Ion Sancho, the Leon County, Florida Supervisor of Elections who authorized the
Diebold hack test, last year, is facing a wave of retaliation from the Big Three voting machine vendors, Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia. They refuse to sell him the equipment necessary to make Leon County compliant with the Help America Vote Act. Now the state of Florida may remove Sancho for failure to comply with HAVA.
From Vote Trust USA:
At a Leon County Commission meeting on February 28, 2006, county staff revealed that Chuck Owen, Division Counsel for Diebold Election Systems, met with county staff behind closed doors on February 27. According to staff, Owen stated that "Diebold would sell its touch-screen voting machines to the county if, and only if, the county removed Supervisor Sancho from office."
Action on the flip.
Vote Trust USA is organizing an
e-mail campaign to Florida officials in support of Sancho. Their action link may not work for some people, so I have pasted the letter,the e-mail addresses and the Division of Elections contact form you need.
First, here is a link to the contact form for the Division of Elections.
Here are the rest of the e-mail addresses you need:
proctorb@leoncountyfl.gov, saulsj@leoncountyfl.gov, danw@leoncountyfl.gov, rackleffhsd@earthlink.net, cliff@leoncountyfl.gov, grippat@leoncountyfl.gov, depuye@leoncountyfl.gov, secretaryofstate@dos.state.fl.us, jeb.bush@myflorida.com
And here is Vote Trust's letter:
Dear Florida and Leon County Officials:
I am writing to protest the disgraceful treatment of Ion Sancho, Leon County Supervisor of Elections by certain state and local officials. Mr. Sancho should be hailed as a national hero for having the courage and vision to conduct the kind of testing of his voting systems that should have been performed by state and federal certifiers. These tests exposed severe security vulnerabilities in Leon County's Diebold voting system, have since been duplicated and confirmed by California computer scientists, who also found additional severe flaws.
In return, the state has withdrawn Leon County's Help America Vote Act Funds, threatened Mr. Sancho with legal action, and refused to require voting system vendors to do business with him.
It is not too late to make amends for this shameful treatment of a dedicated public servant. I urge you to:
* Support Mr. Sancho in his efforts to provide secure, verifiable, accessible voting equipment to the citizens of his county.
* Demand that voting machine vendors, who would not be doing business in the state of Florida without state certification, be required to sell voting systems to any and all Florida counties or lose their certified status.
* Return the $564,421 in Help America Vote Act funds to Leon County.
* Provide all Florida citizens with voting systems that provide a voter-verified paper trail.
Our nation needs secure, accessible, auditable voting systems to ensure that our democracy may not only thrive, but survive. Mr. Sancho's heroic actions are helping to accomplish that goal.
Sincerely,
Your name here
This couldn't be more serious. As David Wagner, a computer scientist on California's official voting machine panel, was quoted saying in this Miami Herald column, if Sancho goes down, election officials all over the county could become wary of offending the corporate operators of our elections.