If we had ballot images posted in every election, elections would be much, much harder to steal. Until then, establishment incumbents will be declared winners and nothing will ever change. Think of how different this country would look today if Ron Paul had won the Republican nomination in 2012, or if Bernie Sanders had been declared the winner of the Democratic nomination in 2016. Full transparency. That's all we're saying.

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My guest today is Ralph Lopez, who writes for OpEdNews and other political websites, is an activist for election integrity, and author of Peace Moon Over Afghanistan.

Joan Brunwasser: Welcome to OpEdNews, Ralph. You posted an interesting political article recently: Ocasio-Cortez Primary Upset in New York Shows Wisdom of State's Voting System, No Matter What Party You Are In. There's a lot to talk about but our readers may need a bit of background before we jump in. Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and what's so special about her?

Ralph Lopez: Hi, Joan, happy to be here. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a 28 year-old community activist who just threw Washington into a tizzy by unseating Joe Crowley, a powerful, 10-term incumbent in a Democratic primary, and a strong candidate for next Speaker of the House. This shouldn't be unusual, but it is. Entrenched incumbents of either party get primary challenges all the time but they never seem to go anywhere. Why?

Many election transparency activists, of which I am one, feel that a number of factors came into play, and the most important of these was that a way has been found to keep the vote counting honest, at least with the kind of vote-counting machines that are in use across the entire state of New York.

JB: What's so different about New York, Ralph? What have they been able to accomplish that other states have not?

RL: Good question. It turns out that New York, and many other states, use a kind of vote counting machine that takes a picture - a digital image - of each paper ballot as it is fed into the machine. This allows citizens later to count the votes for themselves, after these images are posted online, or burned onto a DVD or some other accessible medium. In Alexandria's race, there was a very real danger that the vote-count could be hacked, and no one would ever find out. With the ballot images out there, people could find out. Ironically, activists like myself have been trying to get access to these images for the past two years since the 2016 presidential election, and election departments don't seem to want to cooperate. So what are they hiding?

In Arizona, in Ohio, in Alabama, election departments have balked at releasing the ballot images. That tells me we're on the right track. And we are. In Florida just this year, in a primary between a Bernie Sanders-type reformer and the incumbent, Hillary Clinton protege Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Schultz won, but the results were fishy. So what does the Broward County election department do when the loser, Tim Canova, sues to examine the paper ballots? They destroy the ballots*. The fact is we now don't know who in Congress really belongs there. Was really elected. Or put in by the powers that be. We have a case of the establishment perpetuating itself.

JB: I read about Canova's case. And, as in other, similar cases, absolutely nothing happens to the officials who wantonly destroy ballots and any other evidence. What does that say about our current system? Let's circle back to Alexandria's race for a moment. Were the digital images actually available to be scrutinized? We know in the past, that although we have paper ballots, there continue to be many obstacles to accessing them, let alone counting them. Please tell us more.

RL: The images of the ballots were not posted, but they would have been subject to a Freedom of Information Act Request, had Alexandria lost and suspicious patterns been found in the voting data, as it was in Tim Canova's race. That's what triggered Tim's lawsuit to view the paper ballots, before Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes illegally destroyed them. I think the threat of citizens demanding to see the digital images was enough to keep Alexandria's election honest - just my opinion. Election activists have been fighting and winning court battles over the right to view these images, in states like Arizona and Alabama, so election officials are now aware that "we the people" are aware of the images.

And you are exactly right, election officials can raise all kinds of obstacles to people accessing the paper ballots, mishandling by untrained citizens, the cost of overtime for election workers to conduct hand recounts. But with the digital images, they don't have a leg to stand on. There is no good reason to hide these unless you are doing something wrong. That's why we think a movement to have these images publicly posted after each election could usher in a revolutionary new era in election transparency, and we'd see fresh faces in Congress as a result of honest, transparent vote-counting. Tim Canova's race ripped the lid off the dirty little secret to how some of these incumbents stay in power. They cheat.

JB: This line of thought begets many questions. Which types of voting machines generate digital images? How common are they? Which states use them? And how does it work exactly? If I vote anonymously, as we all do, how can I know that the digital image/s represent my actual vote? I'm assuming that's not what this is all about. Can you give us a brief tutorial, so we can better grasp this important concept?

