Tuesday, August 22, 2006
November -- The End of E-Voting
by Fishgrease
That's right. We're approaching the end of ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia. Soon. The November kind of soon. So how we do that, you ask?
It's safe to say that more Republicans will lose than at any time since HAVA. More Republicans will lose than at any time since computerized, programmed vote counting devices came into wide use. Same thing. HAVA mandated and paid for those devices. Who wrote HAVA? Lobbyists for the election device industy... that's who.
Republicans will lose. They're politicians and think an awful lot of themselves (Democrats are too, but it's the Republicans who'r going to have to get used to this losing stuff). What are the chances they actually received fewer votes? No way! It was those damned computers!
Need I say more? I'm going to. Flip wid me.
In fact, Republicans will figure what's good for the goose is good for the gander. They'll be demanding handcounts all across this great country of ours, expecting Democrats to object. Here's what Democrats should do:
Fuck'em! Don't object!
I know I'm going to have comments saying Republicans won't lose, precisely because of e-voting. I don't think so. Sure I think it's possible. With programmed devices counting votes, anything is possible. I just don't think it is likely. Cheating with e-voting, if it ever occurred (I think it might have in select races) would only help if every race were going to be close. Hopefully, we're approaching a blowout, against the very people who supported e-voting and called us all wackos. If computerized vote-count fraud occurred in the past, or could in November, the people who say go or no-go on it will probably realize what grabbing 10% or more of votes illegally could do. People in the streets. Mass protests. If that happens, there goddamn sure SHOULD be people, A LOT OF PEOPLE, protesting... in the goddamn streets.
So if Democrats do win big, why not kill two birds with one stone? Agree with the losing Republican candidates that there needs to be handcounts. Support their efforts, even where handcounts aren't provided, by law as the next step. Even I am not sure I'm right here. I do think it is something Democrats need to be thinking about and including in their contingency planning. We would do well to discuss it here. You gotta admit it's like Democrats to win and then say "Now what?". Make plans for when you win.
Here's a letter to the editor I wrote. I've just received confirmation that it will be printed in our local small-town Wyoming newspaper. Think about writing one yourself. Wouldn't be difficult to write a better one than I did. I've a feeling that now's our chance. We may not get another one. If winning Democrats say e-voting is fine, we may never get rid of it.
This country is headed for trouble. That trouble will occur on election day, this coming November. The trouble is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). You have to love how they name these pieces of legislation. HAVA will help America vote just like the Clean Air Act cleaned the air (it didn't) and the American Jobs Creation Act created jobs (created jobs in India).
The Herald's recent article on our new ES&S voting machines accurately described HAVA as resulting from the disputed 2000 presidential election. The U.S. Congress was heavily lobbied by the elections device industry and as Congress often does, they solved one problem by replacing it with a much worse problem. Like a lot of federal legislation, HAVA was pretty much written by ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia lobbyists. How bad is it? Well, it managed to couple the problems of fair and sensible ballot design with the intrinsic invalidity of computerized vote counting. Pretty darned bad. Very bad. In several places, including Florida and Mexico, there are now laws that ballots or paper vote records must exist, but those paper records cannot be counted by hand. The only recounts allowed by law in these places is feeding the paper ballots back through the same computerized devices that counted them the first time.
Our new ES&S M100 voting machines are computerized devices. I'm a device programmer. I'm not the best, but I could write computer code that would not only change election results, but leave no evidence of the change. If I can do it, so can thousands of other programmers. Citizens of Uinta County, this coming November, your votes will be counted by a computer. Your votes will be counted, not by your local government, but by a corporation. The M100 and similar optical-scan devices differ from the now-fully-discredited touchscreen machines only by their means of input. Their output is routed through programmed devices, either way. Before our election, our County Clerk will verify, before party representatives, that the memory cards are blank. The only way this can be done is by plugging them into a computerized device, probably one provided by ES&S. The M100 also has an internal paper record, but this too is downstream of the programmed functions of the machine.
The great mathematician, Kurt Gödel proved that self-validating systems cannot be provably valid. If the only provably valid election result comes by hand counting the original paper ballots, why do we have the machines? We have them because they were bought with federal money. We have them because of lobbyists. Change HAVA to APAH (All Paper All Handcounts). Then, give us back our Senior Citizen election judges and send the 17 year-olds home. We'll no longer need their computer expertise.
This November, candidates Republican and Democrat will be demanding hand-recounts all across this great nation. Candidates, win or lose, we, the voters, would like you to do exactly that. You owe it to the people who voted for you. You owe it to your country.
A note on that letter and the stuff about the 17 year-olds. This year, our county replaced ALL their past election judges (usually Senior Citizens) with below-voting-aged teenagers because "they are less intimidated by electronic devices than most adults". If you feel ghosts of Cambodia in The Killing Fields, you're not alone.
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