Real paper ballots are pieces of paper with candidate names printed on them in legible human-readable letters. Voters mark an "X" in the box next to the name of the candidate of their choice. Real paper ballots are quite a different animal from Florida 2000's paper component of a computerized system.
When real paper ballots are used and counted by real human beings, voter intent is not so difficult to discern. With more than 200 years of case law and procedures for discerning voter intent, in New Hampshire you never see anyone staring at a punchcard through a magnifying glass, as we saw in innumerable Florida 2000 news reports.
More than two hundred years of accurate, effective and reliable hand count elections provides a historical memory for Granite State residents and election officials to see what is going on behind the smoke and mirrors of 21st century election reform.
The problem with the ballots in Florida 2000 was they were intentionally produced on defective paper, and those ballots, designed for computers to read, were confusing to human voters.
HAVA legislative magicians distracted the nation with hanging chads, and then pulled e-voting out of their hats. Voila. America's elections were transformed in the blink of an eye.
Election Reform Alchemy: From "Right to Vote" to "Opportunity to Verify a Voting Machine"
The cornerstone of the K Street-spawned HAVA is elections designed to technology rather than voter needs. This continues to this day in nearly every piece of post-HAVA proposed federal election reform.
Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the now normative vocabulary of election reform: "verifiable voting."
HAVA states that a voting system must "permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted." (21)
Let's think about this for a minute.
If a voter has just marked a paper ballot with pen or pencil, marking an "X" next to his candidate's name, why does he then need to "verify" his choice?
He doesn't. A voter only needs to "verify" his vote when it has been marked and/or counted by a computer.
HAVA was written to pay for and ensure the use of computerized voting nationwide, even down to the terminology used to define voters' rights.
In HAVA alchemy, our Constitutional right to vote is transformed into the opportunity to verify a voting machine's vote. Many election reformers now believe that giving voters the opportunity to verify voting machines, and election officials the opportunity to audit their machines equates to the right to vote.
Indeed, the verifiable voting movement has spawned an entire cottage industry of election reform-minded computer scientists and statisticians, devising elaborate protocols to support the "verifiability" and "auditability" of technology-based elections.
Verifiable voting is turning voters and election officials into quality control agents for the e-voting industry.
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