Contact information:

Mary Ann Gould

Coalition for Voting Integrity

votingintegrity@aol.com

(c) 215.588.8518

(h) 215.357.5206

Quakertown - Coaltion for Voting Integrity members will attend the Bucks County Commissioners' meeting today to ask crucial questions about the electronic voting system purchased last March by the commissioners and scheduled for use this November.

In light of the most recent report released by the prestigious Brennan Center for Justice, which throws the reliability of the Danaher full-face electronic machines into deeper doubt, Coalition members plan to ask the following crucial questions about the topics listed below:

WIRELESS TRANSMISSION OF RESULTS
1. Are election results going to be transmitted electronically, in violation of Pennsylvania election law?

USED MACHINES
2. Why are we getting used machines?
3. Where were the used machines last used?
4. Why were they thrown out of other states?

BACK-UP PLAN FOR ELECTION DAY
5. Will Bucks County have a paper ballot back-up plan like the ones that saved the primaries in several PA counties that experienced problems with their electronic voting systems?

WHICH COMPANY ARE WE DEALING WITH?
6. Who is Electec Inc.?
7. What is the connection between Danaher and Electec Inc.?

NUMBER OF MACHINES
8. What is the total number of lever machines used in each precinct?
9. Do we have enough machines?
10. Will any precinct have fewer Danaher machines than they did lever machines?

On Background:

The most recent Brennan Center report is third in a series that throws the reliability and security of the county's electronic voting machines deeper into doubt as it shows that full-face DREs, like the Danaher machines scheduled for use in Bucks County this fall, cause more lost votes (residual votes) than precinct-based optical scan (PCOS) voting systems.

The full report can be found here. (http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/Usability8-28.pdf)

Key findings from the report include:

■ With few exceptions, PCOS systems and scrolling DREs produce lower rates of residual votes than central-count optical scan, full-face DRE, or mixed voting systems.

■ Residual vote rates are higher on DREs with a full-face ballot design than on scrolling DREs with a scrolling or consecutive screen format. The negative impact of full-face ballot design in terms of lost votes is even greater in low-income and minority communities than in other communities.

■ PCOS systems produce significantly lower residual vote rates than central-count optical scan systems because the former systems allow the voter to correct certain of her errors prior to casting her ballot.

The two previous Brennan Center for Justice papers were:

Making the List: Database Matching and Verification Processes for Voter Registration by Justin Levitt, Wendy Weiser and Ana Muñoz.

The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World by the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, which exposed the fact that all three of the nation’s most commonly purchased electronic voting systems are vulnerable to software attacks that could threaten the integrity of a state or national election.

Also recently released is this Zogby poll, which illuminates the general public's mistrust of voting systems that are not based on the use of voter-verified paper ballots. Zogby is reporting that 80% of the respondents said they want votes to be counted in front of observers representing the public, and that election officials should not rely solely on the proprietary software that operates electronic voting machines that are presently being installed all over the United States.

And in the most recent issue of Mother Jones, Philadelphia, which uses Danaher full-face electronic voting machines like those scheduled for use in Bucks County, tied for second place on a list of America's 11 Worst Places to Vote, behind only Georgia.

The Coalition for Voting Integrity will continue to ask questions about the electronic voting system chosen by the County Commissioners as well as pursue legislative and legal remedies to the resulting crisis facing voters in Bucks County and most of Pennsylvania.