September
14, 2004
Congressman
Robert Ney
Chairman
of the Committee on House Administration
2438
Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear
Congressman Ney:
I
urge you, as Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, to release
HR2239 from your committee and actively support its passage immediately when
Congress reconvenes.
As
a member of the United States Congress you have a sworn duty to protect our democracy
from all threats, domestic as well as foreign. Electronic voting systems that
do not offer a voter-verified paper audit trail pose a threat to our democracy,
and it is your duty to take action to defend it.
For
over 200 years America's men and women have sacrificed their lives to protect
an ideal that is unparalleled in human history -- a country in which citizens
control their own destiny by means of free, honest, reliable, and verifiable
elections. That ideal of a democratic
society is now threatened by the use of electronic voting machines that have a
documented record of being unreliable, insecure, and unverifiable.
Our
government was wisely set up by our founding fathers with a system of checks
and balances. Yet the vast majority of the electronic voting systems in use
today have no means whatsoever to "check" that the final tallies they
produce are indeed accurate. As the leading nation in the world we are sending
exactly the wrong message to fledgling democratic societies, that democracy
does not deserve the very best and most reliable technology to record and count
the votes of its citizens, but rather inferior and unverifiable technology will
suffice.
We
all know that the upcoming elections will be close, and that calls for recounts
are likely. Yet, without a paper trail, electronic voting machines can only
regurgitate the very same numbers they gave in the first place -- a true
recount is impossible. This enormous
flaw by itself is enough to call for banning such machines in the November elections.
Each
year the United States spends hundreds of billion of dollars to buy the best
equipment to defend our country from outside threats. Why are you standing by while an estimated
30% of American voters will use inferior voting and vote tabulating technology
that conceals fraud, a threat far more serious?
American
citizens deserve to know that their votes can be independently verified and
recounted, which can only be achieved via a voter-verified paper audit
trail. The Voter Confidence and Increased
Accessibility Act, HR2239, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, addresses these
concerns.
Sincerely,
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