RL: Approximately half of all US voting jurisdictions already use the kind of machines which generate digital images of voter hand-marked paper ballots, but only Maryland and New York have them in use across the board, in every part of the state. Voter hand-marked paper ballots are absolutely superior to any other voting system, because the way each voter fills in the bubbles is unique, especially at the microscopic pixel level. It's like a signature, everyone's hand-mark is slightly different.

The way it works is, after you have filled in the bubbles for your choices with the Sharpie, and you feed it into that slot that sucks the ballot in, and at that moment, in a fraction of a second, the machine takes a digital image of that ballot, and a random number is printed across the bottom of the ballot that matches the number assigned to the image. It's like an office scanner but much faster. Now you have the permanent record of the anonymous ballot, and a high resolution image of that ballot. The ballot images can be posted online for people to count for themselves. The makers of these machines have been touting this feature as a way of auditing the vote count, without touching the paper ballots. If something comes up off-total, then you know the counting software is faulty, or might have been hacked.

The real count in any election is what the paper ballots say, not what the machine says. If a total is off, that's when it's time to access the paper ballots and do a hand-count. As it stands, accessing the paper ballots after an election anywhere is nearly impossible, and requires a judge's order, and judges are part of the system too. Look at the trouble Jill Stein had getting hand counts of the paper ballots in key states in the 2016 election, even when she could raise $7 million to pay for them. Even then, they didn't get a full hand recount of every precinct.

What is really frightening is that some states are now considering moving to machines by which votes are recorded through a touch-screen device. That's okay for persons with a disability that prevents them from hand-marking a paper ballot, and there aren't many of these votes. But to use them as a general rule is two steps backwards. Any touch screen device can be hacked to make the vote count come up whatever you want, and you don't have the dual record of the unique, hand-marked paper ballot and its image to put the lie to the hacked count.

You asked which machines meet the requirements we are talking about. To the best of my knowledge, right now those are the ES&S (Election Systems and Software) DS200, the ES&S DS850, the Dominion ImageCast Precinct and ImageCast Central, the Hart Intercivic Verity Scan and Verity Central, and the Unisyn Voting OpenElect OVO. Anyone can go to terrific website called VerifiedVoting.organd see exactly what kind of machines are in use in their county!

JB: NY and MD, where all the machines generate digital images, are outliers. For the other 48 states, even if they consult the digital images when available, it's not uniform because not all votes are captured that way. What happens then? As you pointed out, getting an actual look at the paper ballots, let alone digital images, has been made all but impossible, if not illegal.

RL: Yes, NY and MD are outliers, in that they are the only states which have 100% voter hand-marked paper ballots, counted by late-model optical scan vote counting machines which make and store digital images of each ballot. But the good news is that a nationwide, hack-proof, transparent vote counting system is really within reach, because around half of US counties and cities already use the right kind of machine. It's just not standardized across every state. This is where citizen awareness and lobbying come in.

Citizens should be demanding, and it's important to get the wording right, to have 100% voter hand-marked paper ballots, counted by machines which generate high resolution images of the ballots. It's important because there are many ways to easily go off-track and wind up with a system that was worse than before. Tulsi Gabbard has a bill out for election reform, but it's terrible, because it allows touch screen machines and makes no mention of ballot images. Any touch screen system, except for disability, should be outlawed. So should any system which does not even generate a paper record of any kind, like they still use in South Carolina. Think of it, South Carolina is a critical early presidential primary state, where campaigns pick up or lose momentum that affects the rest of the presidential primaries. Yet it is totally opaque, unaccountable, and hackable. Maybe that's exactly why it's an early primary. It's the place to stop non-establishment candidates in their tracks, like a Bernie Sanders or a Ron Paul. And that's exactly what happened to both in South Carolina.

Voter hand-marked paper ballots, counted by machines which generate high resolution images of the ballots. Then, you post these images for the general public to crowd-source count, if you will, to verify the vote counts. This would be easy. Another thing: early mail-in voting should be kept to a minimum, only for good reason like deployment or absence. If you really want your vote to count, make sure you see it go into the box yourself. Hundreds of ballots lying around in an office for a week is a recipe for mischief.

