Fellow Patriots,

The fight to restore democracy in our country continues.  I can tell you one thing.  There is a core group of determined people who will not give up this fight, no matter how long it takes.  I invite you to stay informed, help spread the word, and to expand on a cliche, "DON'T get over it."

In this newsletter:

1) New lawsuit filed against e-voting machine company in Washington State
2) New investigation launched into Ohio recount
3) National Conference to Save our Democracy held
4) Election Reform Commission is stacked with GOP
5) Divestment campaign about to enter next phase
6) New tool for writing letters to election officials
7) New Up-to-the-minute Voting News available
8) The CD project
9) This Newsletter to be published in PDF

1) New lawsuit filed against e-voting machine company in Washington State

On April 7th, two lawyers filed a lawsuit in Snohomish County, WA, which could turn out to be one of the most important lawsuits of our time.  They allege that the privatization of our election system, and the companies' refusal to open the source code to the public, amounts to "secret vote counting," which is unconstitutional.   With the machines and systems currently running our elections, not even the people who run the Board of Elections can watch the vote counting process and verify anything at all.  The lawsuit they filed cites several existing laws that demand open and fair elections, allowing public access to vote counting.  It sounds almost too simple to be true, but if you think about it, they're right.  Private companies should not be allowed to count our votes without public observation and verification.  We don't need new bills or amendments to fix this problem, which really only serve to legitimize a flawed system.  The lawsuit is against Sequoia, the voting machine company used in Snohomish County, and against the election officials that signed the contract with them.  It seeks to only void the contract and return the money for the machines back to the state. The lawyers seek no money whatsoever.  If the suit is successful, it is our hope that people will use it as a model for many other places countrywide.


2) New investigation launched into Ohio recount

On almost the same day, it was announced that a new investigation is being launched into the Ohio recount.  You may recall that the law called for random hand recounts, but they were not done randomly, and observers were not allowed to view the recount as required by law. And an employee from the voting machine company Triad was caught on video tape admitting that he instructed the voting officials to basically ignore the recount numbers and just confirm the original count, to avoid any problems. This was all
blatantly illegal.  The Green Party is still waiting for a Judge to rule on a request for another recount and to address these very issues. We don't know if it's a stalling tactic or if the judge is just taking a long time to decide.  This new investigation is outside the Cobb lawsuit, and being conducted by the Erie and Cuyahoga county prosecutors, so it can proceed while the Judge sits on the deicision.  Hopefully they will uncover more evidence leading to the truth.


 3) National Conference to Save our Democracy held

 At the same, all the lawyers, activists, experts and legislators who have concerns about the integrity of our election system were meeting in Nashville for a conference "To Save our Democracy."  The Solar Bus was still hibernating so it was unable to attend.  Those who went said it was extremely productive and much was accomplished. It even got a little bit of coverage in the "mainstream" media. We are waiting for videos from the presentations at the conference and as soon as they are available we'll let you know.

 One thing that came out of the conference was the need for another one. It is believed the next conference will be in Philadelphia, sometime this summer.  The Solar Bus will be at this one, and I hope you will consider coming too.


4) Election Reform Commission is stacked with GOP

While all these positive steps are occurring, we expect tactics from the other side to show up from time to time and it's definitely happening. You may have heard about the new "bipartisan" Election Reform Commission, headed by James Baker and Jimmy Carter.  This has been covered in the mainstream media, which is practically becoming a red flag in itself.

On further investigation, our concerns are justified.  While Jimmy Carter is certainly a advocate of fair elections, it appears the commission is stacked with representatives of the voting machine companies and other organizations who have shown a lack of concern for open and fair elections.  At the same time, none of the experts who really understand the problems of electronic voting have been invited to speak at the commission.

Recently it was discovered that one of the organizations represented at the commission is actually a fake.  Called the American Center for Voting Rights, a recent investigation by Brad Friedman revealed that it only just came into being shortly before the Commission was announced, and while it claims to be non-partisan, its spokesman just happens to also be the National Election Counsel to Bush-Cheney '04 (even though they don't admit this on their website).

The problems with the selection of the commission were recognized by Rep. John Conyers, and he wrote a letter to Carter, expressing his concern and requesting that some specific organizations and individuals be invited to testify before the commission, so the real issues would be presented.  You'd think that Conyers himself would be on this commission, as a longtime advocate of election reform, and his Judiciary Committee recently published a 102 paged report on the documented problems with the '04 election.  But he is not even being asked to speak before the commission and his document is being ignored.

The Commission opened on Monday and the first reports are not  good.  Conyers watched the hearings, and  was outraged.  Here is an excerpt of what he wrote on his blog:

 "The remarks of Mr. James Baker, III, which were echoed by a number of right wing political operatives called as witnesses, seemed to have a singular purpose of spreading hoaxes and conspiracy theories about ineligible Democratic voters being allowed to cast votes." -- John Conyers

 And sadly when the issue of paper audit trails on the electronic voting machines came up, several "experts" spoke against the idea.

It appears that this Commission is nothing but an attempt to whitewash all the facts about the problems with our election system, and divert attention from the real problems.  Our only hope is that President Carter uses his influence and doesn't let the commission cover up the facts.  We saw some hope of this today when he actually used the "F" word!:

"We want to make sure that the electoral process has integrity -- that it is not shot through with fraud."

 Mr President, I hope you mean what you say.


