OREGON VOTER RIGHTS COALITION
www.oregonvrc.org

MISSION:

To restore public ownership and oversight of elections, and to ensure the fundamental right of every American citizen to vote and to have each vote counted as intended in a secure, transparent, impartial, and independently verified election process.

CURRENT ISSUES:

• Across the nation, concerned citizens are demanding assurances that the foundation of American democracy – the VOTE – is being protected and that the will of the people is being accurately reflected in election outcomes. Oregon’s election system has strengths absent in many other states (e.g. universal Vote-By-Mail, which eliminates the potential for the infamous election day lines seen in Ohio in 2004; paper ballots as the ballot of record, which sets the stage for meaningful recounts and audits; and forensic signature-matching to ensure voting integrity). ORVRC wants Oregon’s election system to be a model for the country in all ways. In order to be a model, we must be willing to examine weaknesses in our current system.

• The entry of corporate, trade-secret software into elections increased the speed with which election results could be tallied. It also ended the era when citizens and election officials could actually observe the counting of the vote. The source code of the software that actually counts our votes in Oregon may not be viewed by any official, including the Secretary of State.

• California’s SOS, Debra Bowen, recently ordered a “top to bottom” review of the election systems used in all California counties. This resulted in the de-certification of systems provided by all vendors and conditional re-certification of some for the 2008 elections. Most of Oregon’s votes are counted on optical scan machines and tabulation software manufactured by ES&S. ES&S optical scan voting systems were recently de-certified in Colorado after extensive testing conducted by the SOS’ office deemed them untrustworthy. Recent testing in Ohio also revealed extensive security flaws with the ES&S systems.

• The Oregon Legislature passed an election audit bill (HB3270) last session that requires a hand-counted sample of ballots to verify the reported outcome of the machine-counted ballots. According to the Brennan Center report, the type of audit now required by Oregon law will provide only a 61% confidence level that “a complete manual recount would not change the outcome of the race” if the margin of victory between two candidates is 2% or less.

• Open-source software for elections has been proposed as a needed replacement for the current proprietary software provided by private, for-profit vendors. A hand-counted ballot sample would always be required for verification, but use of open source, transparent vote-counting technology could be a giant step forward for Oregon. As it happens, Oregon has a vibrant Open-source community, with respected institutions like the Open Source Development Labs in Beaverton and the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

CURRENT ACTIVITIES:

Distributed Election Integrity Survey to candidates for Secretary of State

Participating in Election Integrity Forums for SOS candidates

Providing information on upcoming events, current Election Reform news, and links to major Election Integrity reports through the ORVRC website at www.oregonvrc.org