JB: Very true.

RL: Then, you might see a lot more candidates, like Ocasio-Cortez, winning primaries against powerful incumbents like Joe Crowley, among the hardest thing to do in politics. Why? Are these dinosaurs really that popular? Are people really that resistant to change? Maybe not. Because we never get to see the paper ballots, we never really know who won. Our entire system to date has been based on trust in election officials, and trust that the machines are not hackable. In the last two years, both these assumptions have been blown out of the water. It's time for full transparency in vote-counting, and secure chain of custody. No more election officials moving boxes of ballots around in the middle of the night, and asking us to take their word for who won. Folks interested in learning more should go to www.auditelectionsusa.org.

JB: Thanks for explaining all this. I don't know about our readers but this is still not very clear to me. Everyone votes. The machines which count the votes produce, at the same time that they're counting, a high-resolution digital ballot image. Correct so far? I don't see how posting a bunch (or millions for that matter) of ballot images is going to give anyone a sense of whether any monkey business went on with the ballots. Can you flesh that out for us a bit?

RL: Absolutely. So you've marked your ballot, filled in the bubbles with the Sharpie. You walk it over to the box, and either you or the election worker feeds it into the slot of the box that holds the paper ballots. It sucks it in, kind of the way your bills get sucked into an automated cash-counting machine at the drugstore, which then spits out your change. At that moment, while it is going into the slot, the vote-counting machine does two things. It "reads" the votes through optical scan technology, and adds them to the tallies for the candidates, and at the same time it takes a digital picture of the ballot, and stores that image in memory.

The image is in a standard digital format like a jpeg image. Now, you have a digital image of every ballot that went into that box. The problem has been, it has been proven very easy to hack the vote count, so that the machine's software is, for example, subtracting a vote from a candidate when it should be adding one. Or adding extra votes to a certain candidate. One for you, one for me, one for you, two for me, that sort of thing. If the ballot images for every precinct are posted, anyone can go in and count the votes for themselves and expose these kinds of shenanigans. If the official number released says that candidate "A" got 100 votes, but you only count 80 from the ballot images, then that indicates the counting software may have been hacked. This has been proven easy to do time and time again. That would justify demanding that the election commission access the paper ballots and do a hand count. As it stands, that discrepancy would have gone unnoticed, and perhaps the wrong candidate may have been declared the winner.

Does this happen? If it doesn't, then why do election departments constantly do everything in their power to prevent hand recounts? This happened in the 2016 presidential election between Trump and Hillary, when Jill Stein tried, unsuccessfully, to get full hand recounts of critical swing states, especially Wisconsin and Michigan, where the results said Trump won.

Why did the Broward County election commissioner take the blatantly illegal step of destroying the paper ballots, in the Democratic primary race between Tim Canova, a Bernie Sanders protege, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Clinton ally? If we had ballot images posted in every election, elections would be much, much harder to steal. Until then, I think the same old establishment incumbents will be declared winners until they decide to retire, and nothing will ever change. Think of how different this country would look today if, say, Ron Paul had won the Republican nomination in 2012, or if Bernie Sanders had been declared the winner of the Democratic nomination in 2016. All indications are that Sanders would have easily beaten Trump. Full transparency in vote-counting. That's all we're saying.

JB: Over the years, every time there has ever been a report about a "glitch" or "hitch" or abnormality, election officials as well as the press have hastened to reassure us and say that there's no evidence that the vote tally was affected or that the outcome was changed. This includes officials, elected representatives of both parties, the media and even the possibly 'wronged' candidates themselves. Despite lots of evidence that election 'glitches' were rampant, first Gore in 2000 and then Kerry in 2004 quickly conceded, leaving millions of concerned voters in the lurch with no assurances that the election had been conducted properly or that the vote count was accurate.

