Undervote Rate Plummets 85% in New Mexico’s Native American Precincts after Statewide Switch from Touch-Screen Voting to Paper Ballots
REPORT: Undervote Rate Plummets 85% in New Mexico’s Native American Precincts after Statewide Switch from Touch-Screen Voting to Paper Ballots
Comparison of Voting Data from 2004 to 2006 Shows Hispanic Undervote Plunged 69% as the ‘Civil Rights’ Case for DREs Continues to Fall Apart
ALSO: New Concerns Emerge About Racial Profiling vis a vis Touch-Screen Voting Systems…
“We were looking for any impact the change to paper ballots may have had on New Mexico’s historically high undervote rate. When we found the dramatic drop in Native American precincts, we were shocked,” says New Mexico’s Theron Horton. The Election Defense Alliance (EDA) activist added, “something was going on with the DREs in those precincts in 2004.”
Something indeed.
Details now out from New Mexico reveal that undervote rates dropped precipitously in both Native American and Hispanic areas after the state moved from DRE’s in 2004 to paper-based optical-scan systems in 2006. In Native American areas, undervote rates plummeted some 85%. In Hispanic communities, the rate dropped by 69% according to the precinct data reviewed by the Election Defense Alliance, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.org.
Ellen Theisen, then Executive Director of VotersUnite.org, reviewed the original high undervote rates in the state after the 2004 elections, but hadn’t broken it down to compare DRE vs. Op-Scan precincts. “When I heard of Theron’s work,” Theisen says in today’s press release, “I performed the comparison, and found that it’s the paper ballots that made the difference in the minority precincts.”
New Mexico banned the use of DREs across the state after their disastrous experience with Sequoia touch-screen voting machines during the 2004 Presidential Election. They now require a paper ballot for every vote cast statewide.
As he signed the bill which banned DREs into law in early 2006, New Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson wrote a letter to Election Officials in all 50 states, warning that while “some believe that computer touch screen machines are the future of electoral systems…the technology simply fails to pass the test of reliability.”
“One person, one vote is in jeopardy if we do not act boldly and immediately,” Richardson implored, while decrying the failures of DREs in his state and in support of paper ballots. “When a vote is cast, a vote should be counted,” he wrote…
COMPLETE STORY, FULL PRESS RELEASE, LINK TO NM REPORT, DATA:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4193
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