Cook County Clerk, David Orr was just one of the featured speakers at the forum titled: Your Ballot--Your Future, sponsored by The Oak Park Coalition for Truth and Justice (OPCTJ). The forum drew a capacity crowd at the Dole Branch of the Oak Park Public Library on Saturday, April 30, 2005 and covered the voter fraud that occurred in the November 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections and the inexorable purchase of voting machines for Cook County and the City of Chicago in the next couple of months.

Although Illinois numbers among the 14 states that already require a paper verification of votes cast on electronic voting machines, speakers at the forum say that is not enough. They are backing a bill, SB 1683--Elections-Provisional Ballots bill introduced by Don Harmon, which has already passed the Illinois Senate. The bill requires that the source code used by electronic voting machines be made public as well as test plans and test results of the machines. It also requires a random recount of ballots in 5% of precincts be done and that the paper ballot remain the official ballot and counted by another piece of equipment than the one that produced it.

Other speakers at the forum included Chicago software developer, Carolyn Kay, founder of www.MakeThemAccountable.com, Ron Baiman, Professor of Economics and Statistics at UIC and author of The United States of Ukraine? and Dan Johnson Weinberger, attorney with the Midwest Democracy Center and lobbyist for progressive legislation in Springfield.

Although most of the forum focused on the integrity of electronic voting systems, Cook County Clerk, David Orr spoke about other problems that need to be addressed in order to streamline and eliminate barriers to voting in Illinois. Orr pointed to the law that requires women to reregister if they change their last names upon marrying. He is promoting legislation that would allow people to register on voting day, allow voters to vote three weeks in advance and eliminate the prohibition against using an absentee ballot if you registered by mail. These were just a few of the improvements Orr would like to see. In addition he would like to see election day moved to a weekend or holiday allow the counting of all absentee ballots postmarked by voting day.

The forum opened with the film, Invisible Ballots, a documentary that covers the history of voting technology, and the current problems with e-voting. Those problems were echoed by software developer, Carolyn Kay, who said that she is able to create a program that would print out a different vote summary on paper than was calculated in the machine. Dr. Baiman of UIC who coauthored an extensive paper that concluded the November 2004 presidential election results were statistically impossible given the exit poll data.

It was Johnson-Weinberger, however, whose radical ideas brought cheers from the crowd. Johnson-Weinberger challenged the audience to think outside of the box and consider themselves in charge of their futures. He suggested that cities may consider taking over their own elections if they want to insure a fair process and reliable results. He cautioned against leaving important assignments up to corporate entities such as the gathering of exit poll data and he said we should keep an eagle eye out in Republican precincts as well as the Democratic ones since statistics show the ballot box stuffing happened mostly in Republican precincts.

The Cook County Board of Elections and the Chicago Board of Elections are choosing between four companies: Diebold, HART-Intercivic, Sequoia and ES&S. Every precinct in Chicago and Cook County will have at least one electronic voting machine by March 2006.