Non-Profit Foundation

After interviewing a number of national PR firms, the Verified Voting Foundation a non-profit foundation in California selected NewsMark Public Relations to help raise the media’s awareness on issues surrounding electronic voting machines and their use in the U.S. national election.

VerifiedVoting.org is a non-partisan, non-profit foundation that advocates for legislation and regulation that promotes accuracy, transparency and verifiability of elections.
The organization was perplexed that while some print media had tackled the issue, the crucial arguments for a voter verified paper trail in the national elections had largely gone unnoticed by national TV news.

To help demonstrate the problem for television media outlets, NewsMark Public Relations recommended that Verified Voting illustrate the issue in a way that would resonate for TV producers. We recommended a press event for the media that included staging a “mock” election where a machine used to capture votes could be programmed to produce a false result.

At a computer conference in California, Verified Voting’s founder, Stanford’s Computer Science Professor David Dill, arranged the “mock election” where attendees could record their votes on a machine that he had programmed to give a false result.

The aim was to show for cameras, that without a voter-verified paper trail, even experts would not detect vote tampering on touch-screen voting machines. NewsMarkPR then pitched the media to attend an event that would illustrate the problem in a way that had never been done previously.
The result: Extensive news coverage for Verified Voting’s founder Dave Dill by the PBS national evening news, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”, CBS news, CNN, and recurring appearances on CNN’s nightly talk show at that time, “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” Dill’s expert views on e-voting also became frequently sought by the media across the country from the Boston Globe to the Washington Post.The following is an archived sampling of the media coverage generated during the NewsMarkPR media outreach campaign in support of the Verified Voting Foundation.

Extract from Verified Voting’s Timeline: “Since its founding by David L. Dill, Verified Voting has generated national attention developed actionable solutions, and brought about measurable results. From early 2003 to early 2010, we went from 2 to 34 states with a requirement for voters to be able to verify their vote on a paper record or ballot, and another 6 that purchased voter-verifiable systems even without a statutory requirement. We have assisted 10+ states with post-election audit provisions and helped pass requirements for more; this year half the states will do a post-election audit of some kind.”