2/7/2008: "Fostering Public Dialog on Oregon's Secret Vote Counting"

Subject: Fostering Public Dialog on Oregon's Secret Vote Counting
From: "Virginia L. Ross"
Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:00:41 -0800
To: john.lindback@state.or.us
CC: Bill.Bradbury@state.or.us, sen.vickiwalker@state.or.us, Avakian.Sen@state.or.us, Brown.Sen@state.or.us, Metsger.Sen@state.or.us

Dear John,

We appreciate your time in replying and understand that these issues can be complicated. We gladly accept your invitation to meet in person so we can discuss directly your answers to our questions. How about meeting with us in Portland on around the 13th or 14th? (If you come to Portland on the 13th, you might wish to consider attending a screening of the important new documentary "Uncounted" that will be held at Bethel Lutheran Church in Portland (and numerous other locations) around the state on that date.)

We would like to keep Oregon citizens informed of these issues on our website, so we've created a reference page on the front of our website for all our correspondence with you. We would like to continue this dialog, which is not between you and me or a few of us, but between you, the entire Oregon VRC, the SOS candidates, and the public.

The bottom line is, Oregon votes are counted in secret, by software, inside machines. Your confidence that the outcomes are correctly produced in this secret process seem to be based on the following factors:

1) L&A testing of machines before and after the election using stacks of 1,000 dummy ballots.
2) Your feeling that the customer service of the vendors is good and their testing of their own equipment, or testing by conflicted consultants, is vigorous.
3) A new audit procedure that will provide at best 60% level of confidence that the correct outcome has been generated by the machines.
4) Full hand recounts in the past have generally upheld the machine results.

Conversely, we, as citizens, have no real basis for confidence in this secret vote counting. The L&A tests do not apply to the election itself. Software is fully capable of operating differently during an election than during a test. A "feeling" as to the quality of service or vigor of testing provided by vendors with partisan connections is not a sound empirical basis for confidence. The so-called "audit" procedure passed in the last session does not provide citizens with any solid basis for confidence in the results, and it actually worsens the situation by giving an "illusion" of credibility to the result. Finally, serious security vulnerabilities and performance problems have been reported in connection with optical scanners across the country. ES&S M650's in particular have been decertified completely in Colorado.

The solution is readily available. We need proof that the outcomes are correct through routine, mandatory hand counting of statistically significant ballot samples. This is not too much to ask. Oregon VRC worked diligently with you in a non-adversarial fashion and consulted with experts for years to create an effective verification procedure. In the end, all of these efforts to give Oregon voters a basis for confidence in our election results failed when you abruptly gutted the HB 3270 bill and replaced the verification wording with an ineffective precinct sample method just before the bill was passed into law.

We look forward to seeing you again to hear your answers to our unanswered questions and concerns and also hopefully to discuss and plan a way forward.

Sincerely,

Oregon Voter Rights Coalition