Wrap up of "Stop U.S. Vote Rigging Now!": San Jose, Sat. Mar 26th

It went well IMO.  I was the MC. It was all videotaped by Penny Little (producer of the upcoming movie Electile Dysfunction) and we are going to try to get it up on the web soon.

Peter Drekmeir did a fabulous job of laying out the whole picture of Fraud '04.  See his website electionfraud2004.org

Emily Levy www.juiceforjustice.com spoke about the tell-tale statistics that assure us there was massive fraud on and after Nov. 2nd and how to connect to groups that are making a difference.

Singer-songwriter Laramie Crocker of LaramieCrocker.com rocked the house with songs of taking back our country from the black box voting machines.

Alan Dechert, Pres/Founder of OVC (OpenVoting.org) was the keynote speaker and the main topic of the day was "Open Voting Systems".  Between Alan and Jim March (of BlackBoxVoting.org) they defined "Open Voting" as transparent, verifiable, electronic voting with open source software, fully logged chain-of-custody of all votes (meaning recorded names of every single person who has takes any administrative action on the voting machines, tabulators or ballots).

In OVC's software proposal the print out sheet of the vote IS the actual ballot.   It has a UPC code that represents the votes on the various races, which can be verified by the voter before the voter puts their ballot in the ballot box.  This verification process can take place no matter whether the voter is english literate or not or even if the voter is blind.  The voting machine in the OVC proposal is basically just a printer that also records a backup tally of the votes that can be used to audit and double-check the counting of the actual ballots.  I was impressed.

Alan said the first certifiable OVC software would probably be tabulation software sometime next year.

About 50 people.  Some lively discussion. There was a little controversy in the form of a couple of folks who were paper-only voting advocates trying to start a debate which was inappropriate at that point and place.  I said the paper-only position has vitues and that the rest of the democratic world operates on that basis.    I offered to set up a followup meeting that would be a real full-on debate between paper-only and open voting advocates.  Unfortunately none of the paper-only folks came up to me to help me get such a get-together so I don't know if I'll be able to get it going.  Too bad.  I didn't get their names, but if they contact me I'll still follow through.