No Centralized Voter Registration Databases

Originally posted on January 30, 2008 at No Centralized Voter Registration Databases


Computer systems are hackable, from the Department of Homeland Security, to the Pentagon, to local County and City levels.

Franklin County (OH) Muncipal Court is another in a long line of government organizations that violate citizens’ privacy by exposing personal information on their websites.

The Constitutional framers had it right:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.

Some counties recognize this.

See County Web Site Helped Thieves Steal Identities of Victims in Five States for details of Franklin County's disastrous failures. Some of the article is excerpted below:

Police in Worthington Ohio say hundreds of people in five states are the latest victims of identity theft that has resulted from county officials publishing sensitive information about citizens over the Internet. They've asked the U.S. Secret Service to investigate the link between the county Web site and online identity theft.

The known victims of this latest breach are from Ohio, South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Wyoming. Although no one has been arrested yet, Worthington police seized the records and computers of two people, who implicated four others and the county Web site in the scheme.

Ohio law requires that some court records are made public but does not require officials to publish any of the records online where the information can be used by criminals worldwide.

Now that the county has published your sensitive information online, local officials say they will try to locate anyone affected by the breach, but place the burden on individuals to take steps to protect themselves. They suggest verifying information in credit reports and keeping constant vigilance over your account.

Better to keep constant vigilance over the Bill of Rights and government officials.

The Help America Vote Act – pushed thru Congress by convicted felon Bob Ney* – requires states to develop and maintain centralized, computerized voter registration databases.

This is one of a series of Congressional Acts since 2001 that strip Americans of their basic rights under the U.S. Constitution. Under HAVA, $3.9 billion was provided to states to deploy hackable computerized voting systems which obscure the vote count from the public.

How convenient for dishonest government officials and hackers. The Big Brother scheme provides name, address, party affiliation, and vote frequency of every registered voter.

Coupling centralized, computerized voter registration databases with secret vote counting (via machine) is a perfect recipe for tyranny. Stalin must be dancing in his grave over U.S. elections.


*Ney's felony conviction means he can no longer vote, which is perfect karma for his part in HAVA.

NOTE: The post below, "Real Election Madness," was originally posted on February 26, 2008.

Real Election Madness

A new book is coming out detailing the efforts of ordinary citizens who investigated the implausible results from the 2004 presidential election held in Ohio. Richard Hayes Phillips promises an advance copy here.

Serving as one of the Ohio investigators taught me that citizen oversight is the cure to "Election Madness," a pandemic delusion fiercely held by half the country - that half that still votes. Some of the symptoms include the belief that honest elections can exist even though:

* Votes are counted in secret (inside a machine);

* The government - whose seats are being challenged - counts the public vote;

* Electoral management bodies (EMBs) repeatedly fail to maintain chain of custody;

* Exit polls that differ from reported results are explained away by corporate media which owns mass media;

* A posture of arrogance and secrecy pervades EMBs toward the public, which is the rightful owner of the election process;

* Recounts are impossible (paperless voting) or sabotaged by EMB failure to maintain secure protocols over the ballots, or conflicting results fail to overturn originally posted official results;

* Centralizing the vote count defeats a precinct-by-precinct check on official results;

* Vote by mail, early voting, and other "convenience voting" methods defeat chain of custody, providing us with no rational basis for confidence in reported results;

* Registration is used by partisans and election officials to disenfranchise voters, thru purges, "glitches" and targeted populations;

* Redistricting is used by partisans and election officials to "choose the voters" instead of the other way around;

* Through rules, rulings, and laws, citizens are presented with no significant difference between candidates offered in the dominant "two-party" system;

* Granting of "personhood" to corporations has monetarily corrupted democracy from a "one adult - one vote" proposition to "one dollar - one vote" ...

Truly, this list goes on.

As more and more citizens become involved in electoral management oversight, we have a chance at reviving democracy in the U.S.

