Why is no candidate talking about Verified Voting?

It's sad really, that a topic that everybody pretty much agrees on, that everybody should have the ability to vote and know their vote accounted, has turned into something divisive and fracturing.

I used to have high hopes that Rep. Holt's bill in the house would pass in the Republican congress, after all it had plenty of Republican co-sponsors, and there had been multiple companion bills in the Senate. That didn't happen, the Republican leadership would never let it come to a vote.

Now we have a Democratic congress, and while we hold only a bare majority in the Senate, still the legislation never ends up coming to a vote.

Moreover, anytime "irregularities" show up, people are immediately divided up into "deniers" and "fraudsters".

While it is true that you can't blame every electoral loss or mishap on "Diebold", it is also foolish to pretend that the problem doesn't exist or that "the states have it under control."

In some cases this is true, but why fight 50 battles when we don't have to?

A starling statistic from the Iowa Straw Poll won't leave my mind and may foreshadow many more Elections to come.

There were 26,000 total Tickets sold for this event, yet there were only just 14,302 votes tabulated.

Now think about that for a minute.
26,000 people purchase tickets to go to a Straw Poll event, and yet we are to believe that 12,000 of those people couldn't even care less about the voting part? Just what were they there for?

This is not believable.
12,000 people went through all that trouble to get a ticket, drive a long distance, wrestle around with parking, or public transportation, and spent their whole Saturday away at a crowded and noisy event, and then did not even vote for anybody?
What were they there for again?

I am thrilled at our upcoming Democratic majority in both houses of congress. The fact that we are going to see some real Democratic legislation passed is exciting and it makes all of the many, many hours of work and toil totally worth it.

There is something that needs to be addressed immediately, it is a problem that eats away at the very core of our Democracy and American Values. We need some to be able to address the problem of voting machines and unverified voting.

As required by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) (or the Help Republicans Get Elected Act), New York City is in the process of finding electronic replacements for the venerable old lever machines that have nobly served for over half a century. This week, the NYC Board of Elections is providing two demonstrations of the proposed new equipment in advance of a public hearing on November 21 (strategically timed two days before Thanksgiving) and a series of public vendor interviews that will precede the final order in March.

I attended the session on November 15 in Queens with a group from Democracy for NYC and, far from alleviating my concerns about the new machines, it raised even more issues that aren't always fully discussed when the contentious topic of voting machines arises. For anyone in New York City concerned about voting machine issues, I highly recommend that you find a way to attend the final demo session at 5PM on Friday, November 17 at Hostos Community College in The Bronx.

An overview of the proposed machines and some observations from the November 15 session follow the fold.

Tomorrow at 9 AM the Committee on House Administration will be holding a hearing on electronic voting machines: verification, security and paper trails. Move On is asking supporters of paper trails to attend:

X'posted to Dailykos

Not all of us who advocate for verified voting are doomsayers who do no actual work.

Some of us have been doing work at the grassroots level before 98% of the people in the blogosphere even knew or cared what these machines were. I'll use myself as an example, years ago when Diebold was still considered "hunky dory" in California, I led a letter writing campaign to then Democratic Secretary of State Kevin Shelley. This letter writing campaign consisted of a clear and reasoned argument against the security of these touch screen machines. They run off of MS Access, are ridiculously easy to hack and have proven flaws that are always patched and never fixed. Speaking as somebody working within the IT field I came up with a reasonable set of "talking points" and distributed them to friends and colleagues who were also concerened.