HR 550's audit contemplations can stay in committee for the next millennium for all the good they will do democracy. Honest elections preclude electronic voting systems, and their audits. Whether by design or ignorance, HR 550 proponents back a corrupt system.
Now consider the Kucinich bill. HR 6200 partly models what we need – hand counted paper ballots, at the precinct, before observers. It fails by applying only to the Presidential race, and by removing provisional ballots from the HCPB method.
Florida and Ohio teach that one significant way election officials suppress the vote is to target voter classes for "provisional" status.
Different tabulation methods creates a second class of ballots - some people's votes are to be counted without chain of custody, while others – who weren't provisionalized by election officials – are to be counted by hand, at the precinct, before observers.
If Ohio's midterm election is any indication, these second-class "provisional" voters are transient citizens – college students, low-income workers, and racial minorities. [5]
Joe Knapp's map showing Franklin County's high-portion precincts of provisional voters is found at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/13/122915/95. OSU's Ohio Union is noted in red for its 26% prov-rate.
Are any elections close enough that provisional and absentee votes could sway the outcome? Witness the current Kilroy-Pryce contest for Ohio's 15th Congressional District.
HR 6200 also fails by referring to votes cast for President and Vice President only. US citizens do not elect the President in practice; party operatives and partisan courts select him in a winner-take-all elite system called the Electoral College.
Why a bill calling for hand counted paper ballots would limit itself to the only office citizens don't actually vote for is confounding.
PUBLIC DEMANDS TRANSPARENCY AND OVERSIGHT
Half measurers avail us nothing.
Honest elections can only occur when there is complete transparency, where we deem election system security more valuable than personal voter privacy. The only valid reason to maintain a secretly cast vote is to ensure the voter isn't forced or bribed into voting the way local elites deem appropriate.
How many voters agree with this value can be astounding. Zogby found that 92% of US citizens agree our election system should be completely transparent. [7]
Ohio's recent Parallel Election (PE) found that 84% put their money where their mouth is and signed the PE Roster. Repeatedly we heard comments, "You can have my name. I want to know the results."
Even more importantly, according to PE comments, most voters applaud citizen oversight and consider it critical to election integrity.
In 2004, Rady Ananda began contributing to the Web, as part of the growing community of citizen journalists. Focusing mainly on elections, her blogs also address religious, gender, sexual and racial equality, as well as environmental issues; and are sprinkled with book and film reviews on various topics. She spent most of her working life as a legal investigator for lawfirms, and about 5 years as an editor. She currently serves as a senior editor at OpEdNews.
All material offered here is the property of Rady Ananda, copyright 2006, 2007, 2008. Permission is granted to repost, with proper attribution including the original link.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Tell the truth anyway. Sign this petition: http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/ny_levers_petition
"You can't test quality into a product, you have to build it in," was the mantra we learned in the 1980's quality movement. The same holds for election integrity. Audits are nothing more than a flawed attempt of trying to test veracity into a corrupt election system. Our experience in Arizona, that the audit was made a farce by the re-elected Secretary of State, that the audit procedure itself can be manipulated such that well meaning people doing as they are told yield worthless results, is proof that auditing is just another venal strategy to keep electronic voting machines as a viable option. They are not!
No more electronic voting machines, ever! A return to hand counted paper ballots (HCPB) is the ONLY answer for the 2008 election. If the state wants to use an opti-scan system that uses paper ballots that can be hand counted to give an unofficial rapid results so be it. Just so long as the official ballot of record is from the hand count.
Secretary of State Brunner has a simple, albeit not simplistic, problem ahead of her. Her answer must address the legions of citizen election integrity activists who very much helped put her in office. She needs to understand that their allegience is not to her, but to election integrity. I trust she will choose wisely.
by
Mike Shelby (12 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 21 comments)
on Friday, November 24, 2006 at 9:00:00 PM
