Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, October 12, 2010,
Citizens Communication
Citizens Communication is next.
would the following three citizens please come forth?
and this item gives residents an opportunity to address the court on any matter not on the agenda for up to three minutes.
Karen renek is first, hamilton richards is second.
ronnie reeferseed is third.
(indiscernible) acevedo is fourth.
ms. Renek.
>> good morning.
my name is Karen renek, I am the founder of an organization called vote rescue and also vote rescue is a member of a newco lition called the hand count coalition.
just for the purpose of keeping our listeners at home informed, this is our sixth consecutive visit to the court.
I wanted to also inform those that are listening from home or via the internet that the hand count coalition has a hand count project that we announced last week.
we are moving forward without the assistance of the the county.
we are going to be performing our own pilot hand count on November 2nd.
and anyone that is interested in helping with this pilot hand count, please go to our website at voterescue.org.
I also want to announce that we have two new members in the coalition.
one is from the national level.
it's an organization called the center for hand counting paper ballots.
they're based in boston, massachusetts, run by sheila parks.
and on the local level, code pink Austin has joined the hand count coalition.
I also wanted to briefly, very briefly introduce pam richards who is sitting to my right who will speak next.
pam is a ph.d, has a ph.d in commuter science and pam has vote rescue has been recently giving presentations to groups about the problems with electronic voting.
we gave a presentation to the league of women voters here in aunt area.
in the few minutes or minute that I have left, I wanted to just touch briefly on a couple of items relating to the department of justice.
I wanted to first of all clarify a misunderstanding that might exist in reference to a preclearance request.
I know that, judge, you asked about -- made a statement about a preclearance that is required if a voting jurisdiction changes their procedures prior to an election.
and I just wanted you to know that the hand count coalition or vote rescue has not made any request to the department of justice for preclearance.
that is not our duty or position.
what we did is contact the department of justice because we find -- we believe that serious violations of the voting rightsability are going on here in Travis County due to fact that our votes are being counted secretly on these electronic voting machines and we wanted to bring that to their attention.
I also wanted to bring to your attention that a letter has been sent to congress by 18 -- a letter has been sent to the department of justice to the attorney general eric holder by 18 members of congress and I will report on this next week.
thank you very much.
>> thank you.
mr. Hamilton?
mr. Ham I will son richards.
>> thank you, judge Biscoe and Commissioners.
my topic today is electronic voting.
I'm not a member of vote rescue, nor of the hand count coalition.
my presentation is based on the fundamental premise, mainly that digital systems are inherently different from all other kinds of systems. In particular testing, which is the customary approach for assuring proper functioning of systems from aircraft to water pumps.
it doesn't work for digital systems. Testing a digital system may show the presence of flaws in its operation, but can never show their absence.
in other words, testing a digital system may show that it can operate correctly, but it can never show that the system cannot operate incorrectly.
that's a triple negative.
I'll give you a second to digest that.
explaining why this must be so would use up my three minutes and then some, but I'll refer you to the paper that I've given to all of you.
and the evidence is all around us in the form of software that is subject to frequent bugs and patches and so forth.
testing has its uses for evaluating a digital system's convenience, usability and suitability, but for determining a digital system's correctness, testing is useless.
Travis County's election administration is widely and justly praised for its dedication to testing and security, but all that effort does not establish that the voting systems will count votes correctly.
the millions of dollars being spent by all sides in election campaigns is evidence of strong motivation for skull dugry, yet the counties efforts to plus the loopholes in the systems amount to a game of whack a mole.
we should not however respond with denial, despair or a return to hand counting -- hand marking of paper ballots because it's possible to devise trustworthy election systems using untrusted equipment.
one such system would use electronic voting stations not to count ballots, but merely to print each voter's selections on a sheet of letter size paper as a ballot summary.
after inspecting her ballot summary for correctness, the voter would drop it into a ballot box just as in days of hold where it would constitute the official record of the voter's intent.
as a durable record it could be counted by hand or by machine.
I'm agriculture no, sir tick on that -- agnostic on that question, as many times as it takes to convince the election's losers that they lost, which is after all what elections are all about.
Austin's especially nens as a major center of technology entrepreneurship provides Travis County with the unique opportunity to build on its leadership in election administration by inspiring or even sponsoring the development of a voter friendly voting system that's truly secure.
>> [ buzzer sounds ] thank you.
>> may I ask a question of dr. Richards?
>> have you had the opportunity to review the committee report yet?
>> I have.
>> and do you find that that committee report is similar to -- how is it similar, how is it dissimilar to what you suggest with regard to the electronic ballot printer versus the dre plus paper?
>> well, many dre plus paper systems use a dre for the primary count and the paper is supposed to be available as some kind of an audit trail.
typically the paper is about what you get out of an atm or a gas pump.
it's a narrow strip, very small type, and I imagine it would be quite a nightmare to actually conduct an audit.
these things tend to curl and so forth.
I have not seen a proposal, and I may have missed it.
I haven't read every word of that report.
I convenient a proposal for a separate printer which would use -- a laser printer such as you can buy at fry's for $50 nowadays.
it would print on highly legible and durable letter size paper.
>> so given your summary, and I tried to quickly read your stuff, but given your summary, you do see taking it straight from your summary, that the right combination of electronic and paper can provide trustworthy elections and the advantages of electronic?
>> yes, exactly.
>> ronnie reeferseed is next.
thank you, mr. Richards.
