Democracy Demands Transparency,
Not Trust
“If you did it right, no one would ever know,”
said
Craig C.
Donsanto, head of the
U.S. Department of Justice’s Election Crimes Branch, Public Integrity
Section (from 1970-2010) in a July 4,1989 Los Angeles Times article
about electronic voting machines and vote fraud. Yet,
he did nothing meaningful to stop the use of voting systems that
were nontransparent and easy to rig.
The GOLD STANDARD for voting is
"In person using paper ballots and hand counts only at your local
polls under the watchful eye of election observers from all parties
and the unaffiliated on Election Day only." - no machines, no mail-in
ballots, no early, no absentee, no ballot harvesting, no drop boxes.
HOWEVER, that said we need to
adjust
our "Voting Protocols" to political realities.
Our motto is, "Democracy demands
transparency, not trust". That is particularly true for the voting
process whose purpose under our constitution is two-fold: 1) That
"qualified" voters are allowed to vote, and 2) that their votes are
counted properly. To fulfill its purpose in a legally meaningful
and effective manner, while still protecting the secrecy of the
ballot, plus recognizing the pressures of modern living, we propose
the following Protocols For Voting Integrity:
-
The
ENTIRE voting process of casting and counting of paper ballots
shall be done "in person" using paper ballots and hand counts
ONLY at an officially sanctioned polling place or election
office, plus the transport and storage of ballots shall be
totally and continually transparent to "election observers" from
all parties, including a representative of "unaffiliated"
voters, until the election results have been certified.
In other words, election observers shall continually have "eyes
on" the paper ballots at all times, including during transport
and inside storage rooms. Any break from this protocol, due to
emergencies or other causes, shall result in a recount of all of
the ballots from the affected locations under these same
protocols.
-
The following voting
and vote counting methods do NOT allow for total and continual
transparency by election observers and therefore shall be
prohibited: machine voting (any device including lever voting
machines, computerized or electronic ballots counters, touch
screen machines, e-mail, etc..), mail-in ballots, ballot
harvesting, and drop boxes.
-
An "early voting"
option shall take place "in-person only" one month before
Election Day at government-sanctioned election locations, and
shall include the aforementioned requirements listed in Protocol
#1 with the exception that ballot envelopes shall not be opened
nor ballots counted until Election Day.
-
"Absentee in-person
voting" shall take place on "Election Day only" for the military
at their bases and on their ships at sea, plus for U.S. citizens
abroad, who can vote at U.S. embassies and U.S. consulates under
the same requirements in Protocol #1.
-
Registering to vote shall take place "in-person only" at
government designated locations and end 60 days before "early
voting" begins, which is 30 days before "early voting
begins", in order
to give election officials and the public sufficient time to
check the voter rolls for accuracy and for election officials to
make any necessary corrections before votes are cast. For
this reason, voter
registration on Election Day shall be prohibited.
LATEST NEWS:
SUMMARY:
For the sake of convenience and
'alleged' voter protection, Congress has destroyed the transparency,
verifiability, and integrity of America’s voting process.
Voting is the bedrock of democracy. And democracy demands
transparency, not trust. Yet, there is no real transparency to the way
Americans vote today.
State and federal
governments, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, have codified and legalized election fraud by allowing, if
not mandating secret, non-transparent voting systems that prohibit direct
access to a paper ballot and meaningful public oversight of the voting
process. For the sake of 'convenience', we have destroyed the
'integrity' of our elections. It began over 160 years ago.
There is no
transparency to our current voting system. Under
the U.S. Constitution and case law, qualified citizens have
two constitutional rights: 1) to vote, and 2) to have their votes
counted properly. For that right to be enforced by federal and state
authorities, the voting process must be observable by the public.
Which is also why those in jail should not be allowed to vote, but
once they have served their time, then they should be allowed to vote.
U.S. elections are not
transparent or
observable.
When Congress and state governments opened the door to increased
voting rights, 'convenient' access, and secret ballots, they closed
the door to effective transparency and meaningful oversight of the
voting process. Now we have computer voting, early and mail-in voting,
drop boxes, and electronic voting for the military...taken together
they have destroyed any semblance of election integrity or legitimacy.
Things weren't always this
way.
BEFORE the Civil War, voting was a completely transparent process.
