Thursday, January 17, 2008
Hints of Things To Come
New Voter Confidence Committee webmaster Paula Long and I met today with members of the board of the Redwood Chapter of the ACLU. This culminated a process that spanned the last four months as the group developed a statement on election integrity. I promised not to scoop their forthcoming press release but suffice to say I am grateful the VCC was given an opportunity to input on this, and I am immensely gratified at the end result.
Following up on last Wednesday's presentation to the Humboldt Democratic Central Committee, today Larry Hourany submitted to one of the Dems' subcommittees a resolution that I also can't fully disclose just yet. I wrote it, so if you have been reading my blog for any amount of time you can probably guess what it says.
Tonight I attended the Ron Paul Meet Up. There were about 25 people and it was fairly well organized and smoothly run. In the few minutes I spoke I addressed some questions raised by the previous speaker about the Feb. 5 CA primary, namely that Humboldt will be using eSlate machines for voters with disabilities (adding that ballots cast this way must be copied by elections department staff onto the regular paper ballots fed into the Diebold optical scanner); and that modems will no longer be used to send precinct results into HQ so we have to watch the chain of custody getting ballots and memory cards physically transported from precincts to HQ.
I suggested group members consider election day observing, and to connect back with me next week when the VCC can be prepared with a plan to coordinate reports from observers coming in and being posted to multiple places online. I have also forwarded them these two links provided by Dan Ashby of the Election Defense Alliance. Both are manuals for election day observers:http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/sav_r_vote_election_monitoring_field_guide
I also took a few moments to mention the VCC Report on Election Conditions in Humboldt County and how we are moving the community dialog into a discussion of the tangible components, such as how long it will really take to hand-count all the paper ballots, and how many people we'll really need to get it done. Seven more people signed onto this project tonight. If you are a registered Humboldt voter, you can sign-up too at VoterConfidenceCommittee.org.
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/ca_election_monitoring_a_training_manual
Finally, tomorrow afternoon I am scheduled to talk to Arcata Eye editor Kevin Hoover so I'm hopeful we'll soon see a news article that actually presents our framing, offering the community an opportunity to objectively judge the feasibility of hand-counting paper ballots in Humboldt County.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/hints-of-things-to-come.html
Labels: ACLU, Arcata Eye, Dan Ashby, Democratic Central Committee, Eureka Reporter, hand-counting paper ballots, Kevin Hoover, Larry Hourany, Paula Long, Ron Paul, Voter Confidence Committee
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Dave,I imagine you are researching what is currently going down in South Carolina,if not look into it,err it'll probably show up in front of you soon enough if not regardless.But yes,a mass machine malfunction has crashed the primaries.
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