Last night, the Clinton camp sent this letter to the Texas Democratic State Party chair. You'll be hearing lots of spin from other camps in the news in the next few days, so I thought I'd provide both the original letter and a bit of context.

In Texas,  Democratic Party caucuses are done with sign-in sheets as a verifiable paper trail for deciding the proportion of delegates to be awarded to each candidate for President.  That is, each attendee signs in and identifies who they are representing in writing.  There is no provision for 'hand counts' or other methods of counting votes for delegates.  All caucus attendees are required to prove that they voted in the primary in order to be included in the final count.  If for any reason an attendee does not have their voter registration card with them, the voting rolls from the early vote and the on-the-day vote are available to precinct workers to refer to prior to allowing an attendee to sign in as an eligible attendee.

For the last 2 weeks, there have been a multitude of reports of misbehavior, sloppy math (when determining final caucus totals), people who attended -- and voted -- in the caucuses who were not even registered to vote (some of these were even selected as delegates) and more and more and more.

The Texas Democratic Party -- at a minimum -- is supposed to 1) verify that the caucus attendees were registered voters, 2) determine that the math was done correctly and 3) provide lists of (at least their own) delegates to each campaign.  The TDP has been so overwhelmed, both with the numbers of attendees to check and the size and frequency of the problems, that they say they cannot accomplish these tasks prior to the scheduled County/State Senatorial Conventions on March 29.

The Clinton campaign has requested that the County/State Senatorial Conventions be delayed until that information can be provided and the State Party can accomplish its job.

Texas has a paper trail for caucus results and delegate selection. That the State Party is essentially saying "Yeah we do, but we don't have time to look at it" is a failure of the highest order.  This HAS to be dealt with at this next stage in the process, or the process breaks down completely.

No one knows what the results of actually referring to the paper trail will be.   It could net Obama more delegates, it could net Clinton more delegates.  BOTH camps should be joining to demand that the paper trail be examined.

The text of the letter from the Clinton campaign follows:

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Finally, there's a focused and innovative national campaign against Republican voter suppression, voter intimidation, and voter fraud: Secretary of State (SOS) Project.

Tapping the energy of hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the scandalalous conduct of election officials in 2000 and 2004, the campaign will focus on electing progressive candidates -- candidates committed to open and fair elections -- in targeted secretary of state races throughout the country: In Ohio,Minnesota, Colorado,Iowa, Nevada (page coming soon), and Michigan (just this weekend nominated Democrat Carmella Sabaugh in the SoS race).

The SoS web site will allow donors to contribute directly to the candidates via ActBlue.com's technology infrastructure.

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In a democracy, voting is a sacred right and responsibility of its citizens. Making sure votes are tallied accurately and honestly is a sacred trust charged to the government. Requiring citizens to cast ballots electronically without the accountability of a paper trail is a breach of that trust. It is not a democratic election if the results cannot be independently and tangibly verified.

Paperless electronic voting, as it currently exists, is vulnerable to fraud. This is as unacceptable to democratic citizens as the idea of no receipts at the ATM is to bank customers. Right now is the time for our representatives to involve themselves in fixing this new system by insuring that it becomes one of tamperproof integrity.

If our representatives wish us to believe that they, too, hold sacred a fair and honest democratic voting process, they will take whatever steps are necessary to insure that the November elections are verifiable.  They will take immediate action on H.R. 550.  Please contact both your state and your U.S. representatives and demand that this November your vote will create a paper trail.

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(Hat tip to DocGonzo for his diary on DailyKos)

An article on Slashdot (a tech/news blog for geeks) written in their politics section by WhiteDragon gives a break down of the hackability of the machines. Here's what he says:

"The folks at Open Voting Foundation got their hands on a Diebold AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machine. They took it apart (pictures here), and found the most serious security flaw ever discovered in this machine. A single switch is all that is required to cause the machine to boot an unverified external flash instead of the builtin verified EEPROM."

So, what does all of this mean? Follow me below the fold.

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Time and time again, studies have shown paper ballots to be the most reliable of voting systems, especially in comparison to electronic voting machines. Why? Because they leave a paper trail—a tangible, hand-held record of your vote. It's not rocket science—it's horse sense.

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