Investigate, observe, count signatures, count ballots, and follow the chain of custody. Video as much of the process as possible, make movies, and write books, blogs and editorials. Where election officials fail in their duties, report this as widely as possible, in as many venues as possible.

Let's take our country back, by implementing an election process that models best management practices. This brief handbook offers a skeletal plan on how to do this. A lengthier handbook is in the works.

Sort and Stack Method of Hand Counting Ballots

In a single page, complete and concise instructions are provided for hand counting ballots at http://snipurl.com/21d36

This method requires the use of a Reconciliation Audit Slip, a sample of which is provided at http://snipurl.com/21d39

Papering over OptiScam Problems

This is my January 6th response (originally posted at OpEdNews.com) to Clive Thompson's piece in the Sunday NYTimes, "Can You Count on These Machines?" reproduced in a separate post below.


In a 7,800-word article in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, writer Clive Thompson details the myriad of problems associated with touch screen voting systems and devotes only 3% of his essay to similar problems with optical scan systems. If readers actually make it to the last two paragraphs, they’ll read that optical scans – despite Thompson’s prior promotion of them – are also fraught with vulnerabilities.

In Can You Count on These Machines? Thompson correctly describes how “costs ballooned and chaos reigned when Cuyahoga County, Ohio first used Diebold’s AccuVote touch screen system, but inaccurately low-balls the number of memory cards and cartridges that went “missing” during that May 2006 primary. Thompson fails to mention that twenty-eight $4,500 voting machines also went “missing.”

Because the hired watchdog group (Election Science Institute) randomly selected 10% of the precincts to study, we can extrapolate to determine, with a fair degree of confidence, the total number of missing machines to be 280, and the total number of missing memory cards and cartridges to be 890, for the entire county, for that one election. Thompson reports that 200 cards went missing.

He also failed to report that Deputy Director Michael Vu, who oversaw all these “lost” mission critical assets, later resigned and was hired to run San Diego’s elections. In an unfortunate coincidence, at best, a shipment of memory chips to San Diego went missing last month. After Michael Vu’s dismal and shockingly inept handling of Cuyahoga’s May 2006 primary, that he is allowed to serve in any democratic election further defeats confidence in US electoral management bodies.

Reading Thompson’s piece, many will walk away believing optical scans are the best choice for democratic elections. Damn the science. Damn the cost. Damn the loss of transparency and public accountability. Hey, all technologies have problems.

But the problems inherent in software-driven systems turn insider vote stealing into child’s play. Pokey Anderson of Houston’s radio news show, The Monitor, notes:

While there has always been manipulation in elections, the difference between stealing in a hand-counted paper ballot election and an electronic election is the difference between successfully robbing a convenience store and successfully robbing Fort Knox.

Honest elections are a national security issue; without them we fall under the tyranny of the best thief. Media that continues to obfuscate the truth about software-driven election systems serves tyranny, not democracy.

Election integrity activists have been dealing with this obfuscation for three decades, as detailed in Votescam: The Stealing of America by Jim and Ken Collier (1996).

But Thompson’s recent article takes on particular import now, since New York has been ordered to deploy scientifically-condemned voting systems.

During oral arguments last month in USA vs. NY, Judge Gary Sharpe refused to acknowledge that all software-driven voting machines are vulnerable to being hacked. Todd Valentine represents the New York State Board of Elections and sought to show how none of the machines meet NY standards, at which point Judge Sharpe interrupted:

Sixteen months ago I told you to pick a machine, and here we sit in December, a week before Christmas, and you still haven’t picked a machine.

Maybe Judge Sharpe believes that if corporate media and the judicial system continue to deny the reality that none of these machines provide voters with a basis for confidence in reported results, the scientific community and informed activists will simply go away. Instead, our ranks continue to swell, as more and more citizens – and officials – take note of all the failures in software-driven voting systems.

Thompson accurately notes, at the very end of his article:

Public crises of confidence in voting machines used to come along rarely, every few decades. But now every single election cycle seems to provoke a crisis, a thirst for a new technological fix. The troubles of voting machines may subside as optical scanning comes in, but they’re unlikely to ever go away.

