Movie Producer Penny Little Comes to San Jose to Finalize Filming of Electile Dysfunction

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA — Nearly a year after their first public demonstration of an open source voting machine, the Open Voting Consortium returns to San Jose to host an election reform conference and Penny Little, the producer and director of the movie “Electile Dysfunction” will be there, camera in hand, to film activists, organizers, and members of the general public. On Saturday, March 26th at 2:00 P.M. at the St. James Senior Center in San Jose (199 North Third Street), speakers, musicians, and concerned citizens will meet to discuss the problems with the voting machines used in the last presidential election and plan actions to get an open, secure, and accurate voting system in place for the future. Speaking at the event will be activists Emily Levy, Project Coordinator of the Richard Hayes Philips project that discovered many of the 2004 election anomalies in Ohio, Peter Drekmeier of the Bay Area Coalition for Election Reform, and Jim March, board member of Bev Harris’s Black Box Voting.org group. Alan Dechert, president and founder of the Open Voting Consortium, will speak at the event to educate the public about the Consortium’s open voting system. The event will also feature showings of clips from the movies “Votergate” and Little’s most recent version of her film “Electile Dysfunction,” and live music from political singer Laramie Crocker.

Penny Little, from People to People TV, is making the trip up from Santa Barbara, California just to interview and meet people at the Open Voting Consortium event. “I want to hear how technology can be kept in the voting process,” Little said. “I believe it can still be a part of the election system if it is used responsibly.” Little has been interested in the Open Voting Consortium's open voting system since she met Dr. Arthur Keller in Boston at a political rally. Dr. Keller is a resident of Palo Alto, a computer science professor at the
University of California Santa Cruz, and a board member of the Open Voting Consortium. Little’s film focuses on the concerns with the current use of electronic voting machines that do not have paper trails and are programmed with proprietary code (no one can see how the machines are programmed). The Open Voting Consortium’s open voting system is mentioned in the “solutions” part of Little’s film.

The Open Voting Consortium’s open voting system involves computers that print a paper ballot summary after each person votes. The paper ballot summaries are then counted either by hand and/or by using a bar-code printed on the summaries. “The system combines the advantages of computer voting, like blind people can vote without assistance and it is easy to tell what choices the voter intended to make, with the security of voter-verified paper ballots,” said Lara Shaffer, the event’s organizer. All machines in the open voting system use open source software (anyone can see how the machines are programmed) and recycled computers can be used instead of expensive new touch-screens. Jim March, a speaker at the event, agrees that open source code needs to be part of the solution, “I believe we need to go to open source software where everyone can inspect how their vote gets processed, rather than the black box secrecy involved in the private voting companies today.”

Santa Clara County still uses electronic paperless touch-screen voting machines produced by Sequoia. To be compliant with California State law, Santa Clara County will have to purchase voting machines that produce a paper trail by 2006. Currently, only the Sequoia Veri-Vote system produces a paper trail and that machine preserves the order of the vote, keeps the paper print outs in the voting booths where they could be stolen, and produces a paper trail that is not auditable. “Nevada bought brand new Sequoia Veri-Vote DREs, exit polls showed Kerry, electronic voting results Bush, and Greens gave up on a recount because experts referred by the vendor had to be hired to recount them,” notes Kathy Dopp, president of US Count Votes. The Open Voting Consortium hopes that its open voting system will be chosen by Santa Clara County as its new voting system to comply with California State law and reinstate people’s faith in the voting process.

The event on March 26th in San Jose is one of many events in California to drum up grass-roots support for the Open Voting Consortium. The next event will take place in Long Beach and will feature the producer of the movie “Votergate,” Robert Cohen.

The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of open voting systems for use in public elections.

For more information go to: http://www.OpenVoting.org