MUCH OF WHAT WE WANT IN ELECTION REFORM can be achieved once we have agreement on the civil rights issues. Yes, we need paper ballots, but that does no good unless we also have a right to information.
ELECTION REFORM LEGISLATION MUST DEAL WITH THE PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO KNOW
The American constitutional form of representative government is based upon the principle that government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.
Elections are the mechanism through which the citizenry conveys its instructions to the government, and therefore, elections must provide full freedom of access to information to all citizens, which includes access to the information needed to validate and audit the election.
Without this, it is only a matter of time before our system of government crumbles.
THE GOOD NEWS
We can base real electoral reform on a body of law that's already in place: Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA). Elections are a special circumstance, and current FOIA laws don't quite work the way they are currently structured, but with tweaks specifying the kinds of Freedom of Information rights we need for elections, WE might just work wonders to make everybody happy.
FIVE PROBLEMS WITH FREEDOM TO ELECTIONS INFORMATION
FOIA has enormous potential for correcting many of the problems we're seeing, but not until it's adapted for elections. For any election system to work properly:
1) The information to enable citizens to oversee all aspects of the election must actually be produced. With the move to computerized voting, some aspects of the right to observe and the right to examine information have been removed from public access. We need to get those back.
Currently, even when elections information is produced it may be deleted or kept out of print. For example, according to responses to Black Box Voting public records requests issued in New England, elections contractor LHS Associates tends to do business verbally. According to elections officials in Vermont, even purchase orders are often not put in print! In addition, we are finding evidence that elections vendors don't always itemize their invoices.
What we get is that "something" was done to or for the computerized voting system, but there is no document the public can examine to learn exactly what's going on, or even what their tax dollars are paying for.
SOLUTION: One of the things we need to get to work on is identifying what information MUST be produced (in written form) by whatever voting system is used. We're also going to have to mandate sensible retention policies for election-related e-mails and correspondence, because some public officials are telling us they throw away their e-mail correspondence immediately, including communications records with vendors and directives from the state.
2) Information is not provided to citizens timely. Freedom of Information laws are not designed with elections in mind. Almost always, you can't get the records until weeks after the election is certified. By then, it's too late.
And this is getting worse. When Black Box Voting obtained some early precinct results from Georgia counties, we were astonished to find that candidates had been unable to get hold of their own results! While they could get their totals, the precinct detail results were simply not available. Candidates were contacting Black Box Voting just to get their own elections results, because precinct results were not released until certification of the election was imminent.
3) The costs for elections-related records are prohibitive in many states. We love Ohio and North Carolina for their willingness to part with public records at a reasonable price, but in Texas it can cost you $500 just to get a precinct-level report of the results for a single county, and Michigan once tried to charge us $1,600 just to look for a single letter, with no guarantee of finding it, and a requirement for a non-refundable prepayment. South Dakota doesn't really have to give you any records; one South Carolina county insists that you have to travel there if you want to see elections records. And San Diego, Calif. wants to charge over half a million dollars for citizens to audit the paper ballots.
Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c(3) organization dedicated to ensuring fair and accurate elections. We are supported entirely by citizen donations.
We are currently accumulating Freedom of Information documents for a series of (more...)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Dear Santa--
Please don't bring me an SUV,
Please don't bring me a boat,
Please don't bring me an apple tree,
A donkey or a goat.
I sure don't want a jigsaw,
Or a drillpress or a vise,
And giving folks what they don't want,
Is wasteful and not nice.
I have no need for screwdrivers,
For hammers or for mallets,
There's just one thing I really want:
HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS!
**********
Without honest, open elections, we have no voice in government and nothing else is possible.
blackboxvoting.org is a major force in the struggle to retake our democracy from the corporate interests squandering our heritage. I know things are tight, but if you possibly can, please consider giving them a one-time donation, or becoming a member. The difficulty and costs of fighting the big machine keep increasing.
Happy holidays, Black Box Voting! I've told Santa how good you've been all year and I hope you get everything you wish for!
--Mark
by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments) on Sunday, Dec 24, 2006 at 7:27:56 PM
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