| ......the NJ legislature (in response to a lawsuit initiated by NJ voter Stephanie Harris) passed a LAW stating that NJ would have secure voting machines that provided a voter verifiable paper trail.
After years of foot dragging and delays they finally postponed implementation of the law to January of 2009.
Now on November 13th they post a law that postpones the deadline to November of 2010!!! The scene in the video takes place on Monday December 8th at a committee hearing whose "job" it is to ram this through so the Senate can do the same on Thursday and a full vote would likely pass it just before years end and then Governor Corzine would sign this into law along, no doubt, with a stack of other bills requiring passage before year's end.
There will be no signing ceremony for this one. They had to sneak it in at the end of the year so that the state of New Jersey wouldn't be in violation of its own law!
I guess when you make the laws it's ok to simply change them when compliance becomes inconvenient.
A thousand Kudos to Assemblyman Conaway! It gives one faith in the possibility of government actually being able to intelligently respond to common sense and common decency to see someone actually "get it" like this and to have the sheer courage to go against the grain of the "script" and let loose with the truth as he saw it to be.
If the whole committee had that kind of clarity of thought, heart and conscience...this bill would be dead and we would be talking about going another way.
Meanwhile, the struggle for secure and verifiable elections continues at the NJ Senate this Thursday.
I hope anyone from NJ who sees this and cares about this issue will show up at the Statehouse in Trenton this Thursday to rise up in opposition to this latest postponement of the compliance date for secure and verifiable elections in NJ.
The senate bill # is S2380
the meeting is Thursday 12/11 at 1pm room 6 annex bldg.
Here's video of the testimony that preceded Assemblyman Conaway's eloquent display of gloriously righteous indignation.
I've heard rumors that Rush Holt may show up at the Senate hearing on this bill on Thursday. I hope he does and that he opposed another two year delay. Perhaps we can all give his office a call to encourage him to use his influence to come up with a way that we can have secure and verifiable voting in place for November 2009.
Meanwhile, please show up on Thursday if you care about this and it's at all possible. For everyone that makes it to these hearings they have to know that there are a thousand others who couldn't be there.....so when you make the effort and the sacrifice to "show up" know that it is of great value.
Thanks to Ann Rea whom I just met at the DFANJ holiday gathering on Sunday. When she spoke of her intent to go to Trenton to testify on this I suggested that she make a video. She turned the tables on me and suggested that I take my own advice.
Thanks also to Marcia Marley (President of BlueWaveNJ) for taking the initiative to organize against the passage of this flawed legislation.
Mike Shapiro's of the NJ Tenant's Association said it well, optical scanners are the way to go. Most people won't even check the printout behind a glass enclosure after making their selections....they'll just finalize the vote and leave asap.
Thanks to Stephanie Harris and Irene Etkin Goldman of The
Coalition for Peace Action. Without Stephanie's law suite this legislative initiative (warts and all) may never have been passed in the first place. And let's hope that the legislators have the wisdom to take the advice and help that Irene offered to share with them. It's clear that they have a lot on their "plate"....and it's also clear that they need to be spending less time listening to lobbyists for Sequoia and more listening to citizen activists like Stephanie and Irene who have become expert (or who know where to find independent objective expertise) on this critical issue.
Here's a link to a BJ diary from last year that includes pics of the "Rube Goldberg-ish" "solution" that Sequoia designed back then.
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