Green Party Presidential Candidate David Cobb has today sent a letter the voting machine companies of America, urging them to stand with Velvet Revolution’s campaign to restore integrity to our country’s Electoral Process!
Cobb, along with the Libertarian Party’s Presidential Candidate Michael Badnarik, was responsible for the demanding a recount of Ohio’s Presidential Election after thousands of documented irregularities began to emerge out of the state after the election.
A letter of support was also sent to yours truly as Co-Founder of VR.
Here is the text from Cobb’s letter sent today to the leaders of all nine of America’s major voting machine companies:
Dear {Voting Machine Company Head}:
As an American citizen and a recent presidential candidate, I want to have faith in the vote counting process. Unfortunately, with more than 50,000 documented instances of irregularities in the past election, I am unable to trust either the vote counting process or its results without an open, accountable and independent method of public verification.
Public involvement and oversight in the voting process is essential. The integrity of our democracy demands that steps must be taken immediately to restore faith in our elections and the winners that they produce. These steps must include: having a paper ballot for each vote cast, independent analysis of voting machine software and hardware, open software source code, no contributions from voting companies to candidates for public office, no networking of machines and the public dissemination of all relevant voting data and documents. These steps are supported by millions of Americans and scores of voting rights organizations including VelvetRevolution who has already contacted you in this regard.
Your company is, in essence, performing a governmental function by counting the votes cast for political candidates and ballot measures and therefore must be accountable to the voters. Unlike the past, where voting machines produced a paper ballot that was counted by elections officials, many voting machines now receive, store, and tally votes, all without a single elections official knowing for sure if the votes were properly cast and accurately counted. This has greatly undermined public confidence in our electoral system.
I am writing to you now to specifically request that your company demonstrate its respect for the voters of this country and its democratic ideals and take the steps outlined above to restore integrity, accountability and transparency to our elections.
Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
David Cobb
2004 Green Party presidential candidate
Please see this page for the letter sent to Brad Friedman.
Cool. Good one, David!
Yeah, Brad! United we stand – divided we fall. Everyone, stand united with VR and make the necessary changes for America.
need more like you ,,,seems like to many dems are forgetting how to vote.come election they will wonder why they lost.they should know the primary starts NOW::::
Admire your perseverance Brad! Keep it up. We are with you!
I will write a letter, but I don’t think I can be as civilized as Mr. Cobb.
I’m pissed at these voting companies. And I bet they aren’t going to do a damn thing unless they are FORCED to. These companies have repeatedly demonstrated in the past that they will LIE about how good their systems are, they strongly resist any sort of transparency, and yet the public has documented tens of thousands of vote machine errors and hundreds of security/software vulnerabilities.
There’s only one logical way to explain such behavior and "incompetance". It’s called corruption. If this were a banking system, and we were dealing with money, these fuckos would be in jail. It’s like we are asking people that we are 99% sure have been stealing successfully over a period of years to just stop, since we are asking nice. They won’t stop – they will resist strongly and try to wear out our resolve. They know we will have a lot of difficulty getting a federal law passed.
Plan B: If we don’t get reforms, we just have to spread the word and launch a major campaign to inform anyone voting for a non-Republican to use absentee ballots. Repubs will use the machines, Dems & friends will use paper.
Plan C: Destroy the machines. Seriously. Knock them down and beat the shit out of the machine with a hammer. The Boston Tea Party 2006.
The two party system is completely bankrupt. We are promoting democracy in Iraq and here, in the US, it is a bad joke. The question is can a person who has stolen one election, and excluded input from all other political groupings, really promote democracy anywhere in the world?
How can countries in the middle east understand democracy when our own president does not? We are approaching a one party state.
I suspect that the "no networking" demand is going to be a major stumbling block. I don’t think it’s required in order to have a secure, verifiable process either. Obviously, no networking at all is one way to prevent people from trying to hack the machines, but it’s also a major selling point of the system. I strongly doubt that the manufacturers will go along.
Perhaps with super-crap systems like Diebold’s, built on Windows machines, the only way to be sure is to unplug; But, a well designed system with transaction logging and a journaling file system, etc. should be fine.
The point is to be able to detect problems, and to be able to do a recount when problems are encountered. Verifiability, and repeatability are what is really required—networked or not.
I hope you succeed in getting this mess cleaned up, and I sure admire the effort on the part of the "Velvet Ones," but I have to say, honestly, if it was my software company I’d refuse to get rid of networking.
Great comments – especially Benjammin075 #5!!
Haha! I LOVE YOUR COMMENTS and I totally AGREE! Where are we going to get stormin’ patriots like those who threw the tea overboard?
🙂 I agree, keep on trying, I think The Green Party Recount site was the one that had direct links to the media which should have copies but the media certainly keeps their email hidden and when you find it, more than half the time it doesn’t work.