The National Voting Rights Task Force, a non-partisan voting rights organization, will host its third National Election Integrity Conference on October 5-6, from 10 am to 6 pm in Berkeley, at the South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis Street, corner of Ashby Avenue, near the Ashby BART station.
Entitled The Coming 2020 Election Crisis: In Paper We Trust, the conference features more than 20 nationally-recognized leaders in the election integrity movement, covering crucial issues, sharing ideas, solving problems, and creating a strategy for the future of our elections system. The focus is still mainly on cybersecurity, voting machines, and election audits, but it has expanded to include open source election system software and the wider issues of both voter suppression (registration problems, gerrymandering, purging of voter registration rolls, hindrances to getting out the vote), and voter misdirection (deceptive election day announcements, fraudulent Facebook ads, and the organized campaigns like that of Cambridge Analytica). Election activists are investigating and uncovering these problems, fighting them by publicizing, litigating, organizing, and explaining what we all need to know and can do to help everyone be able to vote, have all the valid votes counted as cast, and verify that the real winners are the ones reported by the election systems in all the states.
Conference speakers include:
- Ben Adida, CEO of VotingWorks
Speaking on: Open source voting - Barbara Arnwine, Chair of the Voting Rights Alliance and co-founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition
Speaking on: Voter suppression - Jan BenDor, Co-founder of Michigan Election Reform Alliance
Speaking on: Voting in Michigan - John Brakey, Co-founder of Audit USA
Speaking on: Ballot image audits - Emma Briant, Expert in propaganda and political communication (website)
Speaking on: TBD - Garland Favorito, Co-founder Voter GA
Speaking on: Hacking Georgia - Robert Fitrakis, Professor of political science at Columbus State Community College
Speaking on: TBD - Lulu Friesdat, Journalist and filmmaker at Holler back Film
Speaking on: Organizing observations - Emily Levi, Co-founder of Audit USA
Speaking on: TBD - Ray Lutz, Founder of Citizens Oversight (insecure link)
Speaking on: TBD - Virginia Martin, Elections Commissioner on the Columbia County Board of Elections, New York
Speaking on: Audits - Karen McKim, Coordinator of Wisconsin Election Integrity
Speaking on: Voting in Wisconsin - Steven Rosenfeld, Journalist for Alternet
Speaking on: TBD - Jonathan Simon, Executive Director of the Election Defense Alliance and author of Code Red (on computerized elections)
Speaking on: TBD - Barbara Simons, Chair of Board of Directors of Verified Voting
Speaking on: Election System Security - Norman Solomon, Journalist and author
Speaking on: TBD - Jim Soper, Co-chair National Voting Rights Task Force
Speaking on: TBD - Harvey Wasserman, Journalist and activist
Speaking on: TBD
Click here to register. Conference tickets are $30 per day, or $50 for both days if purchased in advance, with discounts for seniors, teachers, students, and educational administrators or staff members. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
For background and an idea of what to expect you can look at the 2017 National Election Integrity Conference, which includes summaries and videos of every presentation. And read our article about the 2017 conference.
If you want to learn more about Indivisible East Bay’s Voter Rights & Election Integrity team, and how you can help, email us at info@IndivisibleEB.org, or join the #voting-issues channel on IEB’s Slack. For an invitation to join Slack, email: info@IndivisibleEB.org
Graphic: National Voting Rights Task Force
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