With the industry designing to EAC specifications, and Congress putting those specifications into federal law, soon all of America's voting systems will be EAC-designed. Or, put another way, designed by the White House, with designs that fail the tests for democratic elections.
Instead of publicly owned, observable elections, we are getting complex, corporate-owned, voting computers designed by the White House.
Could we get any farther from the Founders' vision?
Coming Back to Life: Restoring Democracy in America
The tests for democratic elections demand that we ask, for each proffered election reform, does it enable citizen oversight? Does it enable checks and balances?
None of the corporate, privatized, and trade secret reforms meet the standards of democracy. With black box technologies and claims of trade secrecy, it is a stretch to say they can even provide verifiable voting, although that is the illusion under which they are sold to the American public.
In contrast, hand counted paper ballot elections offer an observable, reliable, accurate, secure, and advanced election system. Some say that moving from technology-based elections to hand count elections is going backwards, but this method for running elections is in fact the most advanced when considered in the context of the tests for democratic elections.
In hand count elections you manage process, people, paper, and numbers. Hire a good manager and a good accountant for every district, and hand count elections are orderly, secure, accurate, reliable, and dependable.
With the right methodology and management in place, election costs come down and integrity goes up. With a 2-4 person team you have built-in double checks, 2-4 sets of eyes on every count, every tally mark, every contest, every ballot. This is a self-authenticating system; combined with accessible hand recounts, there is no need for complex and expensive audit protocols suggested for computerized elections.
Hand counts integrating the final election count reconciliation (blank ballots, registered voters, ballots cast, etc.) into the process of counting, provide a high level of integrity for the system overall. The " auditing" occurs during the election night count, when it matters, because this, after all, is the count declaring the winner.
Many election officials are afraid that if they give up their machines they won't have enough help to count the ballots, or they will have the "wrong" kind of people. But our communities are filled with the "right" kind of people. We just need to reach out to them.
Every city and town has community organizations. Church groups, Rotary Clubs, Neighborhood Watch groups, PTA's, high school social action or community service groups, are just a few that come to mind. Seventeen year olds are eligible to be poll workers in most states, and community service is often a high school requirement. This a match made in heaven.
New Hampshire's large multimember districts create some of the most complex and highest numbers of ballots per polling site. Still, New Hampshire hand count elections handle up to 3600 ballots, with the national average less than 1,000. In fact, 25 people can count up to 3,600 ballots with roughly 15-20 contests in less than three hours.(29)
Twenty five counters is not a difficult number of volunteers to recruit for any polling jurisdiction. It doesn't matter how populous the state or county. What matters is how many ballots are processed in any given district, how many contests are on the ballot, and whether or not there is the political and community will and the infrastructural integrity to conduct hand count, observable, self-authenticating, elections, that meet the test for democracy.
The only thing that can dispel the illusions of 21st century election reform, the alchemy transforming democratic elections into technological electoral illusion, is a good solid dose of reality. Community based, hand counted paper ballot elections are about as real as you can get.
Do you support secret vote counting in the United States of America?
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