An extraordinary 92% of Americans believe that the public should have the right to observe vote counting and obtain information about it, according to a brand new Zogby poll of 1018 registered likely voters, taken August 11-15, 2006. This result flies in the face of electronic elections where vote counting is commonly considered a trade secret of the vendors of electronic voting machines.
Paul Lehto, who commissioned the poll, said: "It's one of the highest political values ever measured. Pretty much the ONLY way we can come up with anything more popular is to go to something about which there is NO SUBSTANTIAL CONTROVERSY. But such values with higher support, if they exist, are not being eliminated like public supervision and oversight of elections is. This is taking place in all jurisdictions, even in some places where they wrongly believe they have "transparent" elections until they ask for the information and it is denied by public officials."
WHAT DOES 92% MEAN? IT MEANS WINNING IF YOU KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE
* It's way higher than people who wouldn't mind a free tax cut.
* I'll bet it's higher than the approval ratings of Pres. Lincoln and Pres. Washington TODAY, if they exist. Though i'm willing to be proven wrong on that. Anyone?
* And, it's also higher than the percentage of people who can get a basic math long division problem right.
Attorney Paul Lehto, who commissioned the Zogby Poll*, stated "This attack on transparency and loss of public rights to observe and supervise their own elections has occurred because of widespread government purchases of electronic voting machines that feature software claimed by vendors to be protected by trade secrecy and proprietary rights against any public observation or disclosure. Because of $4 billion in federal funding to states and counties under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, these new invisible electronic ballots are used by a rapidly increasing majority of Americans against the wishes of 92% of all Americans, according to Zogby. Under electronic voting run under this regime of trade secrecy, American citizens are never allowed at any time to verify if their elections are open, honest and accurate, and the government actually ends up ganging up with its vendors to fight citizen requests for information about the secret vote counting that is occurring. It is by no means "progress" to take checks and balances or public oversight out of elections, it is more like the biggest step backwards for democracy imaginable."
Cross tabbed Zogby data and press release in pdf form are attached hereto. Official Zogby materials are only those attached and that contained in the Zogby link at the top of the page, the rest is the work of the undersigned.
Paul Lehto practiced law in Washington State for 12 years in business law and consumer fraud, including most recently several years in election law, and is now a clean elections advocate. His forthcoming book is tentatively titled DEFENDING DEMOCRACY. In the past, I co-founded but am no longer an active participant in the San-Diego focused election rights organization Psephos, but I nonetheless recommend their work and reference their site here.
When information is available, it doesn't always make sense.
Remember that voting machine in Florida that mysteriously subtracted 16,000 votes for Gore? The explanation given was that there were one or two substitute memory cards responsible. But nobody knows who used those cards or what happened to them.
Here in San Diego where Attorney Paul Lehto has filed an election integrity lawsuit, the Registrar of Voters made a show of supplying the information formally requested by citizens, such as the logs kept with regard to the memory cards used in the optical scan machines. Those memory cards are supposedly secured with "tamper-evident" seals. According to the logs, the seals worked, as tampering was evident on some of them, which had been broken or replaced with no explanation whatsoever. The tampering was noted on the logs, the logs were released to the public, and all we know is that in some cases the "tamper-evident" seals did indeed show evidence of tampering.
Since it has been proven by experts that one person, in one minute, can tamper with one memory card in such a way as to undetectably alter the results of an entire election, the only thing we can know for sure from the logs is that such tampering may have occurred. That is not the way to ensure voter confidence.
by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments)
on Thursday, August 24, 2006 at 12:46:09 PM
1 comments
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