The reason is simple. We need to reject software-driven systems and implement the far cheaper hand-counted paper ballot system. It’s easier to protect from fraud and it provides the transparency that democratic elections demand.

A Pattern of Obfuscation

Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the Collier brothers endured the same media and judicial blackout of this issue when trying to expose these problems. In Votescam, they report that in 1989, the New York Times finally revealed problems associated with computerized vote tabulation:

Some critics of computerized vote counting worry about the potential for ‘trapdoors,’ ‘time bombs,’ and ‘Trojan Horses…’ Once inside the system, (a hacker) could program the computer to count votes for one candidate as votes for another.

In that 1989 New York Times article, Princeton University computer scientist Howard J. Strauss explained:

Writing the ‘source code’ for one of these vote counting
systems, a programmer could insert a ‘Trojan Horse’ that might not appear for years.

Suppose I wanted to throw the 1992 presidential nomination to (Mario Cuomo, for example). I write the code so that every time the name comes up in the primaries, he receives a certain number of votes.

Today’s computer scientists have the same exact criticism for using software in public elections. They take it even further: because there can be a million lines of code, opening up the source code for review in no way guarantees that problems will be discovered.

The 2006 Princeton study of touch screen systems reiterated the same complaints:

Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss.
Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

One has to wonder why the U.S. government would give states $3.9 billion to buy easily compromised voting systems, a vulnerability known for decades.

Expert Studies Condemn Optical Scan Election Systems

Last month, I quoted several computer experts who studied the machines in use today and urge all Americans to read this 20-page summary. By no means do I cover all the reports that have come out in the last ten years, but all experts who study these systems agree: they are subject to easy manipulation. Use your find command to search the annotation for the term, optical scan, and read how optical scan systems also fail democracy.

Also note the paper by Ryan and Hoke that focuses on the GEMS tabulation system which is used in Diebold’s optical scan system. Not only are optical scans vulnerable to hack, but apparently, they were designed that way.

Many people, by now, have heard of California’s Top-To-Bottom Review of Diebold, Hart and Sequoia touch screens and optical scan systems. Cleveland State University Center for Election Integrity Chief, Dr. Candice Hoke, summarized all the findings into a two page document. In a personal email, she wrote:

I was the team leader for the TTBR Diebold Documentation assessment. The TTBR study's lead scientists provided suggestions for this short summary but it is ultimately my work. To reduce over 500 pages to two pages, at least a few
important findings – especially about design flaws not relating to security issues -- had to be sidestepped.

I urge all Americans to read that document, as well. The more each of us grasps the inappropriateness of using such technology in public elections, the quicker we will return to a more secure voting and counting system.

While computer experts continue to detail the myriad ways that software-driven systems can be manipulated, as detailed in my annotation, only some of these technical problems can be addressed by implementing best management practices. Particularly, this includes better training and the employment of expensive experts and expensive chain of custody protocols.

But since the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon are unable to keep their systems from being hacked, we can have even less confidence in our electoral management bodies who are paid far less and have a far smaller staff than either federal agency.

Optical Scan Systems Obfuscate the Vote Count

The hackability of software-driven systems is only one reason to reject their use in public elections. More importantly, the use of any machine hides the vote count from the public. Josef Stalin understood this when he said, “It’s not who votes that counts; it’s who counts the vote.”

Free and fair elections, as contemplated by international experts, require a secret vote and a public count. Democratic elections are to be transparent, so that the entire public can have confidence in reported results.

The 2007 Florida study affirmed prior findings that voting on touch screen systems removes voter privacy. With the use of touch screen systems, the vote becomes public and the count becomes secret.
It is somewhat gratifying that the work of thousands of people have finally moved some of our nation’s electoral management bodies to decide that they should reject touch screen voting systems. But this does not go far enough.

