Action needed! Contact your County Clerk

Hey there Activists!!

It's just past midnight, the 4th of July, and now seems the perfect time to ask for your help in working to restore integrity to that basic of American democracy... the election system.

The Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is determined to see that the problems of the election systems get corrected. As Oregonians, we do focus on Oregon, but our intent is large. We feel that the Oregon system is pretty good, and with a few tweaks, it can be even better. It may then serve as a shining example for folks beyond our borders.

In our evaluation of the election system, we've come to regard several things as minimum acceptable standards of best practices. One such best practice is a mandatory, regular, random hand counted "audit" of ballots to check machine tabulators for accuracy. Scientifically designed, the sampling wouldn't be cumbersome, but would provide for an valid assessment of the machine's accuracy.

Here's where you come in. You're emailing skills will come in handy!!

We need to contact County Clerks in as many counties as possible to encourage them to endorse an audit, and we need county residents to make the contacts.

Please go to http://oregonVRC.org/node/527 (and, hey, join up w/ us while you're there!) This will take you to "CAMPAIGN FOR AUDITING ELECTION RESULTS," and you'll get the whole rundown.

(If the node doesn't respond, just go to our homepage... http://oregonVRC.org On the right side of our home page, you'll see a "TAKE ACTION" box; go there and click on "STATE".
On the next page you'll see "forums" in the middle... at or near the top will be "CAMPAIGN FOR AUDITING ELECTION RESULTS" Click on that.)

To contact your county clerk, on the right margin there's a box titled "Oregon Law and Process". Under that, click on "County Clerks".

We REALLY need your help on this. The County Election folks generally do an
awesome job, but since they DO work their tails off, they are relunctant to sign on to anything that could involve more work. But the audit could actually be done pretty efficiently and could be set up to require very little of their time.

Also, some of the clerks may be under the impression that the audit would be an new assessment of their work... and perhaps regard it as kind of a slap at them. IT'S SOOOO NOT! The audit is only to check the accuracy of the machines... over which county officials have no control.

THINK OF IT THIS WAY... COUNTY CLERKS DON'T RECEIVE A WHOLE LOT OF CONSTITUENT MAIL, SO ANY ONE LETTER MAY WELL HAVE MORE IMPACT THAN 10 "LETTERS TO THE EDITOR"!!

I know that you're getting a ton of emails; I know that a lot of action items ask you to just "click" to sign a petition, and I'm asking you to do more, but just think where we could be if we'd had audits in 2000 or 2004.

Yeah, this is important.

Thanks to you all... and let us know it goes!

KC Hanson

PS This is time sensitive... the Clerks will be having their annual meeting in August and it'd be nice if they all have our voices echoing in their heads....