ACTION ALERT

Help Prevent Disenfranchisment in this Year's Election. Urge you representatives to support H.R. 2239
Read about this bill

On November 2, 98 million voters, or approximately 5/6 of Americans voting will cast their votes for President on computers that unidentified programmers and officials could program to invisibly falsify the results. The potential for major fraud and voter disenfranchisement this year is infinitely greater than in the 2000 presidential election, when problems with voting machines and the disenfranchisement of African Americans called into question the fairness and accuracy of the final count. Most troubling is the use of new direct recording electronic voting systems (DREs), which leave no paper trail and thus no possibility of a recount. Voters are being told to trust a computer system with no confirmation that their vote was properly tabulated. As a result 3/10 of the votes cast in the 2004 presidential election will likely be unverifiable, unauditable and unrecountable. Recent experiences with these new machines give cause for great concern. In elections held this spring in California, DREs manufactured by Diebold malfunctioned thereby disenfranchising thousands of voters. In Texas a congressman was re-nominated by 150 votes until 419 “found votes” made his challenger the victor. In Florida’s 2002 gubernatorial primary, an ACLU study of 31 majority black precincts in Miami-Dade County found that 8.2 percent of votes cast where lost. Despite the unqualified support for DRE systems expressed by Florida governor Jeb Bush, and his consistent refusal to install voter verified paper audit trails, the Republican Party of Florida has urged its supporters to order absentee ballots because even it doesn’t trust the accuracy of electronic voting systems. A number of election officials have been sufficiently concerned about the reliability of DRE systems that they have banned their use. If such machines are deemed unreliable in some counties, shouldn’t they be considered unreliable everywhere? Write your representatives now and urge them to pass H.R. 2239, which would mandate that all voting machines produce a paper trail.