We have an opportunity to make sure that President-elect Obama hears from citizens about the importance of verified voting. The Presidential transition team has set up a system called “Open for Questions” on change.gov Citizens submit questions of their own, and vote on other questions. The transition team will gather the responses and post answers in the New Year.

You can help by recommending this question for consideration:

“President-elect Obama has cosponsored two bills* that would eliminate unverifiable voting in federal elections. Will he ask the 111th Congress to pass a law requiring paper ballots and random hand audits of computer vote tallies?”

You can recommend as many questions as you like, so you will not lose other opportunities to share your ideas by doing this.

Tips for recommending a question on the flip.

We finally got a paper ballot law for our state, but Iowans must step up ensure that the 2008 Presidential election is not decided by tens of millions of votes that cannot be verified or truly recounted.

Last Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced the Ballot Integrity Act of 2007 (no bill number yet), which will require that all voting systems used in federal elections offer a voter-verified paper record- by 2010. The bill will also require equally important routine hand audits of the paper records – by 2010. Among the bills cosponsors are Senators Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, and Barack Obama.

The Ballot Integrity Act will likely be treated as a companion to Rep. Rush Holt’s bill HR 811, a bill which is very near to a full House vote, so the prospects of a conference committee this summer are strong. HR 811 has a 2008 deadline for paper records and audits.

There is good stuff in the Senate bill, but 2010 is too late as a deadline. Unless federal or state legislation changes things, 13 states are likely to use paperless electronic voting, either exclusively or extensively, in the 2008 election. Among those states are Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and South Carolina.

That’s tens of millions of votes, dependent entirely on the correctness of software. What a risky and foolish gamble, in the wake of a drumbeat of security reports, a comprehensive analysis by a task force of top computer scientists, and vote-altering glitches in recent elections.

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