Happy News Years To All. Let's Keep Up The Battle For Fair, Transparent Elections
By John Gideon on 1/1/2006, 5:01pm PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, of VotersUnite and VoteTrustUSA

The "DVN Top 5" is a feature in the weekly voting newsletter of VoteTrustUSA. The December 26 edition can be found here. The selection of what will be the "Top 5" for each week and where it goes on the list is all mine. The fact that you may disagree with my choices is great because it shows that you have been reading the DVN articles that I've posted throughout the week here on The BRAD BLOG!...

VotersUnite! is happy to join the Action Alert from VoteTrustUSA and ask that the EAC do their job and demand that the ITA reinspect the Diebold software looking for banned 'interpreted' code. Diebold has admitted that it is there. Now the ITA needs to find it and, if necessary, withdraw the qualification of Diebold software until the 'interpreted' software is removed. So far 19 organizations have signed the VoteTrustUSA petition. Concerned citizens have sent 1775 emails and 215 letters so far. (See #1 Below for more information)

#5 - This week has found states reporting that they are not going to meet the federal HAVA mandates. This failure, in most of the failing states, is due to their not having the mandated state voter registration data base ready to go. Colorado is one of those states and the failure can be directly attributed to a failure by Accenture. This issue was reported last week by The Denver Channel and The Rocky Mountain News

#4 – Connecticut is another one of those states that is in danger of missing the deadline. They are one of the last of the lever-machine holdouts. Elections officials and voters are not happy that they have to give up their much beloved voting machines for something new. The Litchfield County Times reports that one election official repeated the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." This adage seems funny when you consider that in Middletown a complete new election has to be held due to a lever-machine that has been in use but broken for the last 5 years. This was reported in the Middletown Press

#3 – The voters in Westmoreland County, PA received a blow this last week when they learned that their County Commissioners were going to ignore the will of the voters, who were never given an opportunity to speak on this issue. The County Commissioners, instead, voted to purchase ES&S iVotronic DREs. 15-year poll worker and voting activist, Marybeth Kuznik, revealed the beginning of a 10-county voting activist group and their "yes-we-do-care-and-you-never-even-asked-us" campaign, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

#2 - Last week it was revealed that California SoS McPherson sent a letter to ES&S threatening them with decertification if they did not fix some problems with their voting systems used in the state. This letter had been sent 5 weeks earlier but was just revealed. Of course keeping this secret was not a good thing but then this week, suddenly, McPherson told the ES&S counties that all is well and there are no concerns any longer. There was no report of why the problem was a problem, why it was kept secret, or what was done to fix the problem.

#1 – A National Action Alert was put out this past week with the revelations of Diebold software problems and the admitted presence of federally banned 'interpreted' code on their voting machines. The Action Alert asks citizens to send an email to the Election Assistance Commission commissioners and the Independent Test Authority Secretariat to demand that they do their job and insist that the ITA does its job in decertifying the Diebold software until such time as the banned software is removed.

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