It was only during the Civil War, as the right to vote expanded to
African Americans, that the voting process itself began to recede from
public view and meaningful oversight. It started with absentee
voting for soldiers in the 1860’s, secret ballots in the 1880’s, and
voting machines in the 1890’s. Today in America, more than 50% of all
voting is by absentee, mail, or early, 95% of all votes are
machine-processed, and 100% of all ballots are secret and anonymous.
Making matters worse, our public voting system has been privatized and
outsourced
to a handful of domestic, foreign, and multi-national corporations.
For the most part, our elections are counted by 3 major companies
(ES&S, Dominion, and Hart Intercivic) whose owner(s) and/or technical
staff could easily rig voting machines manually or wirelessly (either
touchscreens or ballot readers); these companies and/or their subcontractors
could also rig elections while inputting the candidates’ names for each new
election, or simply write the software to tabulate more votes for one
party over the other.
See 2005 video:
Danaher VP admits that they can rig an
election
(FULL
SUMMARY
BELOW)
The
'secret ballot' is a 'blank check' for vote fraud. It was supposed to
protect voters from harassment, but it has also had the biggest negative impact on our
ability to truly verify election results.
While
our politicians are required to vote publicly and openly, we citizens
are held to a different standard - a lower standard. We vote
remotely, privately and anonymously by machine, mail, early, drop box, and
secret ballot. It's an invitation to massive and undetectable vote
fraud. That is why, there should be only one standard of voting for both our
political representatives and voters. All voting should be open and
public - no machines, no absentee, no early voting, and no secret
ballots. Secret ballots are really anonymous ballots that corrupt
election officials can count any way they want. Under current
circumstances, and since the public is not ready to consider giving up
the secret ballot, the only thing candidates and voters can do to find
out how citizens really voted is to conduct their own
CITIZEN AUDITS.
CONCLUSION:
For the sake of convenience and 'alleged' voter protection, Congress
has destroyed the transparency, verifiability, and integrity of
America’s voting process. We need to fight back!
REMAINDER OF "SUMMARY"
Can't we detect vote fraud through exit polls? The major news networks
refuse to report on vote fraud and have been implicated in it. Exit
polling is conducted by one organization, currently called the
National Election Pool (NEP), that is hired by the major news networks
and the Associated Press. Since they first started "projecting"
election night winners in 1964, at the same time computerized ballot
scanners came into use, the major news networks have never provided
any 'hard' evidence that they actually conducted any exit polls, at
all. In other words, the major news corporations broadcast their own
pre-election surveys based on anonymous sources, collect vote totals
on Election Day, and back-up those
results with their own exit polls based on more anonymous sources.
The late authors of the book, VoteScam: The Stealing of America, James
M. Collier and Kenneth E. Collier, concluded that some of the major
news networks, including the polling organization that they hire for
election night reporting, have been complicit in vote fraud.
In America, less than 1% of votes are hand-counted-paper-ballots at
the polls on Election Day.
Neither government-controlled audits nor official recounts (both can
occur days or even weeks after the election) provide sufficient
transparency to detect widespread election fraud by voting machines
companies and/or election officials. Moreover, the U.S. Justice
Department (DOJ), under the 38-year reign of Craig C. Donsanto,
refuses to seriously investigate or prosecute electronic vote fraud.
“If you did it right, no one would ever know,” said
Craig
C. Donsanto, head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s
Election Crimes Branch, Public Integrity Section (from 1970-2010) in a
July 4,1989 Los Angeles Times article about electronic voting machines
and vote fraud. (See
DOJ & FBI complicity))At the highest levels, both political parties, the U.S. government,
Big Tech, and major news media are well aware of this situation
because they are complicit in it. (See
Exit Polls) At the very least,
election counting should be local and consist of only paper ballots
and hand counts at the local polling precincts on election day - no
machines, no computers, no absentee, no mail-in, and no emails. See
Paper Ballots
For those who cannot make it to the polls on Election Day,
designated teams of poll workers together with poll watchers should
visit places such as nursing homes in order to conduct onsite
elections and deliver those ballots to the local polling station to be
counted on that day, Election Day, maintaining transparency and
chain-of-custody requirements. Similarly, polls could be set up at
embassies, consulates, and military bases for citizens living
overseas.
And for those who don’t believe we can get enough people to count
ballots, election officials have every right to draft citizens into
service, as is done with jury duty. Hand counting isn’t rocket
science. Other countries around the world do it for their elections.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:
(Some of the information below is NOT up-to-date)
-
Don't some
voters need these machines, such as non-English language voters and
disabled voters?
