But I had to step away from that position. Because optical scan technology, like the touch screens, keeps the count itself secret and proprietary. Citizens and candidates are denied access to the count, even when the computers perform such bizarre tabulations as were seen in Florida 2000's negative vote count for candidate Gore.
Corporate controlled, trade secret optical scanners, like their touchscreen brothers, turn public votes into privatized election data.
Democratic Elections: Core Principles
Many voting activists continue to fight for optical scanners. But the fight for verifiable voting is, in fact, nothing more than a fight to continue the outsourcing of our elections to private corporations using secret vote counting technologies.
To fight for verifiable voting is to perpetuate the subversion of our democratic elections. Secret vote counting is the antithesis of democracy. When you rationalize the use of secret vote counting in America, you ignore the core principles of democratic elections as defined by the Founders. These core principles define democratic elections as those with citizen controls, that are publicly owned and operated, in which the entire voting system (with the exception of the secret ballot) is fully observable. You can not inject privately controlled secret vote counting into this equation. It does not add up.
I recently asked a national organization supporting voting rights through legal action to help eliminate privatized secret vote counting in New Hampshire. My appeal was rejected because New Hampshire uses paper ballots and optical scanners, and they would never take a case that "prosecutes optical scanners" when they were fighting to replace touch screen machines with optical scanners in so many other parts of the nation.
That same organization sent observers to the New Hampshire 2008 Primary recount, and one has to wonder if they still believe quite as strongly in the myth of verified voting after that experience.
In New Hampshire, many officials and politicians point to the state's accessible recounts to justify the use of secret vote counting technology to count 84% of New Hampshire votes on election night. This is just another manifestation of the myth of verified voting. The logic behind this is that it is somehow excusable to allow secret vote counting on election night because, theoretically, you can always count the paper ballots by hand in a recount. But how does this play out in real life?
In the 2008 Primary recount, as the verified voting teams launched their NH recounts, the citizen voting rights activists decided to test the core principles of democratic elections. National activists came to New Hampshire to observe the recount, focusing on the ballot chain of custody, as the paper ballots were transported from New Hampshire cities and towns to the state capital for the recount. After all, they reasoned, what good is "verifying" the vote, if you can't be sure the vote you are verifying is the actual vote that had been cast on election night?
What the citizen observers discovered was that verifiable voting is as mythological as the unicorn. They discovered they could not, in fact, verify that the votes being verified were the votes that had been cast on election night because there was virtually no oversight on the ballot chain of custody. Boxes of ballots had to be delivered from cities and towns to a central location for the recount. But the state did not allow for citizen controls at all in this process. (xviiii)
The state obstructed citizen observation of the ballot deliveries by transporting the ballots in state vehicles at high speeds that eluded their citizen chaperones. The state delivered the ballots under cover of darkness preventing citizen oversight. The state utilized K-9 police units with fiesty barking police dogs to prevent citizens from approaching as ballots were unloaded from state vehicles to the centralized recount location. And the state broke its own law by not providing secure ballot containers to the cities and towns, resulting in ballots being stored and transported in cardboard boxes, often broken open and unsealed, often cluttered with miscellaneous labels and writing, and for which it was impossible to detect whether or not any tampering might have occured.
And who's to say what might have occured with those torn and abused cardboard boxes of ballots in the days and weeks they were left unattended in the locked but unsecured closets of New Hampshire's old town halls?
The verified voting scenario in New Hampshire's 2008 Primary recount is starkly different from a real democratic election, such as those held in 45% of New Hampshire's polling places, where the votes are counted on election night, by hand, with at least one public observer for every one counter, using proper counting methods to reconcile all the numbers (number of voters checked in, number of ballots cast, number of uncast or spoiled ballots, number of blank ballots started with, etc.).
New Hampshire's e-voting proponents are dead wrong when they claim that verified voting rationalizes secret vote counting. The truth is, nothing rationalizes secret vote counting unless you want to have a form of government that is quite other than the democratic republic that is our American birthright.
Which brings us back to the core principles of democratic elections. Both the New Hampshire and the Massachusetts Constitutions, the two earliest constitutions in the nation, drafted by the nation's Founders and predating the United States Constitution, include a requirement to count the votes in open meeting. In open meeting. That means, where everyone can observe the count. Black box vote counting, where anonymous programmers working for private corporate interests, often with partisan ties, using proprietary trade secret technology, does not meet this constitutional requirement.
Verifiable voting is nothing more than a myth perpetuated by the e-voting industry and locked into place by K Street lobbyists. An audit, a recount, a computer receipt.... None of these are adequate substitutes for the right to vote and to have your vote counted publicly and fairly and honestly.
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