Election Fraud in Pennsylvania?
(Image Source - Diebold Variations)
They've got a Secret
Michael Collins
"Scoop" Independent News
Washington, D.C.
The Pennsylvania primary could lock up the Democratic nomination process once and for all. The campaign that Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean asked to be finished by July 1 could be over this Tuesday. Regardless of your candidate or party, you're probably like the vast majority of citizens who insist on fair elections that are open to the public for examination.
Citizens want to know that the candidate taking office is the same candidate who won a majority or a plurality of the votes. A 2006 Zogby poll of 1018 registered voters nationwide found that 92% believed that they, as citizens, have the right to witness vote counting for the election of their paid public servants.
That will not be the case in Pennsylvania any more than it was the case in Florida, Ohio, California, South Carolina, and most other primary states. Almost all states bar any real inspection of vote counting, the process that determines the election result. Even if they did allow you to watch the count, all you would see is a whirring third-rate computer system run by a private company that won't allow anyone to take a comprehensive look inside.
Post election audits are either absent or randomly selected by the people who run the election. Recounts require an exceptionally close election, less than a 1% difference typically. And citizen recounts after the election, where paper records exist, are barred by law in Florida and Virginia and barred almost everywhere else by bureaucratic fiat.
Even if you got to examine each and every ballot, the chain of custody of those paper records will likely be compromised at several key points. Ballots collected by unaccountable individuals, driven around in the trunks of cars, unsupervised, plus other election board customs, mean you can't track the chain of custody of ballots from collection at precincts to delivery at counting locations. Post-election storage oftentimes reflects little concern for real security. If you can't track the chain of custody, you can't know if the ballots recounted or examined are the original voted ballots, if ballots have been replaced, altered, etc.
We elect people who pass laws that are enforced by bureaucrats who then tell us to take a hike when we want to closely examine an election.
"The results are what we say they are," say the keepers of the vote, our so-called public servants. "Move along, there's nothing to see here" is the prevailing attitude toward inquiring citizens.
Potential Election Fraud in Pennsylvania
When you build any system that conducts "mission critical business," like electing a president, you need to create enough safeguards to make sure that the process is secure. How secure is the voting process in Pennsylvania?
Almost 90 percent of Pennsylvanians will vote using touch screen voting machines that have no paper record of votes cast. Once you touch the screen, the machine can count your vote any way it's programmed. It can even give you a receipt indicating you voted for Smith and count your vote for Jones. These touch screens total their own votes, invisibly and without any outside checks. We can't watch and even if we could, we wouldn't know what to look for. Our election boards routinely sign contracts agreeing that the computer programs that count our votes are the trade secrets of the e-voting machine companies, no peeking. The companies even "refuse to promise that their products will work."
Our election process is not a serious one when you examine it to any degree but it is very popular with the politicians and the election boards that they populate.
Computer scientists at Princeton University and others have been able to hack touch screen voting machines successfully on repeated occasions. A candidate in Florida's 13th congressional district lost at least 14,000 votes and a seat in Congress in 2006 in a county with touch screens only, while surrounding counties had nothing like these vote losses. Congress promised a vigorous investigation but never delivered.
The situation in Pennsylvania is so bad that Common Cause rated the state at "high" risk for election problems in the 2008 election. In addition, a citizens' group in Pennsylvania is suing the state to decertify touch screen voting machines because they fail to provide an accurate vote count. The case was allowed by the Pennsylvania courts and is proceeding through the system.
