Mayor Calls for 'Paper Ballots'; County Clerk Lies About Federal Law to Support the Continued Use of Her Democracy-Busting DRE Voting System...
By Brad Friedman on 11/2/2007, 7:04pm PT  

The latest e-vote mess with Texas...

A Travis County judge ruled Thursday that West Lake Hills' last City Council election will not be overturned, prompting the city's mayor to blast the electronic voting machines used in the election and call for a return to paper ballots.

The judge ruled on a lawsuit filed by Robin Vaughan, who lost by two votes in the city's May 2006 council election.
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Two voters testified that poll workers confused them with people who have similar names and gave them incorrect electronic ballots that did not include the West Lake Hills races.
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Minutes later [after the judge's verdict], West Lake Hills Mayor Mark Urdahl, who had supported Vaughan's unsuccessful campaign, said electronic voting machines were responsible for the dispute and should no longer be used. He said a major flaw with electronic voting is that, instead of poll workers handing out a ballot with personal information a voter can confirm, the workers hand out a ticket with a string of seemingly meaningless numbers that is inserted into a machine.

"If we had a paper ballot," Urdahl said after the trial, "we wouldn't be here."

So how many more such cases are we going to see in next week's elections, and more notably, in next year's elections? Hope you're ready for the meltdown to come.

In the above matter, it looks like the Travis County Clerk was more than happy to lie to the reporter so she could continue using her democracy-busting e-voting systems:

County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir, who was at the trial, said the problems that led to the trial were caused by human error and are not inherent in voting machines. She told Urdahl that the county could not switch to paper ballots because doing so would violate federal and state laws intended to protect voters with disabilities.

That is, of course, complete and total bullshit.

Only one disabled accessible voting device (and it needn't be a DRE) is required per polling place, as per the federal Help America Vote Act. If Texas has some state law requiring that every voter use such systems, we are unaware of it. In other words, if the reporters quote was accurate, County Clerk DeBeauvoir was lying.

It's a shame the reporter on the piece, like so many at local papers who cover this beat on rare occassions, didn't know enough to call her on it.

                 

Article Categories: Election Irregularities, Hart InterCivic, Texas, Election 2006