“They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been. In some cases, reconstruction began immediately…
“The most daring reinvasions were performed by Thailand’s indigenous fishing peoples called the Moken… After centuries of disenfranchisement, the Moken had no illusions that a benevolent state would give them a decent piece of land in exchange for the coastal properties that had been seized.“So, in one dramatic case, the residents … ‘gathered themselves together and marched right back home, where they encircled their wrecked village with rope, in a symbolic gesture to mark their land ownership,’ explained a report by a Thai NGO…
“All along the Thai coast where the tsunami hit, this kind of direct-action reconstruction is the norm. The key to their success is that ‘people negotiate for their land rights from a position of being in occupation;’ some have dubbed the practice ‘negotiating with your hands.’
Shock Doctrine, pp. 463-464.
Also see http://www.achr.net/
Election activists “negotiate with their hands” by polling voters outside an official polling site. Citizen-run exit polling, or parallel elections, is a concept that proves hand-counts are on the table. Political realists (deliberately?) ignore the potential energy of this grassroots movement.
Count the Damn Ballots
Starting in 2005, parallel polling has now been run in the U.S. by the grassroots of both major parties, as well as Greens and Independents. This idea generated from US think tanks, where they were deployed as early as 1986 to check election results in other nations.
Today, they’re called citizen run exit polls, but the same structure exists: citizens ask voters to complete a parallel ballot (variably called an affidavit, a sworn statement, or a poll sheet) after they have finished voting in the official election. These parallel “ballots” are then transported and counted (presumably) under secure protocols, using nonpartisans or people from varied political parties.
Although I’ve been involved in parallel polling since 2005, including Florida’s in 2008, I have yet to see one (including the one I ran in 06) that achieves ballot security – something we expect of our official electoral management bodies.
Surely, we require a basis for confidence in reported results from whomever counts the vote. I expect chain of custody will be preserved with better training, and as more people grasp the significance of parallel polling. We citizens must demonstrate secure protocols in our parallel projects, because trust has no place in elections. Meanwhile, I wholly support the spread of this action, coupled with better training.
My buddy, Troy Seman, calls parallel elections “the antidote to fraudulent elections.” Because we run these parallel polls, we know hand-counted elections are on the table. Politicians, of course, ignore the significance of parallel polling, while corporate media discounts discrepancies between pollsters and election results. This, despite that parallel polling is used to verify elections around the globe.
As this movement grows – and there is no doubt it will, given the unrelenting glitches, double bubbles, invisible ink, and wtfever, reported after every single election - and as more voters experience self-empowerment from citizen-run elections, there will come a point when even politicians will admit that hand-counting is “on the table” simply because we citizens put it there. We’re not waiting for politicians – we’re running free and fair elections ourselves.
Several other methods of “negotiating with our hands” are recommended: Be an official domestic observer, video the vote, run a parallel poll, count the signatures in polling books and compare them to official results for in-person voters, follow the voting machines on Election Day, and blog, blog, blog about all of it. Much of what you’ll discover is that the records are unauditable and chain of custody is wholly lacking, but even that is important to convey.
Overall, a citizen’s job is to study how elections are run, as if you are the boss, because you are. Civic engagement is democracy in practice.
Other actions include filing suit, on a variety of different premises. One campaign in the works now demands a voting machine recall. Citizens in LA are demanding that the “double bubble” ballots be counted as the voter intended – despite the overused election official trick of poorly designed ballots, which in this instance, disenfranchised 95,000 voters. Voter intent is what matters – not some arbitrary design or rule or law.
