As we saw in the last recount, many judgment calls were made as to which ballots would be declared valid and which discarded. And whenever judgment is in play, so is bias. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a county or municipality where your election officials oppose the party or candidate you support, you should be very, very concerned about whether your vote will be fairly counted.
But it doesn't stop at the county level. Consider further the wealthy industrialist who quite plausibly believes that if a certain pro-regulation candidate for Congress loses, s/he and their allies stand to make millions of dollars more per year. Might s/he not be tempted to invest considerable political and financial capital in getting voting machines adopted that can be easily and undetectably hacked? Would they perhaps even get into the business of building them?
We may never be able to eliminate the motive, but we can, and we must, identify and eliminate the opportunities to undetectably rig our elections. Until we do, we cannot rationally assume that elections are clean and fair. And we therefore cannot rationally trust the official outcomes of elections.
Here, in summary, are the major weak links in Wisconsin elections:
Vote tabulation. Can we be certain votes are being honestly and correctly tabulated by electronic devices? No. Unfortunately, current procedures and the electronic voting machines themselves provide absolutely no way to independently verify the accuracy of electronic vote counts short of a full hand recount of paper ballots. And by Wisconsin law, most of the recount must be done on the same electronic voting machines that could have been hacked in the first place. Be aware that the memory and printouts can be made to differ from the real voter intent and that the pre-election testing is useless for detecting fraudulent programming!
Also, although required by Wisconsin law, touch-screen machines used in some districts were found to provide no paper record and thus no voter-verifiable (or recountable) record of the vote!
Chain of custody. For the purposes of a recount, are we ensuring that ballots can't be added or subtracted between the time they are cast by the voter and the time they are recounted? As we clearly saw in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court recount, the mandated procedures for our elections are not always followed. Citizen observers witnessed a stunning range of abnormalities in the labeling/sealing of ballot bags and even discovered a poll tape dated March 30, days before the election. The poll tape in question, with its time stamp of 1:40 AM, was sworn to as actual votes. This claim was later retracted only when persistently questioned.
We have sampled just some of the evidence suggest that the upcoming recall elections in Wisconsin cannot, and should not, simply be trusted to be honest. Now we come to the most important part: What can still be done to restore confidence in the outcomes?
There are in fact a number of effective steps that can still be taken. All of them require citizen engagement.
- Wisconsin Citizens for Election Protection are urging hand-counts for the recalls. They have sent letters to all the clerks asking that they hand-count the recalls. You can contact them at Email address removed.
- Contact your county and municipal clerks, the election inspectors and the mayor and councilpersons or the town chair and the supervisors. They can authorize the little extra money that it would take to hand-count paper ballots (HCPB) for the recalls in your municipality. Talk to them about the many jurisdictions in Wisconsin and elsewhere that already count their ballots by hand. Acton, Maine (with seven races and two initiatives, six teams of two people each -- a Republican and a Democrat -- were able to hand-count, twice, 944 ballots in four hours) and Lyndeborough, New Hampshire are potential models for the rest of the country.
- Volunteer to serve in non-partisan citizen exit polls being organized by the Election Defense Alliance to rigorously and independently verify vote tabulations and chain-of-custody of ballots.
Our final prediction: Unless the Wisconsin recalls are hand-counted in every race, with secure hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) elections, at least some of them will be rigged, with major implications for the balance of power in the Statehouse.
Alarmist? Perhaps. But the only way to be certain is to act immediately to close the massive security holes in our elections. Please use social media to share the information and links in this article, and help educate those who naively think that outcome of the recall elections depends solely on getting out the vote, who votes and how they vote.
Protecting election integrity is not "left' or "right.' If any commentator or political leader actively objects to making our elections more secure, please ask yourself what their real stake is in the current deeply flawed system.
"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this -- who will count the votes, and how." -- Josef Stalin
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Grant W. Petty
Professor of Atmospheric Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sheila Parks
Founder, Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots
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