No. Voters who want a ballot in their own language should be able to
order such a ballot in advance of any election. Secondly, voting machines present the same violation of voting rights for disabled
voters. And contrary to popular belief, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
does not require election officials to purchase electronic voting
machines. Besides, anecdotal evidence suggests that these machines
are difficult for the disabled to use. Election officials and voting
machine companies admit that it takes the sight-impaired voters ten
times longer to use a touchscreen machine than able-bodied voters.
However, there is a way for the sight-impaired to vote privately and
independently. They can use
tactile paper ballot with audio
assistance. Tactile ballots are used around the world and in some
states such as Rhode Island. Unfortunately, many disabled voters are
unaware of these kinds of ballots. That may not be an accident. Two
organizations for the blind, The American Association of People with
Disabilities (AAPD) and The National Federation of the Blind (NFB),
are ardent supporters of paperless touchscreen voting machines. They
also have received over $1 million dollars from the voting machine
industry, according to news reports.
-
Can you
conduct Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) using paper ballots? First, I do not support IRV or proportional
voting because they are unnecessary, complicated, and cannot be easily
observed. But, yes,
Britain, Ireland, and
Australia have used paper ballots to conduct Instant Run-Off Voting.
However, some advocates of IRV are aggressively promoting the idea
that voting machines are necessary. Regarding proportional voting, it
is the wrong answer to the obvious problem presented by "at-large"
elections where the winners take all. Instead, political entities
(such as townships) should be divided into voting districts (which
many already are), thereby allowing the development of Democratic,
Republican, etc. strongholds which could result in more equitable
representation.
-
Aren't
machines faster than a hand count and isn't that important?
They should be, but often they are not. Machines breakdown routinely,
thereby taking longer to report election results. In Maryland in the
2004 election, 9% of machines observed by a voting rights group, broke
down. Essentially, a speedy hand count is based on a sufficient
number of poll workers per number of registered voters and the length
of the ballot. Canada uses 2 election officials per approximately 500
registered voters. In addition, election officials don't need to
depend on volunteers. Citizens can be drafted to work at the polls on
Election Day, as is done routinely with jury duty. The right to
direct access to a ballot and meaningful public oversight of the
process supersedes the perceived convenience of voting machines.
-
What
about states that have really long ballots, including initiatives and
referendum? Most
countries keep their ballots brief. The initiative/referendum
movement is called Direct Democracy. However, it is really an end-run
around the legislature. Some activists think this is a good idea,
but others disagree. California's ballot has become a nightmare.
Clearly, those with the money get their issues on the ballot. And
consider this. The initiative/referendum movement allows those who
control the voting machines to also control which candidates win and
what legislation gets passed.
-
Aren't
voting machines more accurate than a hand count?
There is no way to know. There is no way to test the accuracy of
voting machines during the actual voting process on Election Day.
Citizens vote in secret. The machines count those votes in secret.
If ballot scanners are used, then election officials can run an audit
to check accuracy. But, few states require audits. Even with an
audit, election officials decide where and when the audits occur.
Public participation and oversight is not meaningful. Any test done
prior or after an election cannot ensure that during the election the
machine did not manipulate votes, either by accident or design. The
accuracy of voting machines is often correlated with the number of
overvotes and undervotes it records. One could have nothing to do
with the other. There is no way to know the intention of the voter,
or if a voting machine is filling in votes that the voter deliberately
left blank. Although a lever and touchscreen machine can prevent
overvotes, all in all, "The difference between the best performing and
worst performing technologies is as much as 2 percent of ballots cast.
Surprisingly, paper ballots—the oldest technology—show the best
performance." This is the finding of two Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) political science professors, Dr. Stephen Ansolabehere and Dr. Charles Stewart III, in a September 25, 2002
study entitled, Voting Technology
and Uncounted Votes in the
United States.
-
Which is
more expensive, voting by machine or paper? For
legitimate elections, expense can never be a consideration. That
said, paper is cheap and requires no special servicing, storage, or
trained personnel, while a single voting machines can cost thousands
of dollars and require servicing, storage, and trained personnel.
Furthermore, election officials never need to rely on volunteers to
staff the polls. Citizens can always be drafted as they are for jury
duty, at little or no cost to the tax payer.
-
If someone
wins by a large enough margin, isn't that a sign that the election
wasn't rigged?
No. It only stands
to reason that if someone is going to rig an election, it will be done
by a sufficient number of votes to avoid triggering a recount.
