OpEdNews - Page 4 of Article: "Fooled Again" Series: Exclusive Interview with "Diebold Whistleblower" Steve Heller

To hear the voting machine officials, politicians and election officials at the federal, state and county levels tell it, they own our elections. Not the voters, not even the taxpayers, but the voting machine companies, the politicians and the election officials.

Bull!

We, the people, own our elections, and we the people own our votes.

Q. So, what do we do? What can we do?

A. It is imperative that we return elections to the people. The process of voting has to be opened up and made transparent. No secret machines! No secret software! No ballotless voting!

And the process of counting the votes likewise needs to be something that we, the people can observe. I want citizens to be able to watch the votes being counted. Like I said, they're OUR votes, so we should be able to see them being counted.

The only thing secret about our elections should be the secret ballot.

How our ballots are processed and tabulated, and the machines used for such, must be open and transparent.

Private corporations are running our elections for us in secret, using secret machines and secret software. That must not stand.

Every vote in every election MUST have a paper ballot. Not a paper trail, but an actual, legal ballot printed on sturdy, heavy weight paper. And what should be counted is the paper ballots, not electronic bits and bytes that we can't see and hold in our hands, bits and bytes created on machines proven to be vulnerable to hacking, proven to be unreliable and poorly made, proven to have security features any computer savvy 14 year old could break through.

Paper ballots are the ONLY thing that should be counted, either for the initial count or a recount.

We also need to make it federal law that any hardware or software used in an election is subject to independent verification by computer hardware and software experts that have no affiliation with any voting machine company. No exceptions of any kind!

Now, proprietary information laws are generally very good laws. If a company builds a better mousetrap, that company should have the legal right to protect the secret of what makes that mousetrap better, and then be able to exclusively exploit that better mouse trap technology and make a tidy profit.

But not voting machines. Voting machines aren't like a carburetor or a photo copy machine or a mouse trap. Voting machines are what our democracy depends on. So I want to see exceptions to the proprietary information laws when it comes to all voting machine components.

Q. I don't imagine that is going to be an easy sell.

A. If the voting machine companies don't want to make their machines transparent, and if they don't want to make their software open source code, they can get the hell out of the election business. Elections are NOT about profit for the voting machine companies. Again, we own our elections and we own our ballots. So how our ballots are created and counted must not be kept secret from we, the people.

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