Lever machines are equated to DRE machines and Optiscan for creating inaccurate, unauditable elections because they all 3 redefine the ballot as a process when it should only ever been seen as an object.

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Why Banish Lever Machines along with DRE Machines?

An amazingly smart election activist and my personal heroine of the movement named Ginny sat in my apartment in Vinings, GA and along with 6 other Georgia election activists, dumped her 3 years of hard work and election integrity learnings on me as a way to prepare me for my debut as a future election integrity activist. It is Ginny’s philosophical genius about chain of custody and ballot integrity that guides my writing of this article. I therefore demand we as a community committed to election integrity, banish support for all DREs, Lever Machines and Optiscan and go back to simple hand counted paper ballots on election day (no vote by mail either) and return our country to truly representative government. I intend my arguments to be easy enough to comprehend for activists who support Lever machines to reconsider that support. Remember voter owned elections means the citizens own the ballots, but how can you get a copy of that ballot if the ballot is a process?

Are Ballots Objects or Processes?

We must first ask the question, is a ballot a physical object or is it a process?
I am clear that the ballot is a physical object and this notion is supported by federal and state constitutional definitions of a ballot. I will prove the ballot is a physical object thru triangulation of the definition of an absentee ballot and then use the Federal equal protection clause to assume normal ballots must also fit the same definition. According to the Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973ff et seq.), the definition of a ballot is:

A ballot marked and mailed in advance by a voter away from the place where he or she is registered.

This would indicate a ballot is an object that can be both marked and mailed, which would not be consistent with the definition of a ballot as being a process.

I would further seek activist commentary on the definition of a ballot by activists agreeing as below in a post on Black Box Voting by Hal Guentert:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/72/71702.html

“Many of you are better prepared to clarify the definition of the official ballot than I am, but I feel that this is a fundamental issue. It is also an issue that has not been clarified to the point of what an official ballot is, and equally, what it is not.

The ballot must not become the precursor, the pixels on a screen that vanish in the electronic ether right before our eyes. It must be a permanent ballot, an uneditable ballot, readable without a machine, and auditable to the point that there is a one voter (secret/announymous) to one ballot relationship.

The actual ballots should be physical, counted, and protected securely. They cannot be electronic, because electronic ballots are not physical, readable without a machine, or uneditable.

Counting, tallying, tabulating, chain of custody, all depend on this official source document.” - Hal Guentert

To which Michael Johnson responds:

'I believe almost everyone here agrees that an official ballot ought to be required to be a paper document, not some bits in a memory card. It's one of the recs in my "stuff we all agree on" thread".' – Michael Johnson

So if by this simple activist exchange, we all agree that a ballot is a physical object and not a PROCESS by which a ballot is produced, we just made it impossible for anyone to support DREs and Lever machines- both of which are processes that create a ballot and processes that can be broken by hacking or in the case of a lever machine, a nailfile can file down the pinprick device to cause the ballot to not Penetrate the ballot with the voter’s actual intended vote.

In short, by agreeing as a community that the ballot is a physical object and not a process, we knocked out the ballot of record being the electronic version of an optiscan ballot, even if that scan is supposed to be an exact duplicate of the physical ballot, we just agreed, that the paper ballot (or the voter filled out optiscan ballot form) that went into the Optiscan machines resides as the “Ballot of record” for the purposes of a recount. This distinction that a ballot is a physical object is not only our key legal and legislative ally, there are reasons why we need to begin attacking election code that redefines ballots as processes such as here in the Georgia Election code: O.C.G.A. § 21-2-2 (2008)
http://www.lexis-nexis.com/hottopics/gacode/default.asp

(1) "Ballot" means "official ballot" or "paper ballot" and shall include the instrument, whether paper, mechanical, or electronic, by which an elector casts his or her vote.

