White House Agency Takes Aim at Paper Ballots

Now, even the nation's paper ballots must be "machine readable."

Let's think about this for a moment.

I feel as though the absurdity of the statement stands on its own and I can just end this article right here and now. But I'll spell it out just a tad further, because the implications of four white house appointees assuming control over paper ballots run deeper than absurdity.

The double declaration that every aspect of the voting system must be verifiable and that paper ballots must be machine readable reflects the belief of this body that elections must be technology-based.

Verifiability is not an issue unless technology is involved.

Voters marking their paper ballots by hand have, in fact, no need to "verify" that the mark they just made is the mark they intended to make. The act of hand marking the paper ballot is enough verification of their voter intent. Verification is only required when technology has come between the voter and his vote. In these circumstance, voters indeed must try to verify that the machine is correctly capturing their intent. The inherent flaw in the verified voting paradigm, however, is that it is really quite impossible for voters to verify anything a software driven process is doing, because they can not peer inside the bits and bytes of an e-voting machine to see what it is doing with their vote.

Verifiable voting is nothing more than a confidence game.

Hence the title of HR 811: "Increased Voter Confidence Act". Voters do not need confidence that their votes are verifiable. They need checks and balances to ensure that their votes are cast and counted as intended.

The nation has historically depended on voter intent as the ultimate arbiter for election integrity.

Voter intent can only be properly discerned on a hand marked, hand cast, hand counted paper ballot. Voter intent is vastly superior to the ambiguous concept of verifiability when it comes to guaranteeing the citizenry free, fair, open and democratic elections.

The EAC, in broadening its purview to paper ballots, is attempting to replace voter intent with verifiability even for paper ballots, which, it says, must conform to a technology-based voting system.

The EAC is proposing that we replace democratic elections with verifiable elections.

This is a profound paradigm shift for the nation, and the decision for such a dramatic change in America's democracy appropriately rests with the citizenry, and not four white house appointees.

I wonder how many American citizens, if asked, would give the consent of the governed to such a change.

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