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The Coalition
for Voting Integrity invites Bucks County municipalities to join the Doylestown, Plumstead, Buckingham, Tinicum, New Britain, Lower Makefield, Upper Makefield, Milford,
Springfield, East Rockhill, West Rockhill, Hilltown, Lower Southampton, and Middletown Township
Boards of Supervisors, as well as Sellersville Borough Council, Doylestown Borough Council, Yardley
Borough, Newtown Borough, New Hope Borough, the Bucks County Association of Township Officials, and seven former Bucks County Commissioners, and pass a resolution including the following concepts:
The _________________ Board of
Supervisors fully supports the immediate passage of Senator Conti's Senate Bill 977 and Assemblyman Frankel's House Bill 2000,
which call for voter-verified paper ballots and mandated random manual audits of these voter-verified paper ballots to act
as a check on the electronic machine numbers.
In addition, we call upon the Bucks
County Commissioners to rent or purchase a voting system that meets these bills' standards, namely, voter-verified paper ballots
which are the official record of the vote and are kept for random audit and recount purposes.
Resolution* passed by Doylestown Township Board of Supervisors
Resolution* passed by Plumstead Township Board of Supervisors
Resolution passed by New Hope Borough Council
A resolution backed by seven former Bucks County Commissioners supporting voter-verified paper ballots and routine
random manual audits was offered to the current Commissioners at their meeting on Dec.
21, 2005.
The Bucks
County Association of Township Officials, at its meeting on February 18, 2006, passed a resolution supporting the immediate
passage of Senate Bill 977 and House Bill 2000, which call for Voter-Verified Paper Records and mandatory random audits. The
resolution also asked the Bucks County Commissioners to choose a voting system that is based on a Voter-Verified Paper Ballot.
*These resolutions refer to two machines having
been certified. There are now seven machines certified for use in
Pennsylvania as of 1/6/06: five direct recording electronic voting machines, none of which have a voter-verified paper trail, and
a precinct count optical scanner and a central count optical scanner, both of which read and count a voter-verified paper
ballot.
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Background
offered by Madeline Rawley when introducing the draft resolution above to the Doylestown
Township Supervisors on behalf of the Coalition:
As I am sure you are aware, the November 8th election was the last time that
we will be voting on the trusty old lever machines. In 2002, the federal government passed a law, the Help America Vote Act,
or HAVA for short, in an attempt to fix the problems of the hanging and pregnant
chads of the 2000 election. In addition to the infamous punch card system, HAVA also said that lever machines need to be replaced
by January 1, 2006, because they do not produce a “manual audit capacity,” which the Election Assistance Commission
(EAC) interprets as a paper record trail for use in audits and recounts. The State of Pennsylvania is currently testing and certifying voting systems to create a list of approved voting machines that the
counties may purchase. [The state has since ruled that counties need only pass a resolution
to commit funds in order to meet the deadline.]
In the state
legislature, currently two bills have been introduced which mandate that any voting system must have a voter-verified paper
record and that a random manual audit of those voter-verified paper records be done on 5% of the machines used in an election.
These voter-verified paper record and audit bills have already been passed in twenty-five states and proposed in all but ten
states, in response to a recognition all across the country of the unreliability of
paperless electronic voting machines as demonstrated in thousands of incidents across the country in the 2004 election,
including three counties in Pennsylvania where the touch screen machine used, when retested, did not register one out of twenty
touches, and was subsequently decertified for use in Pennsylvania.
In response to the reports of lost and miscounted votes on electronic machines nationwide, congressmen requested
the Government Accountability Office to investigate electronic voting. In a 105-page
report, issued in September 2005, the GAO said that key actions need to be completed before the electorate could feel that
electronic machines were secure and reliable. (Highlights of the report and a link to the full text are available on the CVI website, www.CoalitionforVotingIntegrity.org.)
As noted earlier,
there are presently two bills in the state legislature, one introduced by our Senator Conti, SB 977, and another in the House,
HB 2000, introduced by Representative Frankel, which ask for voter-verified paper ballots and mandated audits as a check on
the electronic machines.
We are requesting
that the Council pass a resolution supporting the immediate passage of the voter-verified paper ballot and random manual audit
bills and calling for the County
Commissioners to purchase a voting system that meets these bills' standards. We
would like a copy of the resolution sent to Governor Edward Rendell, Secretary of State
Pedro Cortes, State Election Director Harry van Sickle, Senator Joseph Conti, Assemblymen Charles McIlhinney and Paul Clymer,
and our three Bucks County Commissioners, Charles Martin, James Cawley, and Sandra Miller.
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