The media has studiously avoided any serious investigations, despite the numerous hacks by computer experts, including the DefCon Conventionin July 2017* where, in less than a day, they exposed serious vulnerabilities in all five voting machines they targeted. The average voter must bite the bullet and acknowledge, however sadly, that we live in a cheating society and that elections are the jackpot for players attempting to game the system for their own advantage, be they corporations, lobbyists, dark money donors, foreign governments, fanatics with an agenda, voting machine insiders or candidates and their teams who simply don't trust the system and who believe that the ends justify the means. How do we overcome the massive psychological resistance to even contemplating that our elections are broken and that without transparency, we have no reason to trust the results?

RL: Very good question, and this is where I see an opportunity arising that we didn't have before, in that over the last couple of years, election-hacking has really been on the front page. It doesn't matter if one thinks the Russians did it, or someone else. The one thing people seem to agree on now, is that it's possible to hack elections, and you have many parties with all kinds of motives to do so. Just the US federal budget is nearly $5 trillion, a lot of that going to contractors for the defense department, HUD, transportation, etc. Then you have the tax code and regulations that no one understands, buried in millions of pages of government documents for the benefit of a small number of players.

It is truly an enormous jackpot of money which is at stake, depending who wins or loses key elections. The only thing that's really hard to believe is that some people WOULDN'T hack certain elections if they could. Now, we have this confluence of technology, meaning ballot images, and awareness which finally might push this issue to the fore. But it is so very, very important that people know what they want and can demand it of the politicians, because they [the politicians] are so slick at making something that looks like a reform when really it is worse than what we had before. Voter hand-marked, paper ballots counted by modern optical scan machines which take ballot images, then post those images online, or burn them onto a DVD. Minimum early voting or vote by mail. Secure chain of custody. Again, folks can study all this at AuditElectionsUSA.org.

Short of hand-counting all paper ballots in public view everywhere, which isn't going to happen anytime soon, this is the most promising path to restoring democracy, which even Jimmy Carter says we no longer have.

JB: Yes, all the publicity could prove to be good for raising concern and awareness. And Carter's not the only one who's worried. Let's backtrack for a minute. I know that you don't live in New York State, Ralph, so this Ocasio-Cortez race wasn't in your backyard. You couldn't even vote in that one.. How did you become a self-proclaimed 'election transparency activist' in your home state and beyond?

RL: Energized is a good word. You don't think much about elections, if you think they are generally fair within the parameters of what we know about them. We know cheating is American as apple pie. Vote early vote often, Richard Daley said, the Mayor of Chicago and one of the old time political bosses. He wasn't really joking. LBJ famously stole votes in Texas to become US Senator. But we thought it was the exception, and honest-enough elections the rule. I got energized when I realize this was not the case. And we are talking about important elections. In 2004, the whole world watched to see if we would re-elect George Bush, after he invaded Iraq. It was like a referendum of approval. And though Bush was declared the winner, there is strong evidence that he stole the key swing state of Ohio. Anybody can google this for themselves and, in five minutes, have plenty of good info.

So now, many people hated not only Bush. They hated Americans. We got a rap we didn't deserve. Fast forward to Bernie Sanders versus Hillary Clinton, and it is clear that Sanders really won. People disappeared off the voting lists in New Yorkand Arizona, and in California they got caught erasing Bernie votes with white out. There were shenanigans in state after state. Anybody can research this too.

Think of what a different country it would be if either John Kerry, or someone like Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders had been elected president. And it's always blamed on the American people, for not knowing their own best interests. But maybe they have been voting for their best interests all along, whether you are coming from the left or the right. And they've been getting robbed.

JB: Thanks so much for talking with me, Ralph. It's been an education!

***

*Tim Canova and the illegally destroyed ballots by Brenda Snipes, the Broward County [FL] Supervisor of Elections in his closely contested 2016 race against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her seat in House of Representatives. Read more here.

Was Sanders (and the country) robbed? Many sources think so, here's one ; here's another[Newsweek].

DefCon 2018:

Coverage before convention:

As DefCon Begins, Child Hackers Ready to Crack US Voting Systems (Because Adult Hackers Find It Just Too Easy)

Coverage after convention:

PBS:: An 11-year-old changed election results on a replica Florida state website in under 10 minutes

New Yorker: Election-Hacking Lessons from the 2018 Def Con Hackers Conference

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors 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.