ACTION ALERT - March 3, 2014 Today, Monday, March 3, the WV House is scheduled to take up a bill designed to further weaken an already limp law that was originally supposed to protect our votes. Bill SB 359 (title): Removing hand canvassing requirements of electronic voting machines, introduced by District 13 Sen. Robert Beach (D) passed unanimously out of the Senate last week over to the House. if it passes in the House, it will not only strip away the ability to ensure that our votes are being properly counted by eliminating the so-called “random” check after each election, it will further erode the publics confidence that votes are being properly counted. Please call your Delegates today to let them know that you strongly object to SB 359. The reason that I chose to qualify the presently required random hand-count as “so-called” is because when that requirement passed in 2005 to assure voters that computers were properly counting their votes (under HB 2950), the legislature left it up to the Secretary of State to promulgate rules regarding a fair and transparent method of randomly choosing which precincts would be recounted. Yet somehow no Secretary of State has ever gotten around to it, possibly because the required recount had always been set at 5%. Which, by the way, is the same percentage that had traditionally failed voters even prior to the implementation of computerized voting. Thats right, folks, there has been a required hand recount of 5% for decades. To stave off fraud in a state that’s had long, dark history of election fraud, it has essentially always been up to County Commissioners to “randomly” choose which precincts to recount by hand. There has never been any regulation requiring that state elections officials make certain that the so-called random selection is fair and transparent. Today the WV legislature is on he verge of doing away with even that lame safety measure. Last election, a larger percentage of WV voters chose not to vote than in any other state, due largely to an overall lack of confidence in our system. Instead of considering SB 359 current leaders should be overhauling the broken system altogether by tossing out those glorified slot machines weve allowed to infest our polling places and require the straightforward and simple hand counting, and re-counting, of paper ballots. Citizens should also ask our present Secretary of State why she has never promulgated rules for the transparent selection of Precincts to be chosen at random, and demand that the recount be increased to the minimum rate of ten percent of all ballots to double the safety factor of all required recounts. In order to gain back the confidence of voters and encourage greater participation, each Secretary of State from now on should be required to publicize all random hand count outcomes in each District, including a log of the history of recounts in order to assure the public that our system legitimate.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 22:51:39 +0000
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