While the Ohio Court found that irregularities did occur in that election (like using uncertified software), the Court also found that Plaintiff failed to prove that these “irregularities affected enough votes to change or make uncertain the election results.” Franklin used uncertified, undetectably mutable software that fails to produce evidence of how the ballots were counted or evidence of fraud. Yet the court ruled against us.
Of Ohio’s four parallel elections (citizen-run paper ballot elections), I organized two of them - the last one covering a 4-precinct polling site with over 3,400 registered voters. We had 24 volunteers on our team that day, and national media covered us. Marj Creech served as spokesperson, and bloggers wrote about it. That was exhausting and exhilarating. I have to thank several special people: Marj, my comrade; Teresa Blakely and her husband, Len Samuelson; Lisa Vallieri and her mate, Mel; and especially Kal Palnicki, a long-time and stalwart supporter of all my efforts in Ohio.
What are you working on now?
Now, I’m focusing on New York, which smartly still uses a mechanical lever voting machine. NY is the only state in the nation to provide a transparent, easily secured voting system. (There are small jurisdictions around the nation that do manually count the ballots on election night in front of many watchers of different political faith; and I trust this method.) But in 2005, NY passed the Election Reform and Modernization Act (ERMA), which replaces levers with computers.
Since passage of ERMA, some 50-plus scientific studies have been published that reveal how easy it is to hack into these vulnerable software systems, producing results that are so unreliable that manual counts are required. Alternative media has continually reported the problems that several states incur when using software driven voting systems.
Given these new facts, as they came to light, NY never implemented computerized voting systems, and so the Dept. of Justice sued NY in 2006. I joined the fray as part of the 2007 amici team that resisted the DOJ's efforts. Now NY is under a 2008 court order to deploy them by 2009 in accord with their timeline. Yet NY is experiencing what the rest of the nation has already learned: software driven voting systems continue to fail in test after test.
Voters and taxpayers should ask, why bother using expensive, easily hacked, vote-counting devices when we have to manually count the ballots anyway? What really gets me about all this is the underhanded way our elections went from being fully and reliably counted to an audit that only samples a small percentage of all ballots cast. When and who decided we should stop reliably counting all the ballots? I cover this in more detail in Count Every Vote.
Attorney Andi Novick pulled me onto her team in NY, the Election Transparency Coalition, where we’re now gearing up for a legal contest. She lays out the case in her two-page summary of the Complaint. New York looks to me like the last battleground where US elections may be saved. Forty-nine other states hoodwink voters into believing they can secure a system that can be hacked remotely. Forty-nine other states have chosen the most expensive voting system ever devised, something taxpayers should think about when you consider that NY’s levers have lasted over 40 years.
So what’s your prognosis regarding election integrity?
“More people have been elected between sundown and sunup than ever were elected between sunup and sundown,” said Will Rogers. The only way we’re ever going to have honest elections is if citizens take over the process, simplify it (meaning, no software), and allow constant scrutiny by everyday people of all political faiths, or who are nonpartisan. No more favoring the two dominant parties. The ballots have to be counted on election night, at the polling site, before all who wish to observe, and the results announced immediately – before any precinct knows the results of any others.
NY has this set-up. What I learned under Andi’s tutelage was astonishing: prior to ERMA, New York protected the count from innumerable attacks, from insiders and outsiders, and insisted the count be fully completed on election night. Of course, every voting system can be hacked, but mechanical levers, along with all the laws and procedures NY enacted prior to ERMA, have convinced me this is one of the most, if not the most, secure voting system ever invented. To quote Professor Pfaffenberger, the nation’s foremost expert on levers:
[T]he lever machine deserves recognition as one of the most astonishing achievements of American technological genius, a fact that is reflected in their continued competitiveness against recent voting technologies in every accepted performance measure. With as many as 28,000 parts, their mechanisms reflect an agonizingly difficult period of development, spanning more than twenty years (1888-1919) in which interlocking mechanisms had to be developed that were capable of dealing with the enormous complexity and variety of American elections. The result was a machine that captures in its immutable mechanical operations the voting rules that the American people, in their wisdom, developed in order to capture the will of the people. (emphasis added)
Any final words of advice?
Get involved. In NY, we need bloggers, court jockeys, lobbyists, community liaisons, BOE buddies, pro-bono attorneys, fundraisers, event organizers and videographers. Check in at the ETC website for updates. The last battle has yet to be fought. The ship has not yet sailed. We need mass help to preserve election integrity in New York. Together, we can make the difference.
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