Charity part II

[eirias]

Thanks, readers, for all of your suggestions re: charitable giving. (I wound up giving to the Red Cross, what with the hurricanes and all, but will keep other ideas in mind for the future.) This coming month I'm thinking a political donation of some kind is in order - and the top contender is Cos' suggestion, Verified Voting. I'm tempted to give the money to my favorite Senator in the whole wide world, but he's ahead of his opponent by six points right now and I think, on balance, keeping the process honest is worth a lot more than keeping one particular person in office. Does anyone else know anything about Verified Voting? They can't have been in existence long, and that makes me nervous, I'll admit... I like to know where my money's going. Is EFF working against paperless voting as well?

(Heh, but on the plus side, if Maryland's electronic voting system is compromised, at least there's a chance that my parents' votes won't count. ;) )

Comments

[trygve.livejournal.com]

Oooh, Verified Voting, that's a great suggestion! I may have to look into helping them out too, thanks! I don't know much about them or their history, but I've read enough that I like what they're doing and want them to succeed.

EFF is definitely working against voting methods that aren't voter verifiable or that aren't recountable, which is true of pretty much all current paperless voting systems. Being technology oriented, though, I don't think they're necessarily opposed to going paperless, they just believe it's more important to be voter verifiable, recountable, etc, and since I'm not aware of any paperless systems that meet those requirements at the moment, that pretty much means that yes, they are working against paperless voting. Sorry to nitpick, just didn't want them to come off as technophobes or anything. =)

[ksledge.livejournal.com]

this is a great cause. You should definitely donate to it. I do believe I have heard of this organization and that it's totally legit...but hopefully I'm not just thinking of one with a very similar name!

verifiedvoting

[cos]

I've been a Verified Voting state contact (for MA) since the spring, and I think they do great work. They're small and lean. Their current big projects are the Election Incident Reporting System, which they've developed to be shared by the entire Election Protection coalition, and TechWatch, an election protection track for geeks. They're also trying to collect information about voting machines & procedures for as many local jurisdictions as they can, through local volunteers, so let them know if you want to help them for your county or state or whatever.