Reader comments
Groups praise voting measure

What about voter verification? We need to stop voter fraud.

I was in the Senate Rules hearing yesterday in D.C. Many in the audience were angry that this poor excuse of a bill was being praised by this hand-picked group of yes-men while the rest of our voices were excluded from the spoken public testimony.

S.3212 would be an ABSOLUTE DISASTER for Pennsylvania and many other states, including Utah. It would throw billions more taxpayer dollars to voting machine corporations in exchange for more unreliable technology and unverifiable elections. Unbelievably, this bill will not fully take effect until 2014 or 2015 and most of the technology it would require and fund is not even invented yet! In the meantime more and more voters are rightfully losing confidence in our voting process.

There is a simple, cost-effect voting system available nationwide right now, and that is optical scan -- paper ballots are marked by each voter using a pencil or accessible ballot marker, then counted by an electronic scanner.

Paper ballots and scanners, followed up with a statistically-significant audit of every election, is the only solution that makes any sense for the foreseeable future.

Senators Feinstein and Bennett please listen -- to ALL of us.

Marybeth Kuznik, Executive Director
VotePA

This bill would flood our country with more of the unreliable paperless voting machines. The only groups happy with this are those with ties to the voting vendor. The National Federation of the Blind received $1 million from Diebold and even boasts on their website of being partners now.

This bill would have a black box to tell us that another black box is being honest or accurate.

Only the voting vendors would like this bill.

Here is what the Verified Voting Foundation said about this legislation: "It is our view that all elections should be accessible, publicly verifiable, independently auditable, and as simple and cost-effective as possible, both to conduct and to audit. There is room for innovation, but innovation occurs even without such legislation, when demand exists. But we must take the necessary steps to safeguard all our elections�today, not years down the road. Yet this bill does not do that. Instead, it allows unverifiable systems to persist indefinitely.

However well-intentioned, S. 3212, if enacted as written, would damage the transparency and reliability of Federal elections in the U.S. for decades to come. VerifiedVoting.org respectfully urges citizens and members of the United States Senate to oppose its passage."

It's not only the NFB that's in bed with Diebolt. AAPD is as well. That's why I did not renew my membership in AAPD. I do belong to the NFB Writers' Division, but I keep my distence from the NFB as a whole. They do not welcome member comment, much less descent.

I was surprised to see a favorable article about this voting bill, since all the other coverage I've seen has been along the lines of the other comments here. To claim as the NFB and AAPD have been doing for years, that accessibility trumps security and varifiability makes a mockery of voting rights and belittles disabled voters. While accessibility would be nice (I have never been able to vote independently), it is far more important to me that my vote be recorded accurately and counted. I agree with the previous commenter who stated that paper ballots and scanners remain the best way of insuring these goals.