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Banish: Lever Machines, DREs & Opticscans-Support Ballots as Objects

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So this simple dialogue shows how easily the challenger of any election is put in a no win situation, they must inspect the machine that creates the process to create the ballot, but these machines are often locked away, off limits or in my case in Georgia, the CD was deemed unable to be released to the citizen because somehow the Diebold source code cannot be inspected. (we all know why Diebold doesn't want us to discover their vote rigging code). The root cause, is that we’ve defined ballots as processes rather than define them as physical objects which we can photocopy, inspect, peruse or ultimately own. Elections are owned by citizens not corporations, election officials or states.

Lever machines, therefore, and their legal precedent, have the dubious honor of leading America, a country founded on it’s independence from a Royal ‘rigged’ monarchy, to another kind of ‘rigged monarchy’ which we currently see in the Bush dynasty. Worse, yet, the lever machines began a toxic rewrite of state based election code starting us down a trail of tears because it began redefining the ballot to a definition that violates the basic tenets of honest, citizen owned elections. This downward spiral is a precedent, I contend from which we cannot easily recover, and will likely take 20 years to sanitize and scrub state and federal statutes to rectify. Worse yet, HAVA as a federal legislative mandate had to rest on our citizen naivete to allow voting machines to make further inroads nationwide into our election system. The only silver lining is the activist community is winning, 2008 is the first year there was an actual decrease in the total votes happening on electronic voting machines.

Lever Machines – Historical Root Cause of Election Deception & Removing Citizen Ownership of US Elections
I am left finally to conclude, that lever machines were the very root cause of inaccurate US elections. Because lever machines break the chain of custody and may or may not have accurately captured the voter's intent, I have to ask the passionate activists why they defend the lever machine's right to exist on the currently dark landscape of our national election scene. Why exactly do smart activists continue to deprive citizens of their right to vote with such love of technology for technology sake? If Ireland and Denmark after spending millions on machines, have gone back to paper ballots and other US states grapple with the choice to go back to paper ballots, why can’t we use these examples to stop giving in to lever machines in exchange for getting rid of DREs when there is no functional difference between the 2 forms of flawed "ballot is a process" voting?

Finally, as a candidate who is running for the State Senate in Washington, who has an almost 80% voting public that chooses to vote by mail (which is unfortunate because of the chain of custody problems with the US mail, as well as with the election offices losing ballots due to bad ballot tracking procedures), I am still hopeful that at least I don’t have to fight the ballot as a process as I did in Georgia. I have swampland now instead of quicksand to fight. If I want to count the votes in my county, I can request copies of every single Optisccan filled out form, which is costly but still better than having nothing to count at all.

When you find yourself living in that American idealism believing in the honor of civil servitude, knocking on doors in 100 degree heat, as a candidate, you better believe entirely in the integrity of the ballots and the integrity of the vote counting process or else you feel personally committed to ensuring that the vote counting process is auditable, honest and accurate. You can bet King County, Washington Elections will be hearing from me before, during and after my campaign as I try to change the way we vote here in WA state.

I conclude with the title, but this time with emphasis and three exclamation points.

Lever Machines, DREs and Opticscans Should be entirely Banished from our Voting Landscape: Why? Because Ballots are Physical Objects Not Processes!!!

I fully support hand counted paper ballots, counted at precincts, in full view of citizens, election night and anything else is just settling for election integrity disaster.

Phyllis Huster
Candidate for Washing State Senate, 5th Legislative District Phyllis@phyllisforsenate.com
www.phyllisforsenate.com
425.736.6644

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