WHO'LL STOP THE TRAIN (WRECK)? Reject Theft-Enabling Voting Computers

A New York Story About Irresponsible Voting Vendors, Irresponsible Legislators, Irresponsible Election Commissioners and:

You Choose the Ending (a) the Irresponsible Citizens Who Did Nothing or (b) the Responsible Citizens Who Fought Back

Forward

The Legislature is responsible for ensuring that our electoral system is secure, reliable and safe. Our Legislature in New York, knowing nothing, passed the buck, authorizing the State Board of Elections (SBOE) to test the two different types of computers offered by the same few vendors and decide which machines should be made available for the individual county election commissioners to choose for their respective counties. The SBOE Commissioners, with one exception, are not familiar with the studies and reports which reveal that there are no secure, reliable or safe computerized voting systems. They have exhibited no consideration for what is required in a democratic election system and have no idea how computers can be rigged by insiders and outsiders to steal an entire election. And yet our legislators and the SBOE insist we must have these privately owned and controlled computers. The county election commissioners are similarly ignorant. The Governor has inherited this nightmare, but has to date taken no action to protect New Yorkers against the fraud these vendors, with the complicity of our public officials, intend to perpetrate.

Since We the People own this government and since democracy is only as good as the people who care enough to make it work, I thought I'd share this with You The Citizen, in the hope that you would figure out what you might do to preserve our democracy. Please keep in mind that if our electoral system becomes so insecure that you don't know whether your vote has been counted, that is the end of democracy. Unless you can see the process of how a vote is cast and counted, you just don't know how the votes were counted.

You can't see inside computers which we know can be readily manipulated without detection. Touch-screen DREs are impossible to ever verify no matter how many paper trails you attach to the other end of this corrupt machine. Paper Ballot Optical Scanners (PBOSs) are equally corruptible, but if we had laws that required a hand count of a sufficient number of the paper ballots and if we had laws which permitted the citizens to also see the ballot images taken by the optical scanners, at least we could see some of what was happening. Of course we don't need non-transparent computers doing a job we are more than qualified to do, for less money and with far greater security: We could just count the paper ballots ourselves and then we'd be able to observe the entire process from start to finish so we'd know are votes were being accurately counted.

But this piece isn't about the requirements of a democratic electoral system: No one in New York is even thinking about something like that. This piece is about how shoddy and untrustworthy the voting computers are; how irresponsible the voting vendors, politicians and election officials are; and how responsible you need to be while there's still time.

When products are made so unsafe and so defective that they cannot perform the function they are intended to perform (in this case voting machines that are capable of accurately recording and counting votes), those products are supposed to be recalled. Dozen of studies have shown that these voting computers are incapable of providing for a safe and reliable election because aside from a myriad of other problems, anytime a computer scientist (or a competently skilled child) gets her/his hands on one, the machine is hacked in a matter of minutes. Rather than rejecting these error-prone, vulnerable machines New York - the only state in the Union not to have purchased computerized voting systems for its citizens- is planning on doing just that.

What if the government in New York decided to purchase one automobile per family. Let's say it was considering the Ford Pinto, even though it had already been revealed that the Pinto would explode upon impact. And to make this fully analogous to the current situation with computerized voting systems, let's say that dozens of studies had confirmed that the Pinto is too unsafe to drive. If New York State, notwithstanding that evidence, was still going to buy one of these vehicles for your family, what would you do?

Don't let your government buy these unsafe machines for us. The piece below is redrafted from a letter I sent to various members of our NYS government. Please read this and do what you think you should.