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Edited on Fri Jun-23-06 07:23 PM by Peace Patriot
In fact,it's even lower level than that--it's up to each country registrar, under state laws/guidelines. I was just reviewing my tabbed OPs, and found your question. And this is a major point with me: WE HAVE A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY to CHANGE ALL this at the state/local level, and that is really the only road to transparent elections open to the people. Bush's Congress is not going to give us back our right to vote. They are the ones who took it away. It's a long slog, at the state/local level--involving thousands of jurisdictions, and a lot of corruption--but if everyone takes responsibility for their own county, or Board of Elections, or local registrar, or state, we CAN get it done that way. This is so important to know. And time may be limited. We don't know when the Bush boot will come down and the Feds just take it all over. Traditional states rights--and potential objections even from rightwingers--have probably held them off from a total power grab over our election system, with centralized electronic "voting" run from the White House. Nightmare time. We're not all that far from that now. HAVA is a bullying piece of Bushite legislation that usurps state powers already, but mostly uses the bribe and corruption of Fed money.
The time is NOW! At the state/local level!
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CLARIFICATION: Added, re Lasher's post, that it's up to state law, not the SoS.
I just meant that the rules for elections and the decisions on voting equipment are still LOCAL (state/county), as opposed to federal. Of course if the state legislature passes a law requiring a paper trail, the SoS and counties must obey it. I didn't mean they couldn't (although some bad county election officials in Calif have tried). But the SoS and couny officials can greatly influence what laws get passed, and control implementation as well as purchase of voting equipment. Usually, there are oversight boards and committees, and so on. About half the counties in the recent citizen lawsuit against 17 Calif counties on use of illegally certified Diebold DREs got out of the lawsuit by promising to use paper ballots until the lawsuit issues are settled. So country registrars HAVE DISCRETION, too.
Something else to note: HAVA did **NOT** mandate electronic voting! It is a myth that it does. See the Voters Unite pamphlet:
www.votersunite.org (MythBreakers - easy primer on electronic voting--one of the myths is that HAVA requires electronic voting; it does not.)
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