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HomeNewsNYT to blast e-voting; TACIR urges verifiable votes in Tennessee

NYT to blast e-voting; TACIR urges verifiable votes in Tennessee

co-election-logo.JPG“A long way from where we started…”

With those words activist Bernie Ellis, a staunch advocate for traceable, verifiable voting records, cited a BRAD BLOG report announcing the publication of a major New York Times article on the issues surrounding electronic voting.

According to The BRAD BLOG, the NYT article includes a graphic of an exploding voting booth and a warning that your vote may be “lost, destroyed, miscounted, wrongly attributed or hacked.” The story is reportedly titled “The Bugs in the Machine.” The story claims that electronic voting machines may create far greater problems than hanging chads and cites a ten percent failure of electronic voting machines. http://www.bradblog.com

co-film-bernie-with-film-title.jpgJust over a month ago, Ellis appeared at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship for a screening of the David Earnhardt film, UnCounted, which offered a scathing indictment of electronic voting machines and the  disenfranchising of entire blocks of voters.

The film premiered in Nashville in November and was virtually ignored by mass media with the exception of Clarksville Online. The second Tennessee screening of this film was held in Clarksville and sponsored in part by Clarksville Online.

Since then, Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) has issued a statement urging a paper trail of votes statewide.

Today the Associated Press reported that only two of Tennessee’s 95 counties maintain a paper trail of ballots and urged all 95 counties to adopt the practice of backing e-voting with a paper trail. Tennessee is one of only 12 states that do not require some form of verifiable voting documentation.

As Tennessee voters head to the polls for a February 5 Presidential Primary, all eyes will be scrutinizing the voters, the machines, and the tallies. The TACIR report, which will be completed this month, calls for verifiable voter records within a “reasonable” period of time. “Reasonable” is as yet undefined, but proponents of a paper trail urge that it be completed before the 2008 election.

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