ELECTION INTEGRITY

The mission of the Election Integrity Committee is to educate ourselves, Indivisible members and the public about threats to the security and integrity of our elections, and to protect democracy by helping to ensure that every vote is counted as cast.
In the current cybersecurity environment, no local or state board of elections should be assuming that our voting machines and elections are impregnable.
We urge legislators and election officials to support the call for evidence-based elections, with machinery and procedures designed to demonstrate to candidates and the public that each election’s votes were accurately counted as cast.
Our elections must be verifiable, secure and transparent:

• Verifiable: Whenever possible, ballots must be hand marked by the voter so the voter’s intent is clear.
• Secure: Hand-to-eye audits and recounts of voter-verified paper ballots sufficient to detect and correct incorrect electoral outcomes prior to certification of results.
• Transparent: The public must have the right to observe audits and recounts of the vote and to review ballot images and cast vote records, consistent with the preservation of ballot secrecy.

To that end, we support the passage of federal and state legislation to enshrine in law the right to choose to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, to ban voting machines that prevent voters from verifying how their votes will be counted, to expand hand-to-eye audits and recounts, and to allow candidates and the public to witness those procedures.