Libertarians Unite With Usual Foes of Freedom to Fight the (Electronic Voting) Machine

California Libertarians at their 2004 state convention join with traditional opponents in demanding that new voting technology is open, transparent, and auditable, opposing direct record electronic voting systems that do not use a voter verified paper ballot.

SAN JOSE, CA (PRWEB) March 20, 2004 --- California Libertarians voted overwhelmingly Saturday at their state convention to hold new electronic voting systems accountable to the public. In a move that aligns the Libertarian Party with usual rivals--California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, Senators Don Perata, D-Oakland, and Ross Johnson, R-Irvine--delegates to the convention demanded paper ballots.

The full text of the new platform plank:

To avoid fraud and manipulation, we oppose direct record electronic voting systems that do not use a voter verified paper ballot as the ballot of count, recount, audit, and record. We support a voting system that is open, transparent and auditable in which each individual can verify at the time of voting that his vote is correctly recorded and in which the public can verify that the votes were correctly counted.

After repeated reports of election snafu's, dropped votes, and failed security audits conducted by the Pentagon and others, numerous groups ranging from VerifiedVoting.org, founded by Stanford computer scientist David Dill to TrueMajority, founded by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, have joined the call for a voter verified paper trail. While Cohen takes very un-libertarian positions on foreign aid ("Expand it!") and the power of a world government ("Increase it!"), Libertarians should find Cohen's The Computer Ate My Vote campaign as palatable as a pint of Cherry Garcia.

Said one delegate, referring to the Help America Vote Act of 2002: "Only the government could spend $3.8 billion to fix a problem and give us a system that is demonstrably less secure and more prone to errors and fraud than the system it is replacing. Individuals must be able to assess whether their vote has been counted correctly."

The Libertarian Party of California has over fifty public officeholders statewide. Libertarians believe in personal freedom in both social and economic spheres, and in government small enough to protect those freedoms.

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-Richard Newell (with Edward Bowers)
NEWS FROM THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF CALIFORNIA
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