When votes are counted on an optical scan system, there is a machine and several experts between the voter and her vote. This expensive overlay obfuscates the vote count and renders its results questionable, at best. Software can be programmed to read the blackened bubbles in a way other than how the voter intended.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Audit

San Diego elections chief has sued the State of California on the grounds that audits are too time-consuming and expensive. This, in a county that sends its voting machines on sleepovers with poll workers weeks in advance of an election.

Anyone who has read any of the scientific studies understands that only a minute of unsupervised access is all that is needed to subvert the integrity of that machine.

But, audits provide false confidence, and should not be relied on for accurate results. Get it right on election night, not days later.
Numerous examples exist – in present day elections – showing how audits reveal outlandish results that the courts allowed to stand.

The most blatant example is the Jennings-Buchanan race in Florida’s District 13 with a whopping 15% undervote rate in one county, when the national average is normally 3% undervotes in a Senate race.

When a team of us counted the signatures in Franklin County’s November 2006 election, fully one-fourth* of all precincts showed that the number of signatures did not match official reports. During the recount, computer scientist Dr. Rebecca Mercuri observed:

In summary, there are numerous reasons why there cannot be confidence in the election process, the recount, and the vote totals for the Franklin County, Ohio November 7, 2006 election. These reasons include:

a) the denial of an appropriate recount from the VVPAT/RTAL materials for the requested precincts;

b) significant evidence that parts of original RTALs and end tally reports were missing;

c) evidence the voting system was inappropriately configured and improperly used during the election;

d) indication that election procedures were violated, including the possibility of password overrides during setup, and use of the machines to cast ballots after RTAL paper supplies has run out;

e) evidence of inappropriate impounding and handling of election materials at the County warehouse following the election, including improper exposure of the VVPAT/RTALs;

f) unexplained disparities between the public counters of ballots cast and the number of voters who signed the poll books in many precincts; and

g) misleading information provided to voters, and not properly followed up by the County, regarding the safety and examination of the voting machines and system.

The judge in that case was unimpressed with these “anomalies” and declared the official results credible. Clearly, audits and recounts are meaningless when it comes to elections.

Election attorney Paul Lehto writes:

I, for one, have never doubted that computers including opti-scan computers CAN COUNT. That's all that the usual "audit" and certainly the usual "recount" ever test for: whether or not there was funky addition in the counts (presuming proper chain of custody between the first count and the audit or recount).

I realize that, as Bev (Harris) points out, a real "audit" would be significantly broader and include the full panoply of chain of custody issues, etc., but in practice as I see it, this broader evaluation either doesn't occur at all because it's not fully mandated, or else problems that DO occur or rather are found by the audit's broader provisions do NOT result in any remedy or result that changes anything or results in any consequences.

Many people feel confident with optical scan systems since they are used in school exams. They fail to recognize, tho, that test results can be directly questioned by a student whose name is on a specific test answer sheet. This is not possible with anonymous ballots.

Trust Has No Place in Public Elections

When Holland computer experts obtained a Nedap-Liberty voting system and proved it could be hacked, the Netherlands rejected that machine and then outlawed such independent tests. Now why would they do that?

When Project EVEREST published its results of Ohio’s voting systems, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner revealed that these vulnerabilities existed in all the systems used in the highly questioned 2004 election.
Bev Harris of Black Box Voting spent 2007 pursuing the Trust Me Election Model and published her shocking findings that pertain to all 50 states. She writes:

The very core of the voting machine controversy is not paper trails or spot check procedures. The essence of whether an election system can be trusted is whether it allows the owners of the government, The People, to view the counting
and the chain of custody. Votes counted in secret, and secret chain of custody can never work unless we change human nature itself…

Those in control of the counting and chain of custody for secret vote counting are the very same public officials caught in financial cheating. And should we really be surprised? Human nature is imperfect. The founders of this nation realized that, and precisely for that reason, envisioned a system based on distrust, not trust.

Hand Count Paper Ballots

The very nature of computers renders them inappropriate for public elections, asserts computer expert Bruce O’Dell. Evidence continues to mount against these machines, optical scan as well as touch screen.
The tried and true method of hand counting the ballots at the precinct on election night is the easiest to secure from fraud, and it allows the public to observe the vote count. Open counts are a necessary facet of elections by the people.

