12-28-04: Update for donors, and a lo...

Author Message   admin Board Administrator Username: admin Post Number: 263 Registered: 12-2004 Best of Black Box?  Votes: 6 (A keeper?) Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 5:35 am:        (Sent to donors via e-mail 12-28) First, thank you so very much for your donation. It was very much appreciated and needed. In the interest of brevity, you are going to receive three separate e-mails from us in the next 48 hours: 1) Information specific to donors 2) Information about current investigations and audits: HELP AMERICA AUDIT 3) Information about current volunteer actions: ACTIVATING THE EAGLES NOTE: Spam filters, apparently from our own ISP, captured many of the second and third messages. We changed ISPs to accomodate our need to communicate efficiently with members and donors. If your second and third message did not arrive, you will find them posted in this section of the forum This message is the first one, for donors. We received thousands of small donations in November and December ($1 to $5) and very much appreciate these. They did slow down our processing, because for accounting and tax reasons, we account for each and every donor separately, and we were caught by surprise. We did not have enough staff in place to process the volume. Therefore, please accept our apology for the delay in communicating with you. You will soon receive a customized thank you note that provides the records you need to tax-deduct your donation. We are working on those right now. NOTE: Our accounting firm has provided us with the format to send the small number of donors who contributed amounts over $250. The IRS does not require a nonprofit receipt for donations under $250, unless in multiples from the same donor, they exceed $1,000. Please notify us if you need a tax receipt for an amount under $250.) We are commissioning an independent audit of Black Box Voting, Inc. by a major public accounting firm, which will examine all of our financial transactions from the inception of our organization. This is our first year, and we want to make sure that we provide our supporters with trust, transparency, and a solid foundation. Thus, year-end activites are extremely busy. AN UPDATE FOR DONORS: - We are focusing on building long-term infrastructure (Internet, personnel, reporting functions and equipment). - We are concentrating on the HELP AMERICA AUDIT effort that launched by Black Box Voting on Nov 2, 2004, which began with a massive Freedom of Information request. We have collected tens of thousands of pages of documents, are in the process of converting those to Internet-friendly format. We have set up an online workspace for “open source” public auditing of the voting machines used in the 2004 election. Our most important effort of all is ACTIVATING THE EAGLES: We are beefing up our messy old American democracy, by empowering LOCAL CITIZENS to act effectively, independently and forcefully to return transparency to our election system. “Doves, sparrows, and other low-flying birds flock together. Eagles soar alone, and must be gathered one at a time.” The key in "Activating the Eagles" is to find and encourage those citizens who are self-starters, with common sense and the courage to deal with adversity. To this end, we have launched the Black Box Voting “ACTIVATING THE EAGLES” project. This is quite revolutionary; instead of doing the expected, by launching chapters in each state, trying to control the whole thing with a top-down structure, we are focusing on empowering independent groups. In the long run, this will create a much more stable infrastructure for resistance to inappropriate governmental procedures. Please visit our Web site to see the “New Look” for Black Box Voting – We have purchased several new domains, and we are in the process of integrating them into a more effective whole. http://www.blackboxvoting.org – The portal to all the action http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/discus.cgi – The workspace for volunteers and following current happenings. http://www.bbvdocs.org – This is inactive this week, but is being developed as a repository for election-related source documents and audit logs. In addition, we will be putting up mirror sites that we control, hosted on other servers. When they are up, we’ll list them on the main page. The most important part of the new Black Box Voting Web site is the FORUM WORKSPACE. It has just been activated, but is already getting quite busy. Please stop in, register, and post a message to let us know that you are behind this effort: http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/discus. Here you will: - Collaborate with others to clean up elections - Quickly find the latest news - Locate state and local resources - Ask questions and get them answered promptly - Participate in "Help America Audit" # # # # # We protect your privacy and do not allow ANY OTHER individual or organization to have your contact information. If you receive ANY message from another group or individual that you suspect came from your donation to Black Box Voting, please notify us immediately. Please let us know your desired e-mail update schedule: - Please send me weekly updates - Please send me monthly updates - Please send me NO updates at all - Please send me a custom response (type your question in body of message)

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