"Politics is the way a free people govern themselves." --Bernard Crick. Our elections can be honest if all citizens participate in conducting and observing them. Our governmental policies can provide for the good of all citizens if all citizens participate in our civic and political life--and provide the kind of knowledgeable oversight that can keep democratic government honest. Americans need to tithe our free time for this.

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What Can We Do Now to Protect the Election in November?
Teresa Hommel
September 12, 2008

I am an independent citizen activist against electronic voting, and for the last five years I have worked to keep electronic voting out of New York State and New York City.


This article touches on four points:

  -What happened in our national elections in recent years

  -What might happen this year in November

  -What can ordinary citizens do to make our November election as honest as possible, so that when Obama and Biden win, the election is not stolen, and

  -What can influential and powerful citizens do.

1. Were Previous Elections Stolen?

Like most people who have looked closely at the evidence, I believe that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were stolen. A wide variety of tactics was used.

For example, just in Florida alone, in 2000:

  1. Statewide, more than 90,000 primarily Democratic voters were dropped without notice from the voter registration list due to being felons-except they weren't felons.

  2. In one county the vote-counting machine was set up so that the count for Bush started at zero, but the count for Gore started at minus 16,000, meaning Gore had to get 16,000 votes just to bring his tally back up to zero.

  3. The butterfly ballot was designed to confuse voters, who ended up voting for Buchanan instead of Gore.

  4. In one county, Republican absentee ballots that arrived late or had defects were counted anyway, but the equivalent Democratic ballots were not counted.

  5. The punch card ballots in Palm Beach county were deliberately made from defective paper and printed slightly off, so that the punches didn't work right. As a result, people had to count the votes by looking at the ballots one at a time, which was going along fine, without difficulty, until Republican staffers from Congress in Washington were sent to Florida to disrupt the counting, and then finally the Supreme Court said to stop counting.

In 2004, just in Ohio alone:

  1. Not enough voting machines were sent to key Black Democratic areas, so that people had to wait in line up to 13 hours to vote.

  2. Paper ballots were counted fraudulently and after a federal court ordered that the ballots should be preserved for inspection, they were destroyed in more than half the counties with excuses like "we spilled coffee on them, so we had to throw them out."

  3. Observers of the vote tabulation were forced to leave, and were told that there was a national security alert, which proved to be a lie, and after the observers left the tabulation continued.

  4. The state's tabulating computer that showed Bush 48% and Kerry 51% "crashed" and when it "came up again" the tallies were reversed so that Bush had 51% and Kerry had 48%.

Ohio was not the only state with problems in 2004.

In Alaska, there were over 100,000 more votes than voters, and they were counted in the final tally, giving Alaska to Bush. They had 200 percent voter turnout in 16 districts. When Democrats sued to get the vote data, Diebold, the vendor of the tabulating equipment, said that they owned the data and it was proprietary and secret.

Let's sum this up.

  -A wide variety of tactics has been used to prevent voters from voting.

  -A wide variety of tactics has been used to prevent observers from watching procedures with votes.

  -It appears that computers were used to manipulate votes and tallies, but no investigations have ever been done by any authorities.

2. What might happen this November?

Already we have voter registrations disappearing in many states. We have lies about our candidates being repeated over and over in the major media, even after the lies have been refuted. I think we can expect that all the tactics used in the past will be used again, plus more.

Here's what we don't know.

  -Are Democrats prepared to counteract the dirty tricks this time?

  -Are we citizens and voters prepared to counteract the dirty tricks?

  -Are we citizens and voters committed to being part of the election process--as election workers, observers, volunteers conducting exit polls? We especially need observers who will call in the lawyers and media when problems happen on election day, and citizens with cameras who can film the disputes.

3. What Can Citizens Do?

The traditional, critical activities are (1) voter registration, (2) getting out the vote, and (3) "voter protection" to ensure that eligible voters can  register and get access to the ballot.

These traditional activities are more critical than ever. The more people who vote, the easier it is to prevent fraud, or detect and correct it.

When registering new voters we need to keep copies of the registration forms, turn in the forms immediately, follow up two weeks later to make sure the forms were processed correctly, and use the forms as part of our "Get Out The Vote" and "Voter Protection" effort. We need to be ready for election day with the phone numbers of our hot lines, legal teams, media staff, and people with cameras.

But the traditional activities are not going to be enough this year.

In too many states our election administration has become lawless. Just in the last two weeks two election observers were arrested: one was a candidate in Florida where state law gave her the right to observe, and the other was an observer in Arizona with legal credentials. The police seized him when he asked why the ballot containers were open, not sealed according to state law.

  -In some states, hundreds of thousands of voter registrations have already "disappeared."

  -In the recent primaries, names of many registered voters have "gone missing" from poll books on election day, so these voters were forced to use provisional ballots and then their ballots weren't counted.

  -In some counties the poll workers weren't trained properly. They couldn't make the voting equipment work. They didn't know proper procedures, and eligible voters were disenfranchised.

  -Like in 2004, the media is again creating pre-election opinion polls with slanted data--slanted by controlling how many Republicans versus Democrats are questioned. And the major media are repeating lies that make Obama seem less attractive, and McCain seem more attractive-such as "Obama is going to raise middle-class taxes" and "McCain is a maverick." 

***More Americans Need to Become Part of the Election Process***

There's an old saying-if you want something done right, do it yourself.

How many of us are planning to do election work? If we have to work at our job on election day, how many of us are talking to family, friends and neighbors, especially those who are unemployed, who can help with the election? How many of us are writing those letters to the editor, and posting comments on major media internet sites to complain about biased opinion polls and biased, untruthful reporting, or just picking up the phone and calling to complain?

