I have queztions too...

Proposed questions to all who would like to represent us in the state legislator...


1. Do you feel any urgency that Arizona’s election system is not as secure as it should be? Do you believe that Arizona’s election results could be compromised (and potentially changed) by faulty, or hackable, software provided by private, for-profit vendors?

Yes, No, Explain

2. How would you, as an elected official, propose to oversee and verify the accuracy of the machine vote counting given the secrecy that prevents citizens and officials from actually observing the vote count?

Yes, No, Explain

3. Do you think a more open and transparent election system would be a Win-Win situation for Arizona, providing transparency to and producing greater confidence in our elections.

Yes, No, Explain

4. What is Arizona’s current process for testing the election systems provided by corporate vendors? Do you feel it is sufficient? Would you conduct a “top to bottom” review of Arizona's voting technology (including voter databases and tabulating software)

Yes, No, Explain

5. Arizona law currently requires less than a one-tenth of one percent margin separating candidates or ballot questions in order to trigger a machine recount. Hand recounts are the only reliable method to check the accuracy of machine totals. If you are elected would you introduce or support legislation to establish standards that would allow candidates to request hand counts.

Yes, No, Explain

6. Currently Arizona law does not mandate specific security standards for ballot chain of custody and secure storage. Would you support a law mandating that all counties use serialized tamper-evident seals for boxes of ballots to track and verify chain of custody?

Would you favor imposing criminal penalties when seals are removed without verification by party observers?

Yes, No Explain

7. Arizona law requires the County Treasurer to be the officer in charge of holding ballots for time periods set by statute for federal and state elections. However, the law does not mandate a secure method for the election divisions in Arizona counties to turn these ballots over to the treasurer. This step would be necessary to ensure that in case of a recount, ballots matched to precincts can be quickly retrieved. If you are elected would you support a law to mandate that the Treasurer verify and record seal numbers on ballot boxes and certify that all the boxes retain the seals certified by the party representatives?

Yes, No, Explain

Do you think that any form of electronic vote counting can be trusted?”

“Do you realize that both the memory chips on the op-scans and the GEMS central tabulator can be hacked by insiders?”

“Do you understand that there are auditing protocols that will detect fraud with high statistical confidence and other protocols that are badly designed and would surely fail to catch fraud in close elections?” I

“Do you realize that publicly witnessed hand-counting of paper ballots at the polling place and immediate posting of the results would be the safest system of all?”

More to come...