All registration forms, and all polling places, can be festooned with signs warning that fraudulent voting is a felony. No photo ID shall be required at any voting place, only a signature that matches the one on file, and a wide range of less intrusive ID. Innumerable federal, state and government entities from school districts to the IRS know when US citizens turn 18. Ohio allows some 17 different documents to serve as suitable identification at the polls.
Voting is a basic American right. It should be the affirmative duty of the state to promote universal registration and end the bizarre practice of purging voters in a computer age. Short of a death certificate, the few questionable voters can easily be moved to an inactive status instead of purged from the computer database.
2. UNIVERSAL HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS:
It is by now a public article of faith that electronic voting machines are perfectly designed to steal elections. A recent $1.9 million study for the Ohio Secretary of State has confirmed that an electronic voting machine can be flipped with a magnet and a Blackberry. After reports by the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan Center, Princeton University, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers Committee and many more, even the come-lately New York Times has now deemed touch-screen machines to be eminently hackable.
The country owes a huge debt of gratitude to the grassroots uprising of independent researchers and bloggers that has campaigned so bravely and effectively in the face of a mainstream media intent on ignoring the issue.
Now the Times and others seem to want a "middle ground" with Optiscan machines that run paper ballots through a reader, and even worse, feed them into computerized central tabulators.
We oppose this hackable non-solution. At least two Optiscan scams come quickly to mind. In Toledo, Ohio, inner city wards, Optiscan ballots were improperly calibrated causing a higher rate than normal to be rejected by the reader. Scores of them remain uncounted from the 2004 Ohio presidential election. In fact, most of the 93,000 or so uncounted ballots in Ohio fell under the label “machine rejected.”
In Miami County, Ohio, an Optiscan machine produced phantom votes that couldn't be explained in the final tabulation. See the Free Press article: http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2209.
Yet Ohio's Secretary of State is poised to order Cuyahoga County (Cleveland)---which overrode citizen objections against spending $20 million on touchscreen voting machines---to now spend an additional $11 million on Optiscan machines to replace them. How long will it take before those Optiscan machines are, in turn, rejected?
The real solution is obvious: use paper ballots, and count them by hand. This is not, of course, fool proof. But it works beautifully in places like Germany and Switzerland, where official vote counts regularly conform to within 0.1% of exit polls.
Hand counted paper ballots could and should work here. In particular, we should reach out to high school and college students in the tradition of democratic public service to facilitate the vote count process.
The "revolutionary concept" of all of us voting on ballots that have the actual name of the candidates on them, with the opportunity to put a visual, tangible "X" next to those we choose, has the merit of obvious simplicity. These ballots can be counted and recounted, with high reliability and no dependence on source codes or incomprehensible computer glitches.
To be sure, ballots can be stolen and manipulated. But there is every indicator the possibility of fraud is still far less than with electronic machines. One can stuff ballots one at a time, so to speak, at the retail level. But computerized voting and tabulation allow for the far more dangerous wholesale shifting of votes and the deadly pre-programming of election results.
It should also be noted that federal law now requires that all election records be retained for 22 months after a federal vote. In Ohio, 56 of 88 county election boards ignored federal law---and a court injunction---and destroyed all or some of their records from the 2004 election, making a meaningful recount essentially impossible. Thus far, no state or federal official has indicated any willingness to do anything about this blatant abuse of federal law.
So meaningful reform will require that federal election laws actually be enforced.
As part of the King-Lincoln civil rights lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff) extensive research into Ohio 2004 makes it clear that nearly all the electronic records were virtually worthless anyway, and could have been easily manipulated had they been retained.
Voting is a basic American right. It should be the affirmative duty of the state to promote universal registration and end the bizarre practice of purging voters in a computer age. Short of a death certificate, the few questionable voters can easily be moved to an inactive status instead of purged from the computer database.
2. UNIVERSAL HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS:
It is by now a public article of faith that electronic voting machines are perfectly designed to steal elections. A recent $1.9 million study for the Ohio Secretary of State has confirmed that an electronic voting machine can be flipped with a magnet and a Blackberry. After reports by the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan Center, Princeton University, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers Committee and many more, even the come-lately New York Times has now deemed touch-screen machines to be eminently hackable.
Now the Times and others seem to want a "middle ground" with Optiscan machines that run paper ballots through a reader, and even worse, feed them into computerized central tabulators.
We oppose this hackable non-solution. At least two Optiscan scams come quickly to mind. In Toledo, Ohio, inner city wards, Optiscan ballots were improperly calibrated causing a higher rate than normal to be rejected by the reader. Scores of them remain uncounted from the 2004 Ohio presidential election. In fact, most of the 93,000 or so uncounted ballots in Ohio fell under the label “machine rejected.”
In Miami County, Ohio, an Optiscan machine produced phantom votes that couldn't be explained in the final tabulation. See the Free Press article: http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2209.
Yet Ohio's Secretary of State is poised to order Cuyahoga County (Cleveland)---which overrode citizen objections against spending $20 million on touchscreen voting machines---to now spend an additional $11 million on Optiscan machines to replace them. How long will it take before those Optiscan machines are, in turn, rejected?
The real solution is obvious: use paper ballots, and count them by hand. This is not, of course, fool proof. But it works beautifully in places like Germany and Switzerland, where official vote counts regularly conform to within 0.1% of exit polls.
Hand counted paper ballots could and should work here. In particular, we should reach out to high school and college students in the tradition of democratic public service to facilitate the vote count process.
The "revolutionary concept" of all of us voting on ballots that have the actual name of the candidates on them, with the opportunity to put a visual, tangible "X" next to those we choose, has the merit of obvious simplicity. These ballots can be counted and recounted, with high reliability and no dependence on source codes or incomprehensible computer glitches.
To be sure, ballots can be stolen and manipulated. But there is every indicator the possibility of fraud is still far less than with electronic machines. One can stuff ballots one at a time, so to speak, at the retail level. But computerized voting and tabulation allow for the far more dangerous wholesale shifting of votes and the deadly pre-programming of election results.
It should also be noted that federal law now requires that all election records be retained for 22 months after a federal vote. In Ohio, 56 of 88 county election boards ignored federal law---and a court injunction---and destroyed all or some of their records from the 2004 election, making a meaningful recount essentially impossible. Thus far, no state or federal official has indicated any willingness to do anything about this blatant abuse of federal law.
So meaningful reform will require that federal election laws actually be enforced.
As part of the King-Lincoln civil rights lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff) extensive research into Ohio 2004 makes it clear that nearly all the electronic records were virtually worthless anyway, and could have been easily manipulated had they been retained.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