The problem, with the above definition, is they ‘include’ instruments (i.e. machines) and thus define a ballot as a process “by which an elector casts his or her vote”. The simple challenge of a citizen is this, “How does the state count a process?” or more fundamentally, how does this process insure unbroken chain of custody and voter intent in the resulting 'new non paper ballot'? How does a citizen do an open records request for the ballots, when the ballots are a process? What object is given back to the citizen to show their election was accurately counted if we cannot get actual physical objects to count? In my case, when I asked for the ballots in Georgia, I was given nothing in return. Actually , I was given DRE tapes which are accumulated totals of some process within the Diebold machine and no way for me to determine how those totals were calculated- so in essence, I was given nothing.

When I dedicated myself fulltime to fighting fraud in Georgia in 2005, I approached the ACLU about supporting my challenge to receive copies of the ‘ballots’ from the 159 counties to which I did an open records request. Aside from all 159 counties denying me access to the ballots because at the time and still now they are Diebold machine generated CD copies of a PCMCIA card that hold both the Microsoft Database that holds the ballot records, but also Diebold software and for this reason, the SOS office of Georgia said releasing the software compromised terrorist acts. In essence, they labeled me a potential terrorist for asking for a copy of the county’s ballots, which in my mind belonged to me as a voting citizen of the state.

The ACLU denied helping me because in a nutshell their attorneys had concluded that Georgia, by virtue of Lever machines, had redefined the Georgia State Election Code to define a ballot as a process that a machine can execute that produces a ballot. That definition was the precedent which allowed Diebold electronic voting to be seen as legally viable statewide. I will never forgive the ACLU for abandoning me at a time I was challenging the very root of democracy, honest elections.

Lever Machines, DREs and Optiscans which change the ballot from being a physical object like a sheet a paper with a mark on it, to being a process that produces something that acts as the new ballot. In all 3 cases the Lever Machine, DRE and Optiscan adds one additional step to the chain of custody (See below), and that step is a crucial step because it is a step that allows the chain of custody to be broken between the voter, the voter’s intent being transferred to the ballot, the ballot ending up in the ballot box and the ballot being counted accurately. To paint a picture with steps, let me outline what I mean.

PAPER BALLOTS (at poll location)
1. Voter transfers voter intent by pencil or pen to paper ballot
2. Ballot put physically in ballot box
3. Poll close, and citizens open ballot box and participate in counting the ballots
RESULT: Unbroken chain of custody between voters and vote counting

DRE, Optiscan or Lever Machines
1. Voter transfers voter intent by machine to “Process”,
2. “process” transfers vote to paper ballot or electronic copy of ballot.
3. Copy of Ballot (electronic or paper) counted (electronically or manually)
4. Polls close and county elections officials (not citizens) count the votes.
RESULT: #1 Citizens taken out of the loop in terms of counting the actual ballots, but left to count the results of the process. #2 Citizens not given access to ballots election night but some timeframe after the election concludes and numbers announced that they can be supervised to count the votes. #3 Extra step adds multiple opportunities within that step to break the chain of custody between the voter, voter intent, intent on ballot and ballot in secure locked ballot box.

Why LEVER Machines are the Historical Enemy of Election Integrity?

Lever machines, because they were seemingly so simple and even somewhat mechanical, were seen as benign servants of the voter to record voter intent. I would argue, that this insertion of a machine (electronic or mechanical) was the beginning of our historical abandoning of the sanctity of ‘unbroken chain of custody’ as the machine introduced a process that we cannot verify chain of custody.

With emphasis, I would submit a practical candidate who suffered enormously from the use of lever machines. Paul Harmon, a Licking County Ohio candidate for Domestic Relations Judge, lost his election by 189 votes but found that the undervote (40%) had actually won his race and he launched a lawsuit that went to the Ohio Supreme Court but was ultimately defeated. He felt it was fishy that the undervote won his race.

In investigating his case, he discovered the lever machines had been filed down to prevent democratic votes from appearing on the ballot.

From a transcript of his speech May 7th, Ohio Teach-In Sponsored by Case Ohio

“There were 5 candidates for domestic relations court judge, none of the candidates won. Undervotes won in a landslide. (audience laughing)

UNBELIEVABLE, UNBELIEVABLE

Of the candidates, I finished 2nd by 189 votes….”

