Working for safeguards to improve the integrity of Virginia's elections

The General Assembly is in session, and considering election integrity reforms (and some proposed rollbacks). View 2008 Bill Summary (requires Adobe Reader).

Please ask your state Senators to support:

• SB 292 — Provides real recounts and audits during the voting canvas
• SB 536 — Strengthens security requirements for voting machine certification

Please ask your Senators and delegates to oppose:

• HB 638 — Rolls back the ban on new DRE (electronic voting machine) purchases

Our Objectives — free, fair, secure elections for our democracy

• A voter-verified paper audit trail via optical scan ballots — a permanent record, verified by the voter, of each vote cast. This requirement is absolutely essential for recounts and audits to be able to ensure the integrity of our elections. Paperless DRE machines provide no means to detect errors or prevent fraud. Proper implementation must protect voter privacy, and include random audits to compare electronic and paper counts. Other verifiable voting technology may be preferable and less expensive. Optical scan ballots are proven cost-effective systems that always provide a voter-verified paper audit trail.
• Random post-election audits of paper records. No business, government or financial organization would just assume critical records are correct without auditing. The whole purpose of paper trails (whether from optical machines or DREs) is to allow regular manual audits after each election to check machine accuracy. The audits are our safeguard to detect and remedy errors and election fraud.
• Audit paper ballots during recounts. Current Virginia law does not provide a means to examine paper ballots during recounts. Thus there is no procedure in the law to test the accuracy of the machines during a recount, even when the voter-verified paper ballots exist. The solution is to perform an expanded audit of paper records during recounts to determine whether the voting machines performed correctly.