As these truths become more evident to more people, perhaps corporate media outlets will be unable to paper over the problems inherent in optical scan voting systems, as with all software-driven election systems.

Just having paper ballots isn't enough; how it’s counted matters.

* I testified in court that our signature count differed from the official report of vote totals in 68% of the precincts we audited. (We audited 1/4 of all precincts in the Franklin County, Ohio November 2006 election.)

In collecting forensic data, we found one column in the signature books which contained marks by pollworkers that each represented different information. When reviewing what my team of auditors had reported for these differing marks, I realized the entire column of "provisional" votes had to be removed from my analysis because of potentially inconsistent interpretation by my auditors.

For example, pollworkers marked the "provisional" vote column on Election Day to note if a voter voted provisionally, or if a voter voted Absentee (whether or not he or she showed up at the polls that day). This conflict in how pollworkers marked the column provided another level of inconsistency in the forensic records which rendered this column useless in performing our audit.

When I prepared the spreadsheet of our findings for court, I created two analysis columns - one which used the "provisional" vote column from the pollbooks and one which used official reports of how many voters had voted provisionally.

When using the second analysis - which compared the number of signatures of those who arrived on Election Day and voted in person PLUS the number of provisional voters as reported by the Franklin County Board of Elections, our audit revealed that official numbers conflicted with the audit in 24% of the precincts.

This second analysis is the most conservative estimate of how far off official results are as compared to the paper records, and is stunning in light of BOE Director Matt Damschroder's testimony that he had less than 1% error rate in this election.

e-Voting Recount Tips

The below How-To list was sent on February 18th to some election activists who want to post a general How-To manual for citizens.

These tips apply to “recounting” a voter verified paper audit trail, but many ideas transfer over to a recount actual paper ballots marked by voters.

Registration List

In advance of an anticipated recount, request the list of registered voters for that county, for the period after registration closed and before the election. (If your election district allows same-day registration, request the final list as created on Election Day.)

For longer term activists, request the list of registered voters several months in advance of the November election, as well. Request the lists at two or three points throughout the year to study purge patterns (where election officials remove voters from the rolls).

How is the selection of precincts to be determined? Is this a random selection? If so, describe how the precincts to be recounted were randomly selected. Did you observe this process or was it done out of your sight? Note this in your report.

Some recounts may target specific precincts to be recounted, at the discretion of the contestant. Find out the criteria for how these targeted precincts were selected (if possible) and note that in your report.

Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail a.k.a. Real Time Audit Log

What is being “recounted” is the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT), also known as the Real Time Audit Log (RTAL). This intact singular roll of paper shows:

when the machine was turned on (date and time),
the results of the Audit and Logic tests,
any “password overrides” and other messages produced throughout the day,
the actual ballot choices of each individual voter, in the order voted,
when they “closed out the machine” and
totals of that machine for the day are printed.

This singular intact roll of paper – that can be 300 feet long – will also record “service menu entered” or other indication of technician involvement.

There is one VVPAT per machine, but there can be several machines per precinct.

Create Your Recount Form in Advance

Bring pre-printed forms on which to note specific data and vote totals. These forms are where your totals are recorded, and are separate from your tally sheets.

Touchscreens that use a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT), sometimes called a real time audit log (RTAL), produce a thermal paper roll that can be up to 300 feet long. This records all the ballot selections by each voter who voted on that particular machine. Be sure you are close enough to read it, as the print is very tiny. Look for and note:

Precinct number

Date of recount

Names of all present (and their position, if officials)

Machine number (there may be from one to several machines per precinct). On an ES&S iVotronic touch screen system, also note:

· Does the “public count” read zero at the beginning of the tape
· Note the “protective” or “protected” count at the beginning of the tape
· Note the “protective” or “protected” count at the end of the tape
· Note the number of “coded ballots” also known a provisional votes

