http://vvnm.org
New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron appears ready to spend
millions in taxpayer money on voting machines for the disabled but has ruled
out the one machine the disabled are said to like best. Moreover, she is doing
this out of the public view.
Her action, she says, is to comply with the requirement of the federal Help
America Vote Act (HAVA) that at least one voting system accessible and usable
independently and privately by the disabled must be purchased for each polling
place by December 31. The Secretary seems poised to consume NMÕs one time
allotment of an estimated $9 million in HAVA funds for buying some 1,400
electronic voting machines.
During Sept. 19-23, Secretary Vigil-Giron held an unpublicized meeting in Rio
Rancho, to which she invited selected representatives of the disabled and
county clerks. She has not revealed who these disabled representatives were and
how comprehensively they reflected the range of disability. At this meeting she
barred the county clerks from providing input and asked the disabled
representatives to rate three touch screen machines Ð the Sequoia AVC Edge and
the ES&S iVotronic and the ES&S AutoMark. According to testimony on
10/13 before the legislative task force on election reform, nine out of ten of
the participating disabled voters at the Rio Rancho meeting preferred AutoMark.
But inexplicably the SoS told them that the AutoMark is not eligible for
selection on grounds that it is not HAVA compliant -- this despite the fact
that the other two machines being rated are also not HAVA compliant at this
time. In fact the Automark is now
being purchased in at least 6 States because it is both HAVA compliant and
produces a voter-friendly Verifiable Paper Ballot.
Election reform activists with VerifiedVotingNM and UnitedVotersNM say the SoS
is arbitrary and wrong to willfully bypass ballot marking systems such as the
AutoMark. ItÕs touchscreen interface enables the disabled to vote without
assistance and in private. It has a sip/puff tube for voters unable to use a
touch screen and it has audio/large text/high contract modes for blind voters.
It is equally efficient for non-disabled voters. Also, the AutoMark does not
count votes as other voting machines do. Instead, to insure counting accuracy,
it utilizes a conventional paper ballot that can be readily audited or
recounted by hand or by the electronic scanning machines already available in
many NM counties. By contrast, the Edge and iVotronic use rolls of paper tape
for verifiable paper ballots that are much more difficult to audit and recount,
and threaten the secret ballot since they preserve the order of the recorded
votes of all the voters.
North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming have all selected the AutoMark as their
voting machine of choice, as well as counties in California, Oklahoma, West
Virginia and Florida.
This impending purchase by the Secretary of State is of major importance to
voters in NM since these voting machines are used by both the disabled and
non-disabled. Selection of voting machines should be carried out with full
public input and with all alternatives openly considered. On behalf of many
election reform supporters in NM, we urge the media, in your key role as
watchdogs of democracy, to look into this issue and report your findings.
(signed) Robert Stearns 988-3718; Kim Kirkpatrick 454-0598; Stephen
Fettig 662-6785, Pat Leahan 425-3840; Paul and Laura Stokes 898-1237, all
citizen volunteers with VerifiedVotingNM or UnitedVotersNM. Note: We have no
financial connection with any voting machine manufacturer or vendor, nor does
VVNM and UVNM. Note,we are not advocating the Automark over
any other forthcoming ballot marking system, we use the product name because it
one of the three that were under consideration.
More
info on Verified Voting New Mexico