Today's ballot marking devices undermine the need to retain a paper record that can be used in audits and recounts. The industry is virtually unregulated, even though election technology was designated critical infrastructure in January 2017. Federal certification guidelines are 15 years old, and are only voluntary. The voting machine vendors have rigorously resisted the public disclosure of third party testing of their systems.
Even where paper ballots exist, now in a majority of states, they counted by optical scanners. These are computers programs just like the DRE machines, by private companies using software that is not subject to public inspection. These scanners are also easily hacked and vulnerable to both fraud and error. They must be checked by an aggressive manual public audit of the paper ballots on election night.
Where paper ballots exist, we must demand that local election clerks allow them to be counted by hand before they leave the precinct. We must organize citizen volunteer groups and establish legislation, to gives the right to count the votes at the local level. We must have citizens file injunctions to impound ballots, memory cards and voting machines after the polls close. This will prevent tampering with any items after the election, and give us access to them with a secure chain of custody.
The Republican controlled senate has refused to take up bills that would require voter-verifiable paper trails and require certifiable post election audits. Republicans say the federal government should not impinge on states' authority to oversee elections.
Our faith based elections are the result of a new Dark Age in American democracy, brought to us paradoxically by technological advances, and by the corrupt corporate oligarchy, and The Pentagon and CIA that cravenly does its bidding.
The unreliability of new digital technology, when combined with new Election Day domination of a few secretive CIA "cut out" corporations with Pentagon based interlocking directorates and ownership, makes anyone asking if our elections are fair, gratuitous.
The very idea of computers and artificial intelligence has given humans the cover to avoid accountability by kidding ourselves that computer networks and voting machines can take on more and more of our own responsibilities. Digital information gleaned from computers and voting machines, are after all, is just people in disguise. In this way digital modernity represents as sort of soft, cryptic blackmail, and shell game. Once we become accustomed to having an artificial, computer driven information service, our cognitive styles and capacities become unconsciously shaped by the availability of that service.
The recent breakdowns in the real outcomes of elections and the veracity of our votes cast, can be seen as symptoms of a false hope, that information technology can make promises on its own, without people, without verifiable results, without judgement.
Michael Bloomberg's abrupt exit from the 2020 presidential primary race cleared the path for Joe Biden who had gathered a surge of anti-Trump energy in the Democratic Party, to block the progressive movement of Senator Bernie Sanders.
After the disappointing Super Tuesday primaries, where the public was not allowed to verify the vote totals or demand a recount, Bernie Sanders progressive campaign and a rejection of the billionaire class and Wall Street predatory banking was marginalized once again. Instead Mr. Bloomberg and the Democratic Party establishment rallied around Mr. Biden, rigging the primary against what over 70 percent of Democratic voters wanted: a progressive agenda: Medicare for All, free college education, and a green new deal, and a progressive proportional tax system.
Biden received last minute pre- Super Tuesday support from such rivals as Beto O'Rourke, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg, who received a persuasive phone call from former President Barack Obama. The Big Tent Project, an outside "dark money" group backing moderate Democrats had been running anti-Sanders ads throughout the country. The Democratic Party's superdelegates had begun aligning themselves with Biden to block Sanders from securing the nomination at the July convention in Milwaukee.
Biden was running a campaign heavily supported by the corporate establishment, which was his past history. Biden had received funding from at least 60 billionaires, and corporate oligarchs, while the campaign of the progressive Sanders, had received more campaign contributions from more Americans, averaging $18.50, than any campaign in the history of our country.
Just as computer touch screen voting machines can be rigged by the use of private unaccountable software and optical scanners, so to can our primary elections when the political duopoly of power, both beholden to same corporate cash, and the monopoly power of the private computer voting machine companies that refuse to allow audits and recounts of the primary vote totals.
John Maynard Keynes, the great and prescient demand side economist, had seen the emergence of the computing machine called ENIAC. He was very concerned about its eventual computational power. He understood rightly, that judgement would become overwhelmed by efficiency. He stated, that "judgement is to capitalism, and democracy, what the secret police are to a totalitarian state. Without judgement, you will eventually have anarchy and worse."
A privatized, secretive ballot count must be regarded as a violation of our civil rights. If we the people, members of the new Peoples' Party, do not have righteous outrage, and courage to fight for our basic right of American self government, who will?
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