Re: Fw: Letter to congressmen

Thanks for writing, Brian.

I have forwarded you message to our voting project email list. We'll see if anyone wants to do this. Your message will show up in our archives within the hour and you can see the responses yourself.

http://gnosis.python-hosting.com/voting-project/

In general, all politicians seem to be very interested in the way votes are counted. So we want all the politicians to know about our proposal for a new voting system. In this sense, I favor the activity you suggest.

Personally, I like to direct my efforts at state and local officials since they are the ones with decision making authority when it comes to details of which voting system to use. For the most part, the federal government doesn't have too much to do with these details. The U.S. Constitution clearly leaves these things to the states.

The federal government has played a large role by passing the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). I guess if I were someone in the federal government and I got a letter about the OVC system, my response would be, "We passed HAVA. There should be a way to apply HAVA funds so that state or local governments could develop and/or use the OVC system."

In other words, at this point, it's mostly a matter of motivating state and local officials to want to use our system. While, in this sense, a letter to a congressperson is misdirected, it still could be very worthwhile. All politicians are interested in how votes are counted. I think that such a letter should say something like "please use your influence with state and local officials to promote the OVC system" [this is a bad paraphrase, but I think you get the idea]. I don't see any levers in the federal government that need pulling at this point. They have already sent a ton of money to the states to fix the voting system. The point is that we don't want the states to squander that money (any more than they have squandered a lot of it already).

Alan Dechert

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Alan Dechert
  To: voting-project@lists.sonic.net
  Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 10:21 AM
  Subject: [voting-project] Fw: Letter to congressmen

  Does anyone want to take a crack at this?

  Alan D.

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Debelius, Brian
  To: 'mail@openvotingconsortium.org'
  Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 10:03 AM
  Subject: Letter to congressmen

  I would like the OVC to author a letter that I can send to my congressmen outlining the OVC's mission and how the OVC electronic voting system would work. Please use simple English and lots of pictures so that they may comprehend the topics you are explaining. :P

  Thank you,

  Brian Debelius

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Received on Tue Aug 31 23:17:10 2004