundreds of computer experts, including many of the top experts in the world on electronic voting and computer security have signed our "Resolution on Electronic Voting," which calls for a "Voter Verifiable Audit Trail" that can be recounted by hand to check that the machines have recorded the votes properly. Almost no touch-screen machines have them, but there are many systems that do. For example, optical scan ballots (like standardized tests) that are scanned at the polling place are inexpensive and excellent for most voters, and the marked ballots are the "voter verifiable audit trail." Alternatively, touch-screen machines can be modified so that they print a copy of the ballot, which the voter can check for accuracy. That printed ballot is deposited in a locked ballot box in case a recount is requested.

We hope you will join us in pressing for these simple alternatives to the insidious threat to our democracy posed by the touch-screen machines that are now being purchased by the thousands around the country.

Understanding the Problem
How I Can Help?

ACTION ALERTS!

National: Join Martin Luther King III, ActForChange and over 38,000 voters to support the need for paper trail. All US voters please sign this National petition now.

National: Support Legislation HR 2239 requiring Voter-Verified Paper Trail for 2004 Elections All US voters please sign this National petition as well.

National: Help research where your Congressperson stands on HR 2239


About VerifiedVoting.org's Founder:

David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987). He is on the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force and travels around the Country speaking and educating on the inherent dangers of current DRE and voting machines. More

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.asp