Reply #42: ACTION ALERT: NM Election Reform

[dzika]

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

ACTION ALERT: NM Election Reform

According to an article in today's Albuquerque Journal, the first House Voters and Elections Committee meeting at the NM Legislature yesterday was packed with voters demanding a paper trail for electronic voting machines. NM Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron stated that NM has a kind of paper trail that provides cumulative totals at the end of the day, but admitted the machines lack a paper receipt for voters to check if their vote was recorded correctly.

Get this (#1): Vigil-Giron said the state's 33 counties can't use the $9 million in federal dollars left for voting machine purchases to buy machines that provide individual paper receipts because none of the companies that make them have applied to her office for testing and certification according to NM law.

Given the urgent need for machines with paper trails, you'd think it would enter Vigil-Giron's mind to contact the companies, wouldn't you? After all, she does seem to have a special relationship with ES&S machines, whose vice president was her 6th largest campaign contributor in 2002. (See previous DFNM post.) Just by chance, ES&S was showing off its machine with paper receipts at the Roundhouse rotunda yesterday. Perhaps she should have walked over and talked to them.

Vigil-Giron also answered questions from committee members about possible vote fraud in the last election. Get this (#2): She claimed she "has not seen a single complaint come to her in writing, nor has she heard from the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Mexico, which created a task force to look into such allegations." She said, "So far we have not seen anything written down."

I wonder if she considers the court actions and suits, or the reports submitted by the Green and Libertarian Parties that documented myriad problems with the election to be "anything written down." Guess not.

It should be noted that Vigil-Giron is president of the National Association of Secretaries of State and that Denise Lamb, NM's election bureau director, heads the National Association of State Election Directors. So they have alot of clout in how their counterparts around the country will deal with election reform issues. It's incredibly important that they understand how many of us are demanding that voters have access to machines with paper trails and receipts so that we can, once again, trust our election process.

Click to the continuation page for related contact information.

To contact Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron:
Office of the New Mexico Secretary of State
State Capitol North Annex, Suite 300
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87503
Phone: [phone]
FAX: [phone]
Toll Free 1-800-477-3632
[e-mail]

To contact Election Bureau chief, Denise Lamb:
[phone]
[e-mail]

To contact your legislators about voting reform issues:
http://legis.state.nm.us/lcs/default.asp

Membership, contact and meeting information about the House Voters and Elections committee:
http://legis.state.nm.us/lcs/committeedetail.asp?CommCode=HVEC

The website of Verified Voting New Mexico is a good resource on this issue.


source: http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/2005/01/action_alert_co.html