Black Box Voting Public Forum in Greensboro

Notice of Event:

Black Box Voting Public Forum in Greensboro

Date: Monday, March 28, 2005
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Event Location: Unitarian Universalist Church of Greensboro

Street: 5603 Hilltop Road (Corner of Hilltop and Guilford College Roads)
City and State: Greensboro, North Carolina

The panel will provide a presentation illustrating actual and potential failures of voting technology in North Carolina, followed by questions and answers. Panelists will also discuss the Public Confidence in Elections Bill, which is now before the North Carolina General Assembly. The bill would mandate voter verified paper ballots for each vote, as well as other safeguards to insure every vote is accurately recorded and counted. Successful methods for lobbying our legislators will be shared. (Speakers' political affiliation includes

one democrat, one republican and one unaffiliated).

You are invited to attend a public forum that explains the concerns about paperless electronic

voting, a very pertinent issue to Guilford County which has 1,186 paperless voting machines.

To read about instances where votes were lost on paperless voting machines in Guilford County,

see http://www.ncvoter.net/guilford.html

Here are a few

Guilford County Voting Machines - Disability issues, lost votes, faulty software, vendor ethical issues, operating costs, undervotes

Intro: If you went to the polls in Guilford County, your vote was recorded by an electronic voting machine, but no paper ballot was generated in the process. ...The lack of a paper trail raises questions about the potential for fraud, accountability and trust in the electoral process. "Beyond security, there is the inherent dissatisfaction of having a box telling you who won, without verification," says David Dill, a Stanford computer scientist who served on the task force advising California's Shelley. More by Ed Cone article

Facts about Guilford County voting machines:

• They do not meet disability standards for the Help America Vote Act of 2006.
• Permanent loss of votes on Guilford County Machines documented.
• Failure of voting machine company to communicate serious limitations with software causing it to not count votes.
• Same machines which were used in Craven County NC changed votes before the voters eyes..
• Voting Machine Companies ties to bribery of election officials.
• Known instances of ES&S instructing employees to lie to election officials.
• Current machines more costly to purchase and operate, than paper ballot optical scan machines used in 48 NC Counties
• NC Study shows that paperless machines have significantly higher undervote rates than paper ballot optical scan machine

Sponsoring the forum are the North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting and the Social Action Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greensboro. For more information, call (336) 685-4443.