WHEREAS, the integrity of voting and trust of the electorate in the voting system is at the core of democracy in the United States, and

WHEREAS, a trusted election process is one that can be shown to have been honest and transparent, and reduce lost, mistaken or invalidated votes to insignificance, and that can be shown to reflect the intent of the voters, and

WHEREAS, the use of electronic voting machines that lack paper ballots or receipts needed in case of a recount, and that use private computer software with insufficient safeguards for electoral accountability, is now widespread, and public confidence in elections is at an all time low, and

WHEREAS, software currently used to tabulate election results is also proprietary or secret and, therefore, unavailable for public audit and examination, and

WHEREAS, there is no standard procedure in use to generate transparent and verifiable election results or recounts, and

WHEREAS, the computer scientists of the Open Voting Consortium have developed a prototype election system using open source software for voting machines and election tabulation, and

WHEREAS the Open Voting software can be operated on conventional personal computers modified for security, at a fraction of the cost of current electronic voting machines, and

WHEREAS, the Open Voting system uses a paper ballot with clearly marked choices, a bar code that is tallied by scanning, remains in a locked ballot box afterward and available in case of the need for a recount, and

WHEREAS, the Open Voting system can accommodate handicapped people through touch screen technology and can confirm vote selections for the sight impaired through headphones, and

WHEREAS, the publicly owned voting machine and election software paid for in California could then be available to all other States thereby helping to solve the national election crisis;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee supports passage of a law requiring open source software for voting machines and tabulation of vote totals by November 2008 and the funding for system development costs as soon as possible.