Comment by Phyllis Huster (Advocacy Group)

1.2 Scope I don't accept the premise of this section and therefore find the whole EAC VVSG To be a waste of time and taxpayer money. The premise is as follows: Federal Government cannot dictate how elections are to be run. However, due to Federal equal protection clause of the constitution and Federal and state requirements for a ballot, the federal government must protect citizen rights of equal protection under the law. With status supporting a combination of systems, Electronic voting for people who come to polls and absentee paper based ballots for people who don't vote at the polls, we create a situation of UNEQUAL PROTECTION for the citizens and violates the 14th amendment of the Constitution. The Equal Protection Clause, part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides that "no state shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Equal Protection Clause can be seen as an attempt to secure the promise of the United States' professed commitment to the proposition that "all men are created equal" by empowering the judiciary to enforce that principle against the states. If voters (myself as a sample voter) vote on a Diebold Electronic machine with no way to verify the accuracy of the vote, and as a citizen I can't get access to the CD that contains the ballots to validate the votes in my precinct, but folks who vote absentee ballot get a paper balllot which thru open records I can get copies of, this is unequal in that I have no way as a citizen to validate the accuracy of the vote counts. *** SO THE PREMISE IS INACCURATE, it is indeed a requirement of the Federal government to guarantee accurate voting, regardless of the HOW voting is implemented state by state, the Federal government must write a standards document for the standardized REQUIREMENTS of voting to include but not limited to: 1. Chain of custody suggestions (removing any barriers to the citizen's intent, placing intent on the voting apparatus, the voting apparatus being counted accurately the first time and capable of citizen audit on election night in full view of other citizens, and that vote being secured in a locked ballot box all day until the counting begins after polls close. That is a simple standard and yet the EAC has not even done the minimum to discuss or outline voter chain of custody which is the critical underpinning to any voting technology. 2. Voting Verifiability and auditability. A basic premise that any voting system be verifiable for accuracy thru an audit or randomized race count. 3. Citizen counting of ballots. Regardless of technology the supremacy of the ownership must be with the citizen. If we don't own the elections, we don't have a democracy. We don't have to pay taxes because we are not giving our consent of the governed because we do not trust the accuracy of the elections. This basic premise must be covered by the EAC or any voting guidelines are null and void and useless to me as a voter. 4. Mandatory recognition and standard understanding of a ballot. Ballots cannot be a PROCESS as was defined by Kennesaw state college in testimony by Brittain Williams during the deposition by plaintiffs for the VoterGA lawsuit. The ballot is a ballot and a ballot is physical evidence of voter intent. A ballot cannot be the algorithm that converts your screen choice or even your lever pull to a physical or nonphysical representation of that vote. a ballot is the physical way a voter shows intent, without the physical component, you don't have a vote and you don't have a way to guarantee voter intent. 5. Finally, we cannot privatize the importance of election to corporations who have profit motive. You have conflicting goals, if elections are run by the government, they are supposedly protected by all arms of government, when you allow a company such as Diebold to dispatch technical folks who serve as pollworkers and yet don't make them sign pollworker oaths you just handed over the security of your election and the function government should do to a private corporation such as Diebold who has partisan and nongovernmental aims with the outcome of that election. Privatization of military in the form of Halliburton contracting has been a failure, privatization of our defense contracts with the Boeing tanker contract awarded to a European contractor Airbus, is not only a violation of taxpayer demand for national security (becauase you now outsourced your defense secrets to other countries) but you damage the overall GDP of your country in doing so. What happens when a foreign company buys diebold's election division ( or premiere global gets bought). you now have a major security threat in that any foreign government can control the outcome of US elections. This came clear with Cathy Cox the AntiDemocratic governor of Georgia that ushered Diebold into the state reversing 132 years of democratic voting patterns in 4 years turned Georgia fully republican in house/senate/governor and presidential races. Having started a book called "the night Democracy was lost in Georgia" i'm passionate about this very serious blunder in history and the EAC helped aid in the crime of Diebold taking over Georgia voting and removing it from the control of georgia citizens. Privatization breaks down when I asked 159 counties to give me copies of the ballots and Cathy cox faxed out 159 letters saying counties could not release the Diebold CD that contained the ballots because it had proprietary software that she was contractually required by Diebold to keep secret. In essence claiming I was a terrorist for asking for a copy of the ballots. I realize none of this will make it into any formal comments as the EAC is bought and paid for by the Electronic voting Lobby, but I will say one more thing, that The premise that Federal government does not have a role in mandating aspects of standards regarding elections is ludicrous. You may leave up the states the HOW of elections, but you must be airtight in the WHAT of elections and in this regard the EAC has failed miserably. - phyllis@countpaperballots.com 5.