>> thank you, judge.
this is ronnie reeferseed screaming wake up again.
we don't want to waste our time and don't cancel your own childhood, kiddos, with that first hit or swig off of any kind of alcohol, especially those kids.
we're tramping on our own public schools that promote victim for life and strategies through the teachers unions and also those overreaching, under funded, unelected federal and state mandates that are imposed on taxpayers who by the way supposedly are just imagining their own economic melt down because the government weeks ago now announced that the so-called recession, ie ongoing depression, supposedly, already ending many maroons in the past.
so we the people are hurting big time, though.
we must all rise against the criminal bankers.
and all those people who are actively promoting the policy actually promoting death as a favorable outcome from closed door cost cutting resource management schemes that are designed by people like our (indiscernible) who are laughing at the horror of massive self-imposed death that is now being taught as our only choice through these truly evil, deadly, diabolical vaccines that have been inzip piddly injected into our bodies and then people are now beginning to just say no.
we're learning about this.
we're saying no.
the glorious truth is shining through to more thinking citizens everyday.
call toll free 24/7 for weekly updates from founding father among us now, our friend and mine, ob-gyn dr. Ron paul.
and also call 1888-6397 to get american free press, the best in my opinion, truly populous pop la indication put out once per week that often has original articles by or about dr. Ron paul, or ongoing ever extrapolating Ron paul evolution of love for all babies.
liberty in our precious u.s.
constitution just keeps on keeping on.
speaking of all the babies, lock step obamatrons out there, how do you explain away the fact that within the first year of -- and secretary of state chuckling off, more black babies, more black babies were executed than were allowed to be born live.
huh?
this is real, people.
pay attention.
right here in wealthy u.s.a., more than 50% of all black babies conceived, ie, the unification of the sperm cell with the egg cell, they were murdered in the womb with support from the white house like the science czar and also including kenyan born, indonesian subject so-called barack obama.
>> [ buzzer sounds ] not to mention secretary of state ms. Felony.
cheering hurrah.
so we need to bring an end to this death.
thank you.
>> thank you, mr. Reeferseed.
fidel acevedo.
>> good morning, Commissioners.
I'm going to take liberty to use some of the famous words by of pastor walter mol ton.
first I would like to emphasize the fact that we're here due to the fact that we want the court to be fully aware that the 1965 voting right act is what is really driving us to bring in this to a head about hand count paper ballots and being part of the hand count coalition.
I definitely want to emphasize today that that is our driving force, make sure that we can do this and do it accurately with transparency.
the first that came -- they came first for the communists, and I didn't speak.
because I wasn't a communist.
and then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak because I wasn't a trade unionist.
they came for the jews, and I didn't speak because I wasn't a jew.
then they came for me.
and by that time there was no one left to speak up.
pastor martin mowlder.
a good friend of mine wrote it a little bit different.
>> [speaking spanish] then they came for me.
they first came for the illegal immigrant.
and I didn't speak up because I may have looked like them.
and I wasn't an illegal immigrant.
then they came for the I illegal immigrant's family, some women and children were u.s.
citizens, and I didn't speak up because I did not look like them, but my family members were not illegal immigrants.
they came for the person who looked like illegal immigrants, and I didn't speak up because I may have looked like them, but I was a u.s.
citizen.
and then they came with electronic voting machines where u.s.
citizens could not count accurately the votes.
>> [speaking spanish]
>> [ buzzer sounds ] because I looked like them and by the time there was no one to speak for me.
thank you.
>> thank you, mr. Acevedo.
morris priest is our final speaker on the citizens communication.
while he's coming up let me indicate our intention to call up the next items, 4, 5, 6 -- no, 5, 6, 7, then 25.
then we'll get the consent items. Mr. Priest?
>> thank you, judge, Commissioners.
morris priest speaking on my own behalf.
I want to say that when we look at our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we have these fundamental core beliefs that are varying among different parties, but if we look at our constitution and our bill of rights and all these founding documents, the preambles, there are no parties mentioned.
and this situation that we have currently with our present administration at the federal level is the same administration that we have at our county level.
and it's being rejected on a daily basis in many circles.
and many people are coming together to see that we don't have the vision.
we've lost our vision and we've lost our focus.
and we've lost our focus on those things that are not only guided by our constitution, but our creator.
some of these core belief differences are having an effect on us in areas such as transportation, rising taxes, and many of our social ills that we're presently facing today.
this is not a country of entitlement.
this is a country that you have the ability to pursue happiness.
happiness is not guaranteed.
there are some in the christian faith that believe that they don't want to substitute happiness with the exceeding joy that they get from their creator.
many people in this community are coming to acknowledge that people like share lot iserby who wrote the book the deliberate dumbing down of america realize that when our public education system was talking about teaching core beliefs, we thought that they were teaching about math, reading, arithmetic, things of that nature, but these core beliefs were taught not about science or math, these core beliefs were taught against the very founding documents that this country was founded on.
these core beliefs were founded on lifestyles that are not typically what is known and recognized in Travis County to be acceptable.
we have a substance abuse issue in this community.
we have many other issues in this community.
many people are not wanting to fulfill their expectations because they see that the government is running these entitlements.
and people aren't entitled to these entitlements.
it's basically theft.
and we see these people all the time coming -- wanting the government to bail them out, whether it's our corporate welfare system or whether it's just the individuals that basically have an ultimate tear your motive.
we see the obama administration coming out yesterday with 50 billion-dollar stimulus package for transportation.
yet our transportation board is under local control.
we have our citizens communication limited.
we have appointments made prior to all the information being given and prior to having the proper people in place.
>> [ buzzer sounds ] thank you.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, October 12, 2010 6:33 PM
