BF: Clearly the problem isn't in just the three states, but is in the entire system. In reality, the so-called battleground states are only close because of the massive stripping of the voter rolls of black, minority and poor voters. In addition to that, a racist and politically-motivated war on drugs has eliminated many black male and minority voters.
My co-author Harvey Wasserman and I wrote about this in our book "The Strip and Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft." At the core of our system is this new Jim Crow that allows states to purge black and minority voters in unconstitutional ways and get away with it. They know they have to strip the vote, deregister people of color, so they can make the election close enough to get away with flipping it.
In my state of Ohio, Secretary of State Jon Husted purged 1 million voters in the run-up to the 2016 election. If voting were a constitutional right and if the state was obligated to register its citizens to vote, as they do under the European Union Constitution, the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio wouldn't be battleground states.
I agree with what President Jimmy Carter told Der Spiegel, the US is a dysfunctional democracy.
Vote purging is more widespread now than it was in 1965 when we passed the Voting Rights Act. None of these states would have needed to be recounted if we had universal registration and it was a constitutional right. The vote would not have been close.
Another problems is the lock that the two major political parties have over this dysfunctional democracy. We need to desperately hear other voices and elect other people -- be they Green, Libertarian, or others.
JB: Carter was right on target with his remarks. Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up? How can people follow the progress of the recount/s? Do you still need funding for Pennsylvania? What else do we need to know?
BF: One thing I'd like to point out is that there is already a system that counts scanned ballots with open source software. It is used in Humboldt County, California. It's called the Trachtenberg system. The key is to get rid of proprietary software as a first step and allow only open source software controlled by the government, not private companies, until we can move to hand counted paper ballots.
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