Elections & Electronic Voting

From: "kcranston2000" <kimcc(a)pacbell.net>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 21:28:35 -0000
Subject: preserving our democracy

Greetings,

"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." Joseph Stalin

As many of you know, I spent most of this year as a volunteer raising as much money as I could for Kerry, the DNC, 527s, etc. to help Kerry win by a large enough margin of victory so that Bush couldn't steal the election, again. I want to thank everyone else who did everything they could to elect Kerry and preserve our democracy.

Since the election, many questions have been raised about the accuracy of the reported vote (a Zogby survey early this month reported that 42.5% of Americans believe that valid concerns "have been expressed by some observers of the election that problems with counting the votes may have affected the results and deserve further investigation.")

I've spent a lot of time since November 2 working with others to advance the recounts in OH and NM and on several related efforts to determine if the election (the White House, control of the Senate, control of the House, and the mandate) was stolen. I'm not sure yet. It's clear that the voter suppression activities we've all heard about in FLA and OH (and elsewhere) had an impact, that some of the computer vote counting systems didn't count correctly, and that the opportunity existed to manipulate the vote tabulated by computers.

Frankly, I've spent a lot of time working on a lot of political campaigns and before I do much more I want to have confidence that elections can't easily be stolen by computer hacks.

I feel that an important opportunity to try to determine the reliability of some of the computer voting systems exists around the NM recount. NM uses a range of computer voting systems and the recount will enable us to determine if the results reported by the computers that did the tabulations match the results of a hand count of the paper ballots (where there's a paper trail) and if there's evidence that the computers (with and without paper trails) were hacked.

The Cobb (Green Party Presidential Candidate) and Badnarik (Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate) campaigns have filed for a recount in NM. The recount is being coordinated through Help America Recount which has raised $250,000 of the $750,000 that will likely be required; I urge you to consider giving generously to support this important effort to protect our democracy. The money is needed this week so that the recount can move forward immediately. To make a contribution, go to www.helpamericarecount.org and either donate on line or get information on paying by check. Many thanks for your consideration, and for all of your good deeds.

Sincerely,

Kim C.

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