Bruce Funk, an elections official from Emery County Utah, was given bizarre, discrepant machines and told they were brand new. This led to a Black Box Voting study by Harri Hursti, which ended up exposing a “nuclear bomb” sized security hole. Funk was locked out of his office and fired for his efforts.
Ion Sancho, the Leon County Florida elections official who was blackballed by suppliers for participation in security testing, was called “reckless” by the vendors, who claimed that only they should do the testing.
Taking on the voting machine industry will always be called “inappropriate” while efforts are underway to keep vote-counting secret and block citizen oversight, but note that when voting rights are trampled, it can get to a point – as it did in the Battle of Athens – where taking up guns and firing shots over it becomes a thing of honor.
Until vote counting is once again done in public and with full public participation and oversight, we shouldn’t expect conflicts to go away.
Sabo chose a path that exposed problems with machines used by hundreds of thousands of citizens. He’s showing the backbone to take the heat for his decision, even though he has no means of income to pay the $2,500 fine invoked when he took this dramatic, and hey – “inappropriate” course of action. He’s not the first citizen to suffer some consequences in the fight to have a vote, and he probably won’t be the last.
WILL WE HEED THE WAKE-UP CALL?
We should view this as a wake-up call, a powerful sign of public discontent over visibly non-transparent, non-democratic and in all too many cases non-sane black box voting systems. Will we wait for the individual acts of outrage to grow into 1500 shots? A national uprising?
When you change the fundamental structures that are the very essence of citizen sovereignty, you create destabilization of the whole system. That is exactly what we have right now with private systems that count our votes in secret. And until the foundational checks and balances are fully restored, our election system will continue to produce casualties.
“If a political machine does not allow the people free expression, then freedom-loving people lose their faith in the machinery under which their government functions.
In this particular case [Battle of Athens], a group of young veterans organized to oust the local machine and elect their own slate in the primary. We may deplore the use of force but we must also recognize the lesson which this incident points for us all. When the majority of the people know what they want, they will obtain it.” – Eleanor Roosevelt (8)
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A note to our Angels: If you would like to help Anthony Sabo with the burden, which for him is crushing, of the $2,500 fine, contact Black Box Voting and we will put you in touch with the right people. Nancy Tobi will be burrowing her way into several official meetings this summer and needs help with travel expenses (and/or airline miles). We will provide you with her contact information if you can help. Offers of assistance can be by telephone (425) 793-1030, e-mail angels@blackboxvoting.org, or mailed to the address below.
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Thanks to attorney Paul Lehto for his analysis and framing of the voting rights issues, to Nancy Tobi for her amazing work untangling the testing and certification process, and to our own Jim March for doing the heavy lifting on Virginia WinVote certification problems, along with the historic framing of the issue through the Battle of Athens.
Footnotes
(1) Woodland Tea Party: The Colorado Springs Gazette, May 20, 2004, “Voting stunt gets 10 days” by Jeremy Meyer
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