5) Divestment campaign about to enter next phase

In previous newsletters I've mentioned the Velvet Revolution's divestment campaign to get the voting machine companies to clean up their act.  This could promise to be a way around the legislators and politicians who seem to be less than motivated to improve our election system.  The first phase of the campaign was to let the voting machine companies know what we demand - a paper trail on all votes cast, and open source code, among other things.  They were given 60 days to comply.

The 60 days are almost up and it appears they are not going to comply with the request.  The next phase is the divestment phase and we need everyone to participate.  Sometimes money talks more loudly than anything else, and we may just be able to accomplish some things, but we need to do this together.

I urge everyone to get involved in the Velvet Revolution's divestment campaign.  Make sure you sign up for their email list so you will receive instructions on how to proceed once the divestment begins. We will all be asked to check our retirement accounts, mutual funds, and all our investments, to make sure we don't have any money in these voting machine companies.  If we do, let's pull it out.  This is one way we can get them to listen, but it will only work if we all participate.  Here is a link for information on the divestment campaign:

 http://www.velvetrevolution.us/Campaigns/DV4D/


6) New tool for writing letters to election officials

As we speak, voting officials are making decisions on what kind of voting equipment to purchase for the next election.  Unfortunately, many are being pushed to buy more electronic voting machines from these Republican controlled companies.  They are being fed misinformation and lies, leading them to think it is their only choice in complying with the Help America Vote Act.

What can you do to help prevent more electronic voting machines from being purchased?  We all need to voice our opinion and give some of the real facts to our voting officials.  A great new tool has been created to make this very easy to do.  USCountVotes.org created an on-line form, and with a  few clicks you will have a printed letter pre-addressed to your voting officials, urging them to not purchase any DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines.  Please check out and use this great new tool:

 http://uscountvotes.net/scripts/lettergen/ltr_pick_addressee.php


7) New Up-to-the-minute Voting News available

The Solar Bus Election Justice Center takes a lot of time and I often have to decide how it's best spent.  On election day, and for the weeks that followed, the main purpose was to help make the news available that wasn't being reported.  I know many people were using my site to get the real news about the election and for that reason we were busy updating it several times a day with under-reported news stories.

In the last few weeks, I've shifted my focus to working on specific projects to help save our democracy, some of which you'll read about a few paragraphs below.  To help keep the website running with all the latest news, I've teamed up with the good folks at Voters Unite. You'll see a new link on the Election Justice home page, "Up to the Minute E-Voting news" which takes the newsfeed that Voters Unite supplies.  At Voters Unite they have people combing all the media for all stories relating to electronic voting so you can be assured that this is the most complete and up-to-date news available on the subject. So the "front seat" (home page) still has all the most important information on it, and new the "Up-to-the-minute" link now provides current and breaking news stories as the arise.  I wish to thank John and Ellen at Voters Unite for helping make this possible.


8) The CD project

Much has been said of the problems in our national media, and the last election helped bring a lot of these problems to light.  You may recall in the last newsletter I shared a letter I wrote to NPR complaining of their lack of fair coverage on the election issues and politics in general. I found since then that their lack of coverage was no mistake.  In fact, the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is now a bunch of Bush appointees so we should expect more of the same from NPR (and PBS).

But NPR is really just part of the problem.  The entire media infrastructure is controlled by large corporations who benefit greatly from Bush's corporate tax policies and they continuously refuse to speak the truth for that very reason.

Many of us are seeking new ways to get the truth out, ways around what I call the "media blockade," particularly on the issue of election justice.  With the Internet and all the technology we have available to us, we've made some great inroads, but it is still an uphill battle.

Solar Bus is spearheading one such effort around the blockade.  The project uses videos on CD-ROMs to distribute information.  Videos are the medium because as we know, many people don't have the time to read articles and  reports, but they will sit down and watch a video.  The videos are being put on to CDs because most people have a CD burner and blank CDs are very cheap.  It works like this:  When the CD is put into the computer, a screen automatically pops up asking the viewer to make at least 3 copies and give them to other people.  This way, we hope the information will self-propagate and eventually a lot of people will be watching these videos.

 The collection of videos on the CD tell a compelling story about the 2004 election and the need for reform. Appearing in the collection of videos are Howard Dean, Bev Harris, Jon Stewart, many other people including college professors, computer security experts, and voting rights activists, as they state the case that our election system is broken.  There are also links on the CD for people to get more information and take action.

Very soon I will start distributing the CD.  I'm looking for a group of about 100 people who want to help launch this project, "seed planters" as I call them.  The seed planters will agree to make more than just the 3 copies requested on the CD and make a real effort to kick off the project.

If you are interested in being a seed planter, please let me know.  You can reply to this email or use my email address  gary@solarbus.org

 If this project proves successful, we will work to offer a DVD version, and repeat the same concept with more videos in the future as they become available.


 9) This Newsletter also published in PDF format

 Another experiment we're trying in the effort around the blockade is to make this newsletter available as a PDF so that people can print it and distribute it beyond this email list.  We've all seen places around town where flyers and newsletters are left out, like at the library, grocery store, etc.  If you would like to help get the truth out, please consider doing this.  We need to use every avenue available to us to get around the blockade.  It can only happen with grassroots efforts of people like you.  So please consider printing a copy of this newsletter at the PDF link below, and distributing it any way you can.  It's shortened a bit from this email newsletter, so it fits on a single two-sided paper, and it's been edited a little recognizing that some people will read it without prior   understanding of the Solar Bus and some of the issues around the election.  If you have any suggestions or feedback on this, please feel free to contact me.  Here is a link to the PDF version:

 http://www.solarbus.org/election/newsletter/050420.pdf


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