Pass the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act

Dear Friends,

National legislation to protect the accuracy of our elections is a step closer to becoming law. HR 811, a bill requiring voter-verified paper records, random hand count audits to check electronic tallies, and independent testing of voting systems will soon get a vote in the House of Representatives.

We need your help to keep the momentum going. Contact your Congressman and call on him to support HR 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act.

Call the House switchboard at 202-224-3121
and ask to be connected to your Representative's office. Or click any
of the Representative's names below for other contact information.

Congressmen Bruce Braley, Leonard Boswell, and Dave Loebsack are cosponsors. Thank them for their support and tell them to keep the pressure on. If you live in Tom Latham's or Steve King's districts, tell them to join Republicans Frank Wolf of Virginia, Darrell Issa of California, and Greg Walden of Oregon and get on board!


BACKGROUND

On Tuesday May 8, HR 811 was reported out of committee. Here are some of the things HR 811 will do to protect federal elections:

• Require a durable, voter-verified paper ballot for all voting machines.
  

• Require hand audits of federal elections in randomly chosen precincts.

• Allocate $10 million for Iowa
  to purchase paper ballot voting systems! The bill allocates $1 billion
  for new equipment, and each state gets at least 1% of that amount. Last
  month the Iowa General Assembly passed Senate File 369,
  which requires counties to gradually replace all direct-recording touch
  screens with paper ballots and optical scanners, as the touch screens
  wear out. The total cost of all counties switching to optical scan
  systems now? At least $9 million. $10 million in federal money would allow Iowa's counties to convert to paper ballots and optical scan by 2008!

• Ban connection of any election system to the Internet.

• Eliminate the terrible testing system
  in which voting machine companies choose and pay the testing
  laboratories that sign off on the security of their products. The
  present system has failed to detect a litany of security flaws
  in voting equipment. For people who follow this issue closely, the
  testing process has been one of  the most disturbing aspects of the
  story of American elections in the electronic age.

There will
be more work to do before 811 becomes law. The fight in the Senate has
not begun yet. But with your help, election integrity will soon win a
major victory. Thank you for your support in this fight, and for
everything you do for our democracy.

Best regards,
Sean Flaherty
Co-Chair, Iowans for Voting Integrity
www.IowansForVotingIntegrity.org