November 06, 2005

'Parallel election' to check votes

"Marin is one of a handful of California counties in which a cadre of suspicious poll watchers will conduct a "parallel election" on Nov. 8 to check up on government vote counts.

An elections watchdog group calling itself the Citizens' Audit Parallel Election has recruited volunteers in Marin, Humboldt, Los Angeles and Orange counties. The volunteers will go to polling places on election day and ask exiting voters to duplicate their votes on paper ballots that will later be hand-counted in public.

So far, about 22 Marin residents have volunteered to visit polls here, said Linda Bagneschi Dorrance of Novato, a 37-year-old publicist who is coordinating the local effort.

CAPE's leaders worry that the move to computerized voting has set the stage for massive voter fraud.

"California election officials cannot demonstrate that our votes are actually counted as we cast them when our ballots are counted with secret software," said Judy Alter of Culver City, the group's founder. "The official ballots and vote tallies are recorded on optical scanners, electronic voting machines, and central tally machines that are operated with trade-secret software not disclosed to the public, not even to public elections officials."

"We need to have a transparent vote-counting process," said Dorrance. "We used to have that when paper ballots were hand-counted in public view. Now that takes place in a machine, and then ballots are locked away, and if you want a recount, you have to pay."

This will be the second such parallel election that the group has conducted. During San Diego's mayoral election in July, CAPE's volunteers convinced about half of the voters exiting five polling locations to fill out duplicate paper ballots. The locations consolidated 11 of San Diego's 700 voting precincts, or about 1 percent of the total vote."

The article is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at November 6, 2005 12:28 PM