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"The Federal Voting Machines Ordinance (Bundeswahlgeräteverordnung) is unconstitutional because it does not ensure that only such voting machines are permitted and used which meet the constitutional requirements of the principle of the public nature of elections. "
In various parts of the decision, it makes it clear that the right to public scrutiny cannot be removed in order to make sure voters don't make a mistake on their ballot, cannot be removed for speedy results, cannot be removed and
replaced with something else that does not involve the citizens themselves.
WHAT WOULD GERMANY SAY ABOUT CERTIFICATION AND TESTING OF VOTING MACHINES?
The USA has a decades-long history of inept and corrupt certification and testing processes. Just last week, the EAC admitted that it doesn't understand its own technical reports (leading us to wonder how "the public" is supposed to make sense of any of this.)
Here's what the German decision says about certification and testing:
"Limitations of the possibility for the citizens to examine the voting cannot be compensated by an official institution testing sample machines in the context of their engineering type licensing procedure, or the very voting machines which will be used in the elections before their being used, for their compliance with specific security requirements and for their technical integrity."
WHAT DOES GERMANY HAVE TO SAY ABOUT TRYING MITIGATING SECRET VOTE-COUNTING WITH AUDITS AND OTHER PROCEDURES?
What Americans have been calling an "audit" is mislabeled, because measures called election audits are actually spot checks, and missing the management report component of real audits; no effort is made to evaluate chain of custody as part of the spot check. But the German court decision correctly pointed out that Government substitution of public scrutiny with its own check is no substitute at all.
"Also an extensive entirety of other technical and organizational security measures alone is not suited to compensate a lack of the possibility of the essential steps of the electoral procedure being examined by the citizens."
The German decision should bring encouragement to Americans who just knew something was wrong. It's not just you. A whole nation agrees! Now, to get our own country to protect and defend our rights. This starts by clearly stating what we really want: public scrutiny of all phases of public elections.
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(1) 2009 version of Holt "Voter Confidence" bill:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/2009holt.pdf
(2) Official English translation of the government statement on the German decision:
http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/en/press/bvg09-019en.html
(3) German version: http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/pressemitteilungen/bvg09-019.html
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