After the election, Paul naturally wanted to inspect the machine that recorded voter intent on the punchcard and found this:
“They," [Licking county election officials], "locked the doors and the press was there in the hallways and they voted unanimously not to let me look at the Votematics machines, which frankly surprised me.

And I said well, I’m not going to be able to tell much by looking at the punchcards and see how how they intended to vote.” – Paul Harmon

So this simple dialogue shows how easily the challenger of any election is put in a no win situation, they must inspect the machine that creates the process to create the ballot, but these machines are often locked away, off limits or in my case in Georgia, the CD was deemed unable to be released to the citizen because somehow the Diebold source code cannot be inspected. (we all know why Diebold doesn't want us to discover their vote rigging code). The root cause, is that we’ve defined ballots as processes rather than define them as physical objects which we can photocopy, inspect, peruse or ultimately own. Elections are owned by citizens not corporations, election officials or states.

Lever machines, therefore, and their legal precedent, have the dubious honor of leading America, a country founded on it’s independence from a Royal ‘rigged’ monarchy, to another kind of ‘rigged monarchy’ which we currently see in the Bush dynasty. Worse, yet, the lever machines began a toxic rewrite of state based election code starting us down a trail of tears because it began redefining the ballot to a definition that violates the basic tenets of honest, citizen owned elections. This downward spiral is a precedent, I contend from which we cannot easily recover, and will likely take 20 years to sanitize and scrub state and federal statutes to rectify. Worse yet, HAVA as a federal legislative mandate had to rest on our citizen naivete to allow voting machines to make further inroads nationwide into our election system. The only silver lining is the activist community is winning, 2008 is the first year there was an actual decrease in the total votes happening on electronic voting machines.

Lever Machines – Historical Root Cause of Election Deception & Removing Citizen Ownership of US Elections
I am left finally to conclude, that lever machines were the very root cause of inaccurate US elections. Because lever machines break the chain of custody and may or may not have accurately captured the voter's intent, I have to ask the passionate activists why they defend the lever machine's right to exist on the currently dark landscape of our national election scene. Why exactly do smart activists continue to deprive citizens of their right to vote with such love of technology for technology sake? If Ireland and Denmark after spending millions on machines, have gone back to paper ballots and other US states grapple with the choice to go back to paper ballots, why can’t we use these examples to stop giving in to lever machines in exchange for getting rid of DREs when there is no functional difference between the 2 forms of flawed "ballot is a process" voting?

Finally, as a candidate who is running for the State Senate in Washington, who has an almost 80% voting public that chooses to vote by mail (which is unfortunate because of the chain of custody problems with the US mail, as well as with the election offices losing ballots due to bad ballot tracking procedures), I am still hopeful that at least I don’t have to fight the ballot as a process as I did in Georgia. I have swampland now instead of quicksand to fight. If I want to count the votes in my county, I can request copies of every single Optisccan filled out form, which is costly but still better than having nothing to count at all.

When you find yourself living in that American idealism believing in the honor of civil servitude, knocking on doors in 100 degree heat, as a candidate, you better believe entirely in the integrity of the ballots and the integrity of the vote counting process or else you feel personally committed to ensuring that the vote counting process is auditable, honest and accurate. You can bet King County, Washington Elections will be hearing from me before, during and after my campaign as I try to change the way we vote here in WA state.

I conclude with the title, but this time with emphasis and three exclamation points.

Lever Machines, DREs and Opticscans Should be entirely Banished from our Voting Landscape: Why? Because Ballots are Physical Objects Not Processes!!!

I fully support hand counted paper ballots, counted at precincts, in full view of citizens, election night and anything else is just settling for election integrity disaster.

Phyllis Huster
Candidate for Washing State Senate, 5th Legislative District Phyllis@phyllisforsenate.com
www.phyllisforsenate.com
425.736.6644

Authors Bio:
Election Integrity Activist.