Otherwise, this could happen: In August of 2002, in Clay county
Kansas, Jerry Mayo lost a close race for county commissioner,
garnering 48% of the vote, but a hand recount revealed May won by a
landslide, earning 76% of the vote.
-
If the
voting machines are being used at my polling precinct, is it better to
vote by absentee?
Most absentee ballots are not counted by hand, but instead scanned by
computers. The same corporations that
dominate the touchscreen market, also control the ballot scanners. In
addition, some counties, like King County Washington, have even
outsourced the mailing of their absentee ballots to private industry.
-
Doesn't the federal
government regulate the voting machine industry?
No. There is no federal agency charged with regulatory oversight of
the elections industry. There are no restrictions on who can count our
votes. Anyone from anywhere can count our votes.
-
Can a voting machine company be owned by foreigners and run by
felons? (This information may be out of
date) Yes. Sequoia is the third largest voting machine company
in America and was or is owned by a British-based company, De La Rue. Diebold
is the second largest voting machine company in the country. It counts
about 35% of all votes in America. Diebold employed 5 convicted
felons as senior managers and developers to help write the central
compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
Jeff Dean, Diebold's Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on
Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony
theft in the first degree. Dean was convicted of planting back doors
in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade
detection over a period of 2 years.
see: fraud & irregularities
-
Isn't that a threat to national security? Yes.
-
What was the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) all about? It
established the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to distribute
billions of dollars to the states to upgrade their voting systems, but
failed to mandate any meaningful standards.
http://www.eac.gov/law_ext.asp
-
Doesn't the federal government certify the voting
machines? No. The federal government has a loose set of
technical guidelines for voting machines that are voluntary and may be
actually harmful. The Federal Voting Systems Standards (FVSS) used
by the three NASED's approved Independent Test Authorities (ITA) to
"certify" companies are outmoded guidelines and voluntary, and not all
states have adopted them. According to industry observers, the FVSS
guidelines allow one in ten machines to fail. There is no enforcement
of these guidelines, such as they are.
-
Who, then, certifies the nation's voting
machines? (This information may be out of
date) The FEC coordinates with the industry-funded
National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), a private
non-profit group, to have machines inspected certified by
industry-funded private contractors. NASED selects and approves
the testing laboratories. Only prototypes of the machines and software
are available for a very superficial inspection. The inspection is
conducted by three private companies who are not themselves subject to
any regulation.
Technical Issues & Standards
"An unelected
person named R. Doug Lewis runs a private non-profit organization
called "The Electio
17. But, wouldn't it take a vast number of people to rig an
election? Not with today's technology. One programmer working at
either ES&S or Diebold could write code that could manipulate votes
across the country. If a voting machine has computer components, it can
be rigged or accessed through the firmware, software, wireless, modem,
telephone, and simple electricity. Main tabulating computers can be
rigged in a similar fashion. Lever voting machine are also easily
rigged, although it would be more labor intensive. Still, anyone with
the keys to the county warehouse where the machines are stored could rig
the machines. Labels can be switched, gears shaved, odometers preset, or
printouts preprinted.
18. Can't we detect vote fraud through exit polls?
Exit polling is conducted by one organization that is hired by the major
news networks and the Associated Press. Since they first
started "projecting" election night winners in 1964, the major news
networks have never provided any 'hard' evidence that they actually
conducted any exit polls, at all. The late authors of the book, VoteScam: The Stealing of America, concluded that some of the major
news networks, including the polling organization that they hire for
election night reporting, have been complicit in vote fraud.
see: exit polls
19. If someone wins by a large enough margin, isn't that a
sign that the election wasn't rigged? No. It only stands to
reason that if someone is going to rig an election, it will be done by a
sufficient number of votes to avoid triggering a recount. Otherwise,
this could happen: In August of 2002, in Clay county Kansas, Jerry Mayo
lost a close race for county commissioner, garnering 48% of the vote,
but a hand recount revealed May won by a landslide, earning 76% of the
vote. http://www.ecotalk.org/BevHarrisBook2.pdf (page 45)
20. Aren't you just a conspiracy theorist?
No. I'm a conspiracy expert. Election officials have
outsourced and privatized a uniquely public function. Corporations have
gained total control over the process of voting. Corporations also
control the process of reporting exit polls. Both processes are
completely non-transparent.
lynnlandes@gmail.com
Philadelphia, PA
215-629-3553 landline
714-204-2690 cell
www.LynnLandes.com
|