Important Election Day Action Memo from Victoria Lovegren

This is What Democracy Looks Like !


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The whole world will be watching next week's election, and Cuyahoga County's will be a major object of focus. WCPN will host World Have Your Say here in Cleveland on the 7th and 8th. Director Michael Vu was on Lou Dobbs on Sunday night and on CNN today. And wait until the new film, Hacking Democracy, airs this Thursday?

A few patriots have been tracking Cuyahoga County Board Of Elections over the past two years and know that there is absolutely NO basis for confidence in the accurate and honest tallying of our votes by Diebold touch screen voting machines and the Diebold central tabulator. The May debacle, the missing memory cards, the discrepancies among totals, the destruction of all May election data from the memory cards, and the refusal to post election results, the utilization of electronic voting machines in general, and the Recount indictments, are but a few of the reasons we believe it is essential to have election-day vote-count verification (to the extent to which CCBOE and Kenneth Blackwell will let us.)

For those in or near Cuyahoga County, we must be vigilant this November 7th to make sure our votes are counted accurately!

There are many opportunities for citizens to be vigilant next Tuesday, and I'm describing yet another, one that focuses on protecting the vote count:

Vote Count Protection Project

in conjunction with Dr. Steven Freeman and Dr. Ken Warren

of www.electionintegrity.org

This project seeks to verify the vote counts on election day by, first, conducting simple Election Verification Exit Polls, and second, having "inside" people jot down the machine summary-report totals for the top 4 races and 1 issue. So we need "inside" people: poll workers, election-day technicians and observers, to capture the "system" data and record it on a simple data collection form. We also need "outside" pollsters to ask voters to fill out a very short and simple questionnaire.

Sample data collection forms and questionnaires can be found here:

http://www.ohiovigilance.org/ProjectPost/CuyahogaPollDataCollectionForm.pdf (PDF)

and

http://www.ohiovigilance.org/ProjectPost/CuyahogaSampleQuestionnaire.pdf (PDF)



For more details about this important project, see http://www.ohiovigilance.org or email me at victoria@wecount2006.org.

I am certain this project will be a fun, interesting and rewarding experience--a civic duty more meaningful than jury duty--and you'll meet lots of good people also engaging to restore democracy. (There are other roles you can play, as well, in the days leading up to Nov 7th and after the election. We need techies to do analysis on election day and after!)

Victoria Lovegren, Ph.D.

Founder, Ohio Vigilance

Please forward widely!

P.S. If you are not yet an "observer", we can arrange for you to get that status, in which case you can be inside the polls during the end-of-day closing procedures.