[IP] EFF's Cindy Cohn: Valid election isn't a partisan issue
Begin forwarded message:
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@xxxxxxxx>
Date: July 30, 2004 1:05:45 AM EDT
To: politech@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Politech] EFF's Cindy Cohn: Valid election isn't a partisan
issue
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Ensuring Election Integrity Is Not a Partisan Issue
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 10:39:44 -0700
From: Cindy Cohn <cindy@xxxxxxx>
To: Declan@xxxxxxxx
Hi Declan,
Here is what I submitted to the WSJ in response to the e-voting piece
today. An earlier version of this is up on the EFF blog at:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001739.php
Cindy
Election Integrity is Not a Partisan Issue
Over the past week we've seen several media stories suggesting that
the electronic voting machine issue is partisan. My organization, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been one of the many calling
for additional security measures for these machines, including a
voter-verified paper ballot.
While there are certainly folks who would like to portray it that
way, including Jeb Bush, it's not true. Far more importantly, it's
not true in terms of who should care. In a recent court case, EFF
presented evidence of 18 serious direct recording electronic (DRE)
problems over the past two years, and in the majority of the cases
that we've seen, electronic voting systems don't fail in any partisan
way -- they just fail. In Virginia, for instance, the DRE machine
switched one out of every 100 votes for the Republican to the
Democrat. And given the many ways that they can be cracked, no
political party has a "lock" on programmers who could sway an
election.
It's especially puzzling to see this "partisan" spin emerge now, in
the face of a number of Republican and bipartisan efforts to ensure
the integrity of our elections:
* Senator John Ensign, a Republican from Nevada, is sponsoring the
leading Senate bill to establish a voter-verified paper ballot
(VVPB). He has been a stalwart on these issues since long before most
of us even thought about them.
* The National Federation of Republican Women supports the use of
paper trail machines.
* Congressman Rush Holt's (D-NJ) bill, HR 2239, has bipartisan
co-sponsorship, and chapters of political parties from across the
spectrum have endorsed it.
* Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute endorses VVPB,
and EFF has been working with several other conservative groups on
the issue. Just a week ago, EFF helped a bipartisan group of voters
in California's Riverside County in an ongoing effort to recount
electronic votes in a very close election. While the race itself was
nonpartisan, the candidate demanding the recount, Linda Soubirous, is
not left-wing.
When e-voting is dismissed as partisan, voters from both parties
lose. Election integrity is far too important an issue to be
sidetracked by this diversion. And when the media falls for this sort
of spin, they fall into the hands of people who want to push the very
real problems with electronic voting back under the rug.
The bi-partisan recount lawsuit filed in Riverside County, CA:
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/media/releases/article.asp?id%14
Linda Soubirous with John Ashcroft at a COPS event
http://www.nleomf.com/WhatsNew/PressReleases/vigil03.html
EFF's amicus brief detailing the 18 DRE incidents:
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/Benavidez/20040518-benavidez-
Amicus.pdf
Virginia incident that hurt a Republican:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51595-2004May24_2.html
Ornstein's piece:
http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.20129,filter./news_detail.asp
Jeb Bush in the Miami Herald on July 10 (I don't have the link
handy): ''Every time that liberal Democrats say that the election is
in question, every vote should count, it is an effort to try to
mobilize their base and that's it,'' Bush said. ``And it should be
discounted, deeply, because it is purely politics.''
--
*********************************************
Cindy Cohn Cindy@xxxxxxx
Legal Director www.eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-436-9333 x 108 (tel)
415-436-9993 (fax)
Join EFF today! <https://secure.eff.org/>
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