Why Can't They Count Our Paper Ballots?

RPI: Voting At The Iowa Straw Poll: Fraud-Proof, Honest & Secure

8/8/2007

Contact: Mary Tiffany
(515)282-8105

The Republican Party of Iowa will host the Iowa Straw Poll on August 11, however, the voting procedure will be conducted with the assistance and oversight of the Story County Auditor's Office with assistance from the State Auditor's Office.

"Voting at the Iowa Straw Poll will follow procedures unique to this event," stated Chuck Laudner, Executive Director of the Republican Party of Iowa. "You will need to prove your Iowa residency during the credentialing process. This means you will need to display an Iowa driver's license, military ID, student ID, or other legitimate form of photo identification." Read more here.

Editor's Note: Nowhere in this article does the Iowa GOP address in a substantive way, the handling, counting, storing and verifying of paper ballots! Read over the entire article again and you will find just TWO (2) uses of phrase "paper ballot" as follows:

1) "1. Accu vote Optical Scan (OSx) tabulator with paper ballot"

2) "Only upon being successfully credentialed will the Straw Poll voter be given a paper ballot to cast their vote."

Two sentences!! Zilch, nada, nothing about securing, counting, verifying or storing these "paper ballots" to ensure a fair and accurate machine vote count! These paper ballots are simply going to disappear inside these machines and will never see the light of day ever again. There is no provision for manually counting these paper ballots the old fashion way - which wouldn't take more than 45 minutes anyway. We live in the 21st Century, but we are using technology in ways that ignore bedrock principals of fairness and accuracy that create and support the public trust of We The People. Again, we're being ask to close our eyes and trust a process that completely ignores even the most basic manual counting checks that can be used to ensure a fair and accurate vote.