Time to Outlaw Paperless Electronic Voting (Truthout)

[marmar]

Time to Outlaw Paperless Electronic Voting
By David L. Dill
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Monday 30 April 2007

Four years ago, when I began publicly opposing paperless electronic voting, passing a federal law to require voter-verified paper records (VVPRs) seemed an impossible dream. Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) introduced such a bill in 2003, and another in 2005, but both bills languished in committee until the clock ran out.

The dream is now achievable, due in part to the unending stream of problems caused by paperless voting machines in recent years. HR 811, the third incarnation of the Holt bill, is a critical measure. It's needed to protect the integrity of our elections, and it has very good prospects of being enacted. It already has 210 co-sponsors in the House, where only 218 votes are required to pass it.

Two provisions in HR 811 are especially vital for restoring trust in American elections: A nationwide requirement for voter-verified paper records, and stringent, random manual counts of those records, to make sure they agree with the announced vote totals. The requirements in the Holt bill are superior to those in almost every state of the country (there are now 22 states with significant amounts of paperless electronic voting, and only 13 states require random audits of VVPRs).

Success is not assured, however. The forces that have blocked previous bills are still active, especially vendors of current poorly performing equipment. Also, various concerns, reasonable and otherwise, have been raised about the bill by other parties.

Some groups insist on optical scan machines, which read and count hand-marked paper ballots, and are not supporting HR 811 because it still allows the use of touch-screen machines. However, under HR 811, those machines must be equipped with so-called voter-verifiable paper trails, which print a paper copy of the vote that can be reviewed by the voter before being cast. Most of the current generation of inferior paper-trail machines would not be allowed under HR 811, which requires the machines to preserve the privacy of voters and requires the VVPRs to be printed on high-quality paper. This will create a strong incentive for local jurisdictions to purchase optical scan equipment. Furthermore, HR 811 makes the paper records the official ballots of record in audits and recounts, and requires election officials to post a notice explaining to voters the need to verify their VVPRs. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/043007N.shtml

[Peace Patriot]

1. Ah, me! Okay. First of all, yes, HR 811 is an improvement, but then...

torture short of organ failure is an improvement over torture unto death. And this analogy is not far off. Is it better to have some kind of paper trail and some kind of audit, with a voting system run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations?

Yeah.

But the fundamental premise of torture is wrong and illegal. The fundamental premise of electronic voting in the US is wrong and SHOULD BE illegal: private corporations (not to mention private PARTISAN corporations) tabulating all our votes under a veil of secrecy.

It didn't have to be this way. This way was engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress, and it perfectly illustrates the relationship between Bush Fascists and Corporatist Democrats. Bush Fascists assert an outlandishly unamerican and lawless position. Corporatists Democrats pull back from THAT position one inch short of the fascist cliff of no return, and call it "reform."

A "paper trail" enables the rich to demand a recount, if they can overcome all the legal hurdles and corporate news monopoly and other political establishment scorn. A 2% random audit is 98% short of real vote counting. (And who controls the randomization?) These measures do not even come close to making vote counting transparent again. And they furthermore reward the election thieves of 2004, and the Congress-shapers of 2006--mainly Diebold and ES&S--with billions more of our taxpayer dollars for keeping George Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House, and preventing the American people from stopping the war. Steal billions in the US, and your reward is MORE billions. Steal elections in the US and your reward is more billions. Radically privatize the election system in the US, and your reward is billions and billions and billions of taxpayer dollars forevermore.

Venezuela votes electronically, but they use an OPEN SOURCE CODE system. Anyone may review the code by which votes are tabulated. And they handcount FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the ballots, as a check on machine fraud.

Venezuela's elections are certified by the Carter Center, the OAS and EU election monitoring groups. Our elections are, in essence, self-"certified" by the very rightwing Bushite corporations who have acquired the utterly phony, anti-democratic and unconstitutional "right" to profit from them.

When ES&S optiscan voting machines 'disappeared' 18,000 Democratic votes for Congress in FL-13, in '06--a race decided by some 300 votes--and the Democratic candidate's lawyers (of course, it's the Democrat who lost) requested to see ES&S's "trade secret" code, to try to figure out what happened to all those votes, ES&S REFUSED, claiming the business right to keep its "trade secret" code from the public. And the judge agreed with them!

What's wrong with this picture?

Torture short of organ failure.

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I don't object to the Corporatist Democrats putting this bandaid on global corporate predator theft of our elections. They'll do what their corporate puppetmasters say they can do, anyway. What I object to is anyone claiming that this is a remedy and touting it as real reform. It isn't. Real reform--restoration of vote counting that everyone can see and understand--can only happen at the grass roots level, in the counties and states, where ordinary people still have some influence.

You want your country back? Picket your local county registrar and demand, a) a ballot for every vote, and b) a 100% handcount of the ballots BEFORE any electronics are involved. We probably can't get rid of these rigged machines, and the billions of our dollars pouring into Bushite corporations, just yet. But this thing is so dirty that we might be able to scare local registrars into actually counting our votes, in the '08 primaries and general election. But real vote counting and real democracy in the US is probably a long term project. Hang in there, people. It is happening. But we need to learn steadiness, patience and persistence, as they have in Latin America. The keys to that huge, peaceful, leftist (majorityist) revolution, that is sweeping the region (leftist governments elected in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua):

1. Transparent elections (!)
2. Grass roots organization.
3. Think big.