Subject:

Sequentially Numbered Paper Ballots!

Fellow delegates,

Do you really want to vote on your PHONE this Saturday, using a web site whose domain is owned by a venture capital firm in FRANCE?!

You likely received an email from our party chair on Tuesday saying:

“For your convenience and speed of elections and voting, we want to remind all delegates to bring their own web-capable devices. (Tablet, Smartphone, ETC) This will help speed up the process of voting using our secure digital voting platform.”

Are you kidding me?! They want us to vote on a web-capable device?!

State Central Committee (SCC) members will remember the meeting in North Salt Lake City where we used the service the party provided, and our phones got hacked! Our email addresses were captured, and then our inboxes were flooded with junk mail. The party faced a lawsuit over those shenanigans.

PROBLEM

You cannot watch a computer count votes.

Plus, we have no assurance that we will be able to verify that our votes are received as cast, or that our votes will be tallied correctly to the various candidates.

Last year, state delegate Lowell Nelson polled state delegates about the clickers they used at the nominating convention. About 210 delegates responded: 131 favorably, 12 with errors, and 67 with tangential comments. In other words, almost 6% of those who responded noticed an error.

Most questionable was the race in State School Board District 4. One delegate, a prominent public official, telephoned Lowell about that election. He said the number of credentialed delegates in the room was about 240, and that no one left the room early, yet the clicker vote totals through four rounds of voting were 211, 210, 217, and 212. In other words, there were about 30 clickers whose votes were not recorded (even though the green light on the clicker itself came on). And the candidate who received the most votes in Round 4 was only 22 votes away from winning with 60% of the vote. In other words, the malfunction of the electronic devices might possibly have stopped the candidate short of a convention win.

Do we want to go through this kind of thing again?!

Apparently, Secure Internet Voting (siv.org) is the website planners want us to use.

Do you have any experience with their system? Didn’t think so (neither do we).

Think their solution is secure? Think again.

Here are a few companies whose network was “secure” but still got hacked: Colonial Pipeline, Volkswagen, Peloton, U of U Medical, McDonald’s, Wells Fargo, cam4, Yahoo!, First American Financial, Linked In, Facebook, Marriott, myspace, Experian, Adobe, Equifax, ebay, Canva, Capital One, Quora, Dropbox, Uber, Home Depot, MGM Grand, Neiman Marcus, Pixlr, Zoom.

And this is only a partial listing!

SOLUTION

So let’s not play these games anymore! Let’s return to paper ballots. They worked great for decades. We are sure they will work again now.

A paper ballot is something tangible, something we can see and feel, and that we can watch being counted. 

Rule M.5 of the proposed convention rules says:

“Voting will be done by paper ballot or electronic device.”

So let’s vote by paper ballot.

That’s what the SCC wanted to do. At their most recent meeting, the committee voted overwhelmingly for paper ballots at this convention.

Isn’t the URP Central Committee the governing body of the party? Yes!

And can’t we convention delegates decide how we want to conduct our elections? Of course we can! 

Not only did the SCC vote for this, but state delegates from around the state have petitioned GOP party leadership to return to sequentially numbered paper ballots. The number of signers is 240 and still growing (see the petition and signers here). Unfortunately, party leadership (except for Secretary Olivia Dawn, who has been very supportive) has not responded.

CALL TO ACTION

So, when someone at the convention makes a motion to conduct voting by paper ballot, please support the motion.

• We have sequentially numbered paper ballots–ready to go.
• We have volunteers to distribute and collect the ballots–ready to go.
• We have volunteers to count the ballots–ready to go.

And when someone makes a motion to conduct party business while the ballots are being counted, please support that motion too.

• There are only two races.
• Counting paper ballots takes less time than working through the technical problems associated with electronic devices.
• We can do the party business while the first round is being counted. 
• And then we can hear from our public servants.

Let’s do this!

Sincerely,

Advocates for Paper Ballots at GOP Conventions

Otto Krauss, Bob McEntee, Lowell Nelson, and hundreds more