The bottom line goal of Black Box Voting is to restore the civil right of every citizen to authenticate the fairness and accuracy of each step of the election. Then, we need to nurture citizen oversight and keep it in place. We don't think the grass roots momentum is great enough (yet) to achieve this.
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By Black Box Voting, Bev Harris, Kathleen Wynne and Jim March
The reason Black Box Voting could not support HR 550 was because the very nature of the bill, we believe, tends to undermine civil rights - and civil rights is not an area where it is wise to accept compromise.
HR 550 would institutionalize a half-measure that we will then have to lobby to undo. It attempts to "fix" a problem without ever vetting out how it became a problem in the first place.
There are other solutions that better protect our civil rights.
Black Box Voting insists on the ability for ordinary citizens to oversee and authenticate elections. This requires tools, evidence, procedures and consequences to help citizen oversight become the norm in this country.
The right of ALL citizens must be preserved such that ANY citizen can authenticate the election. This fundamental right must apply to 100 percent of the ballots and must not be ceded over to any government agent, private corporation, scientist, statistician, or group.
In order to accept that our votes actually represent our voice, the citizenry needs to verify for themselves that one hundred percent of the votes were counted accurately. Any member of the citizenry must be able to verify that:
- Every voter who registers will show up on the rolls (with no imaginary voters on the rolls)
- Every registered voter has a convenient way to vote
- Every voter who has voted had their vote count as it was cast
Independent citizen oversight requires both tools and consequences. If the tools are withheld -- such as public records needed to audit the vote -- or if the act of voting is obstructed or overwritten, citizens need to be able to invoke consequences. This is not on the table yet.
Some say this is a shift in thinking, but it actually represents a shift BACK to the original intent. When we counted paper ballots at the precincts, every citizen could watch and oversee. We lost this basic civil right. It was taken from us without public notice and without our permission.
Thus, the massive shift is needed to RETURN our original rights, not to get new ones. When it comes to the fundamental civil right to verify the correctness of our own elections, EVERY CITIZEN MUST REMAIN EQUAL - whether you are a carpenter, a lawyer, the UPS delivery person or a retired grandmother.
Black Box Voting prefers to call those who take action "citizens" rather than the using the current terminology, "activists."
We should view our elections watchdog actions as ownership. We are the owners of this country and as such, must actively manage its affairs. Being an American citizen requires taking responsibility.
We've gotten great responses from citizens wanting to find their own voices. This is one of the reasons why the focus at Black Box Voting is on teaching citizens to use their voices independently. We are constantly amazed at the cleverness, innovation and effectiveness of citizens in making positive changes single-handedly.
Some say sure, teach people to use their voice but it's more important to make sure there is consensus.
We disagree. The American spirit is founded on both individual and collective genius. It becomes dangerous to democracy when issues are removed from debate or dissenters are marginalized due to a goal of "making sure there is consensus."
The bottom line goal of Black Box Voting is to restore the civil right of every citizen to authenticate the fairness and accuracy of each step of the election. Then, we need to nurture citizen oversight and keep it in place. We don't think the grass roots momentum is great enough (yet) to achieve this.
How can we achieve the public will to restore real citizen oversight? Only by publicly exposing evasions and misrepresentations in full view of the American public will this happen. The bipartisan Watergate hearings need to be our model.
What has happened with our voting machines involved bribery, false claims, and corruption. What happened to our elections has been just as corrosive as Watergate. This issue is infested with cash, cronyism and shoddy oversight.
Citizens long to hear the tough questions they are asking get asked by their representatives in formal hearings. The way it is now, taxpayers feel exploited. When the truth is exposed publicly, the will to restore meaningful citizen oversight will be strengthened and we can set about making new law.
HR 550 puts the cart before the horse. It puts the solution before the
investigation. It papers over the crumbling of our election integrity with a quick fix. It's wrongheaded.
If properly prepared (and if truly fearless questions are asked) public
investigative hearings using the power of subpoena and testimony under oath will generate evidence that will quickly galvanize public opinion.
The public needs to see exactly how this came to be. Citizens need to see the fraudulent claims made by vendors or testing labs. People want to expose the requirements that were circumvented. Everyone wants to learn more about the money trail behind this. We need to examine wastefulness in government spending on defective voting machines. We realize that asking questions about these
things will not be well received on the federal level, but we have great confidence that it is achievable at the state level. Even if held on a state level, the implications will be national in scope and closely watched by citizens and the media. The results of additional hearings have the potential to be momentous.
Mistrust in the election system is real, it eats away at democracy, and it is caused by what citizens perceive to be nonresponsive government. Citizens are hungry for evidence that their representatives care enough to demand accountability from those who spend taxpayer money. When citizens learn that they have been misled, they need the reassurance that their representatives are
looking out for them. That's how we will get the necessary grass roots support for real reform.
This -- and citizens helping gather evidence to make the case -- is what Black Box Voting would like to see as a next step - not a dog and pony show, as many feel the Carter-Baker hearings were, but a series of genuine, tough-minded, no-free-passes hearings by well prepared senators and representatives. Senator Bowen of California proved it can be done.
Waking people up is still our first order of business. We don't think enough people are outraged.
In the short run, citizens can put their outrage and commitment to work by gathering more evidence. Black Box Voting will release a citizen's tool kit for this on August. 1, 2006.
It is very clear that to a great degree, election integrity is controlled
locally. When you get a bad apple, it spoils the local barrel and then the rotten barrel becomes accessible for exploitation on a state or national level. By cobbling together the rotten barrels, large scale election manipulation is becoming more and more feasible. We don't look at election integrity as a presidential issue. At Black Box Voting, we believe that you have to clean up the local rotten barrels or election mistrust on a presidential scale will just keep recurring.
Because we at Black Box Voting do a lot of field work and we often end up in the most troubled locations, it has become clear to us that problems of election integrity are truly nonpartisan. Put simply, the problem is crooks, not politics. It's ethics, not issues, and no one political party owns integrity.
If we make election reform a partisan issue, we cut the pool of involved good citizens by two-thirds. If we make it about the presidency, we miss what's really going on to strip rights away from citizens at the local level. And through a nonpartisan approach we can break the cycle of divisiveness and distrust between political groups.
There will be shifting alliances - that is entirely normal, and was a hallmark of the civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam War movement. There will be different ways of doing things, some more strident than others. But the genius of democracy is in its diversity. It's messy, but stable.
The process of opening communications between different components of the election reform ecosystem may feel messy, at first, but in the long run will create a more stable and powerful election reform movement.
Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
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"We're counting the votes. Get over it."
Be part of the solution: Please sign up for the NATIONAL HAND COUNT REGISTRY:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-profile.cgi?action=register
Make November elections the biggest evidence gathering action ever. EVIDENCE =
videotape, audiotape and photos. Come prepared. This time, focus on the
COUNTING not just the voting.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
How to get started: Just ask a question about taking action on your elections:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/73.html
Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c(3) elections watchdog group
funded entirely by citizen donations.
To support our work, go to
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or mail
to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St Suite K
PMB 547
Renton WA 98055
Submitter: Joan Brunwasser
Submitters Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html
Submitters Bio:
Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.
Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.
When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.
While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"
Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.