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| Green Party Urges Support of Pocan-Plale Bill to Ban Touch Screen Machines. |
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Wisconsin Green Party Contacts: (Madison, Wi) The Wisconsin Green Party (WiGP) applauds Representative Pocan and Senator Plale for introducing legislation banning the use of touch screen voting machines in Wisconsin until they are proven to be accurate and fair. "We are in agreement with these legislators that a paper trail is needed, and that touch screen machines have a questionable record," said Fred Depies, WiGP Election Committee Chair. "We agree that until such machines prove themselves to be verifiable, and until the questions about their delivery of questionable results in Georgia, Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois, and New Hampshire have been answered, that we should not permit their use in Wisconsin." "In order to be sure that the machines are satisfactory, we call for transparency in the system," said Ruth Weill, a member of the Coordinating Council of the WiGP. "This means that the voting machine software program should be "Open Source" - open for all to examine. We could learn from Australia, where the specifications were set by independent election officials in the process of developing the programs for Australia's first electronic voting machines. The software code was published for the public, and posted on the Internet for all to see and review. Public satisfaction and input were a crucial part of the process. This is a far cry from the US system, where current trade secrecy contracts between these voting machine companies and states make it a criminal offense for states to touch the equipment or examine the software." "If you follow technology trends closely, which I have a professional obligation to do, you would conclude that putting the underlying code out there for everyone to see decreases the possibility for fraud," said Zach Shelton, webmaster of the Wisconsin Green Party. "The scrutiny made possible through Open Source leads to better security. Hiding the code just means that flaws will not be discovered as quickly." The Wisconsin State Elections Board criteria for voting machines currently limits the use of electronic voting systems to existing optical scan equipment, which has a paper trail. The passage of the Pocan-Plale bill would help ensure the accuracy and fairness of elections in Wisconsin. The bill could be improved by calling for open source software programs for touch screen voting machines, by drawing election officials from all the major parties (defined in the Wisconsin Statutes as those parties that received 10% in a race for State Constitutional office), rather than just two of them, and by calling for paper receipts from touch screen voting machines to be encrypted rather than plaintext. Encrypting the paper receipts makes it impossible to sell them. In October, the Wisconsin Green Party passed a resolution calling for United Nations election monitors for the United States 2004 Presidential and Congressional elections, and the use of voting machines that incorporate a paper trail. The resolution advocates for purchasing voting machines that can accommodate IRV voting. The Wisconsin Green Party is an affiliate of the Green Party of the United States, and stands on the four pillars of Ecological Wisdom, Nonviolence, Social & Economic Justice, and Grassroots Democracy. The party has 11 local chapters throughout Wisconsin. MORE INFORMATION |
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