For the first 100 years the U.S. vote was openly conducted viva voce, or by "voice vote". Not just the Registrar of Voters, but everyone within listening distance could hear and notate the vote, then later compile all their notations for a comparison to the Registrar's final count. If all agreed, the vote was rightfully considered irrefutable. The introduction of the Secret Ballot eliminated this alternative verification and made possible the ongoing theft of the vote, of which we are occasionally given glimpses (2000 & 2004 elections). "Secrecy" is the enabling characteristic of vote fraud. Without vote secrecy, vote fraud becomes impossible.
"Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny": Robert A. Heinlein
PeeCE -- Peer Certified Elections
If war is the result of the lack of a real vote, then "peace" would have to be the result of the possession of a real vote. But simply dropping a genuine vote into the laps of the typical citizen carries with it problems. Think of PeeCE as a "toolbox" of five tools, all designed to solve these problems and make the transition to PeeCE smooth and successful.
Specifically, PeeCE is a means by which two or more adversarial nations could end hostilities and achieve lasting "peace", by genuinely placing the ability to make war fully and exclusively into the hands of its own citizens. Under PeeCE, two or more parties enter into a PeeCE agreement in which each operates in a certified democratic fashion, that includes a peer audit of the others election to ensure the other is in compliance. Why "peer certification"? Because it solves the following major impediment to the implementation of PeeCE.
Consider that the leaders of a nation engaged in escalating hostilities, might be justifiably concerned that an adversary would only agree to a PeeCE proposal, as a ruse to moderate the others aggressiveness. Then later, lulled into a state of complacency and weakness, be attacked by their adversary. For PeeCE to work it is therefore essential that both parties be able to verify, with certainty, that the other is in compliance and not just faking it. They would have to know that the citizens of their adversary are in genuine control through their vote. Thus the form peer certification might take would have to be bullet proof. It would have to be a system that would on close scrutiny engender confidence, as so much would be riding on it.
Vva - Tool #1
Until recently any election audit might have raised more questions than it answered. But now, a new and powerful election audit system has been developed, one that was intended to audit and verify U.S. elections. It is called Vva,(2) an acronym for Voter verified audit, an audit in which voters themselves verify their own vote. Vva's power stems from its affirmative response to the one big question no vote security system in use today can satisfactorily answer: "Who can best be trusted to incorruptibly verify the vote?" Vva's resounding answer is; "voters themselves".
In this particular case, it must be assumed that if a voter wanted to somehow alter (tamper with) their own vote, they would simply choose their "alteration" in the voting booth rather than later. If in the process of tampering they make a "different" choice for whatever reason, they aren't tampering, they're voting. That is, in the voting booth all a voter can do is either vote or not vote, both of which are acceptable, no matter who they vote for. This makes the voter themselves a virtually incorruptible verifier of their own vote.
Further, Vva can be exclusively citizen operated and completely independent of government. An important point, since government exclusively checking its own vote count, the very instrument that decides whether it stays or goes, constitutes an obvious conflict of interest. Vva can simply, innocuously and irrefutably detect virtually any kind of election fraud down to levels of less than 1%, depending on sample size, which could easily reach 100%. It is the "canary" of elections. If an election has been tampered with, Vva will detect it.
"If Ya' Want It Done Right, Do It Yourself"
Winston Churchill once remarked, "The best argument against democracy, is a five minute conversation with the average voter". In retort: "The best argument for democracy, is an end of war". Still, Mr. Churchill's remark was well taken and points up an obvious problem with PeeCE-ful democracy; is the average citizen ready for it?
Well, most people can read and write. Most importantly, virtually all of us can "read the writing on the wall". We have a good idea of what we want and don't want, and "war" is certainly at the top of the "don't want" list. There are however many things of which the average person is ignorant or doesn't have the sophistication to understand. Both problems could be solved through enlightened "truth". But what is truth and how will we know it when we see it? Philosophers and the intelligentsia have grappled with that question since Aristotle. We don't have thousands of years more to answer that question. What is being proposed here requires that we answer the question, now.
The American Truth Project -- Tool #2
Over the last few years there has been a concept that has been trying to get started but hasn't quite made it yet. It is called The American Truth Project(3) and its lofty purpose has been, to generate an accurate understanding of the world around us. Doing that requires that the truth of things be known, as closely as can be determined. To that end, TATP attempts to determine precise truth on a grand scale, using a special "truth engine" developed especially for the job. It is called "Descartes".(4)
Descartes "plugs" all candidates for truth into its engine, whose active element is for now common sense, something that will probably morph in the future into some type of open-source, algorithm based Expert-System. It uses a process for deconstructing one sentence statements of proposed truth, or "hypothesis statements", into their fundamental parts or "premises", then tests each premise using rigorous analysis for quality and truthfulness. That process will ultimately output a "figure of merit" of 1-99% as to the probability of truth of important issues. Understand, Descartes will only do the heavy lifting here. The actual decision of what is and is not the truth will and must always remain in the hands of the citizen. Though only in its infancy, Descartes is already quite formidable.
