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LOCAL News :: Elections & Legislation

E-Voting Safeguard Bill Stalled in the Illinois House

A bill designed to protect Illinois voters from the election fraud through electronic voting has stalled in the Illinois House just weeks before the end of the legislative session and the purchase of thousands of e-voting machines by Cook County and Chicago.
As Illinois rushes to comply with the mandates of the Help America Vote Act or HAVA, some in the legislature have been busy trying to guarantee that voters who use them can rest assured that their real votes will be counted. Although Illinois is one of 14 states that requires a voter-verifiable paper ballot to be attached to each machine, that piece of paper will prove meaningless if it is not the legal ballot. SB 1683-Elections-Provisional Ballots bill, gets rid of this loophole as well as several others. The bill not only requires the paper ballot to be the legal ballot so that recounts would require recounting what the voters have verified, those recounts must be done by equipment other than the one that produced the paper ballot. Other provisions of the bill include:

Computer codes of commercial, off the shelf software must be placed in escrow with the State Board and that all codes placed in escrow also must be available via the Internet.

Random audits of the system must be done consisting of a recount of the ballots in 5% of the precincts.

Test plans, as well as the test results, pertaining to the system must be made public records and must be available on the Internet.

This bill, which was written by the Oak Park Coalition for Truth and Justice in cooperation with Cook County Clerk, David Orr's office has already passed the Senate but has been stuck in committee in the House for two weeks. The bill must pass before the end of the session, to affect the elections in spring 2006 when e-voting machines are expected to be operating in every precinct in Chicago and Cook County.

For more information on SB 1683 and Voter protection legislation on the national level see: www.opctj.org or chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/56327/index.php
 
 

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