How to Counteract Dirty Tricks

BlackBoxVoting.org has published a small book called Toolkit 2008, which lists dirty tricks and how to counteract them at the local level.

Citizen oversight keeps democratic government honest

If we are participating in efforts to register voters and get them to the polls, we have the opportunity to remind them that registering and voting are not enough to sustain a democracy.

Even "working the vote" as poll workers and "watching the vote" as observers is not enough. Continuous, year-round public participation is necessary to make government work in a democratic society. Government behind closed doors, or without public oversight, can be corrupted and that includes elections. "We the people" need to be watching and participating at every step for fair elections to take place.

The struggle for American citizens will be three-fold.

  1. We will have to accept that we have to do this "public oversight" work and election work or lose our country.

  2. We will have to change our culture's understanding of government. There is an idea that government is something someone else does--if they don't do it right, the citizen's role is to complain a lot and get on with your own private life. Most of our kids, our younger generation of Americans, don't even know that they are supposed to participate. We forgot to teach them something: "Politics is the way a free people govern themselves" (Bernard Crick).

  If we don't all participate, that allows a small number of people to use the government to steal the wealth of our nation. In recent years we have had one economic scandal after another-savings and loan, Enron, housing mortgages. We have seen government regulation of many industries slanted to enable corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, keeping our environment clean, and reinvesting in our communities and our country by providing our citizens here with jobs at a living wage with fair benefits..

  3. We will have to fight our way back into the process of conducting elections. Right now citizens are shut out in many states. New York is better than most, because our state and city election commissioners meet in public, and we have bipartisan election administration, but third parties are still shut out.

4. What Can Influential and Powerful Citizens Do?

In addition to supporting the critical, traditional activities of Voter Registration, Get Out The Vote, and Voter Protection, influential and powerful citizens can much.
 
  1. Pressure and assist the Democratic Party to prepare to counteract dirty tricks and the invisible fraud that can happen when votes are cast and counted inside computers. Do Democrats have "fair election" teams and computer teams in every state? There is still time to set them up and to take action to resolve that can disenfranchise eligible voters and keep some votes from being counted.

  2. Citizen activists nationwide are working day by day and uncovering the decisions and voting machine set-ups that can cause problems on election day. Now is the time for influential and powerful citizens to make sure that legal, political and media resources are used to  correct the problems activists uncover before November.

Conclusion

Only citizen participation in politics and the oversight of our government can lead to a fair balance between the desires of wealthy individuals and corporations on one hand, and the needs of working people and the middle class on the other. Our governmental policies can provide good jobs, good schools, good medical care, a clean environment, and a decent life for ALL Americans, but only if ALL Americans participate.
  
Democracy requires an informed, engaged citizenry. Right now, due to control of the media by a small number of owners, and use of the media as entertainment instead of information, we have a largely ignorant population. Candidates can lie, and few people notice because most of us don't know our own public servants and what they did in the past, and we don't know the issues. We don't know our own history and we don't know the world we live in.

But we can learn. We can recover. We can do better. We can tithe our free time to civic participation, and help our country and ourselves.

10 THINGS INDIVIDUAL CITIZENS CAN DO

1. Voter registration (New York City deadline to register to vote in November is Oct. 10, 2008)

2. Get out the vote

3. Work as a "voter protection observer" in poll sites, prepared to call hotlines, lawyers, or media teams if voters are unfairly challenged or face other barriers to ballot access

4. Submit application now to work at the polls in November

5. For those who can work with email and the internet: 

    a.  Subscribe to clippings from the internet from Liz Rich, an individual citizen activist, for news you won't find in the major media. Send an email to LizRich151 AT aol.com
   
    b. Subscribe to the Daily Voting News to learn about voting machine and election administration problems across the country. Send an email to DVN AT VotersUnite.org

    c.  For those who can write letters complaining about media lies and slanted polls, go to http://mediamatters.org and sign up for alerts.
    
    d.  Subscribe to alerts from the election integrity organization in NY state, NYVV (New Yorkers for Verified Voting). Send an email to contact AT nyvv.org.
   
    e.  Subscribe to alerts related to NYC. Send an email to admin AT WheresThePaper.org
  
    f.  To learn about election problems, please read at these web sites: VotersUnite.org , BlackBoxVoting.org , ElectionDefenseAlliance.org , WheresThePaper.org

6. Counteract dirty tricks-read the list of dirty tricks and what to do in Toolkit 2008. You can download the Toolkit 2008 from www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.pdf

7. Challenge good government organizations that are not advocating election procedures and equipment that enable ordinary citizens to observe (and understand what they observe well enough to attest that the procedures were proper and honest) AND citizen access to observe.  This includes many national groups: ACLU, National League of Women Voters, Common Cause, People for the American Way, Leadership Council for Civil Rights. (Observable elections require the technology for voter registration, vote recording and vote tabulating to be meaningfully observable.  It also requires legal power for citizens to continuously watch what's going on. Note that the state level can be different--for example, the League of Women Voters of NY State is leading the fight in NY along with New Yorkers for Verified Voting.)

8. Talk with everyone - family, friends, neighbors - "Politics is the way a free people govern themselves." No one will "give us" a fair election and an honest government. We have to keep track of what our public servants are doing and know the issues. We need to "Work the Vote" as poll workers and "Watch the Vote" as observers.

9. For those with cameras, you can Video The Vote. Go to www.videothevote.org

10. Assist with citizens doing exit polls. Sign up at www.electiondefensealliance.org/evp

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Authors Bio:
Teresa Hommel is a voting activist in NY and chair of the Task Force On Voting Integrity, Community Church of New York.