Candidate names, with space for

· Number of in-person votes
· Number of provisional votes (or “coded” ballots)
· Number of undervotes

Is the VVPAT torn or incomplete? Has it been taped? Is it written on? Below is a list of problems previously observed on an ES&S iVotronic touch screen:

· paper jams
· no vote recorded (tape says “not opened”)
· not used (reported by Board of Elections)
· one vote recorded
· torn tapes
· “PEB not accessed” (Precinct Electronic Ballot is plugged into each machine for that precinct and downloads the vote totals)
· blank roll of paper
· roll reversed (which means the roll has been viewed, and rewound backwards)
· rolls are not signed and dated by pollworkers
· password override message

Look for computer generated warnings that are printed on the VVPAT which indicate the machine was accessed during Election Day, a password was changed, machine improperly shut down, etc. Photocopy or photograph these VVPATs, or if that is not possible, write down the entire warning message.

Is there a large space between voters? The spacing should be even between voters. Note which machine exhibits this on its roll, and how often it occurs on a given roll.

Note unusual voting patters of a given voter. For example, in the November 2006 recount in Franklin County, Ohio, one ballot I observed showed a vote for Green Party candidate, Bob Fitrakis, for governor, all other selections were for Democrats, and for the hotly contested U.S. Congressional seat, the voter supposedly chose conservative Republican Deborah Pryce.

Tally Sheets – Use Lined Paper

Two tally methods are offered:

Hash marks of four //// can be crossed with diagonal hash mark so that each block of hash marks represents 5 votes, making it easy to total by counting by five.

The dot tally method uses far less space, and gives blocks of 10, which is even easier to total than blocks of five. This is a preferred method when counting large numbers of objects like ballots, but it does take a little explanation.

Mark a dot in each corner of a square (that would be four votes). Connect the dots to form the square (another four votes). Put an X thru the middle of the square (another two votes).
This represents ten votes:

Each dot or line represents one vote:
[ dot tally pictures did not transfer into this post]

In less space than it takes to make five hash marks, a block of ten is recorded using the dot tally method, and it is much neater and thus easier to count correctly.

Tally Order

Richard Hayes Phillips suggests the following order of tallying, which will expose ballot tampering (high number of consecutive ballots for the same candidate).

Using lined paper for your tally sheets, write the name of the candidate first called out and give that vote a hash mark (or a dot, if using the dot tally method). Continue recording consecutive candidate choices on the same line (and continuing onto the next line if necessary).

When a different candidate name is called out, write that candidate’s name on the next line and begin marking. Again, continue recording consecutive candidate choices on the same line.

Repeat this process throughout. When finished, you should be able to visually ascertain if an unusually high number of consecutive votes for a particular candidate occurred.

Signature Audit

(I have a couple pages of tips, but I have to distill this from a 10-page report. I’ll wait to see if you want this level of detail.)

Political Realism vs Negotiating with Our Hands

Successful tactics from around the globe inspire adoption into the hand-count elections movement. Rejection of hopeless “realism” – that politicians aren’t considering our demand for hand counts - is but a part of the overall strategy. If citizens expect accurate election results, they must run parallel polls, observe, investigate and video the vote. Power is never given; it must be taken.

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected.”

So said Tom Paine back at the height of the Enlightenment. A century later, New York case law reveals judicial comprehension that:

“Statutory regulations are enacted to secure freedom of choice and to prevent fraud, and not by technical obstructions to make the right of voting insecure and difficult.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick explains that:

"Democratic elections are not merely symbolic....They are competitive, periodic, inclusive, (and) definitive …”

It’s probably safe to say that all election integrity advocates agree with these premises. Where we differ is in how to achieve our mutual goal of accurate election results. Some would have us adopt the “reality” that the machines are here to stay, while others would demand transparent vote counts, now. Still others want to ignore the entire issue of how our votes are counted, as they work to confront other, less immediately-serious failures in U.S. elections.

Votes counted in secret are a hallmark of tyranny, if Robert Heinlein is correct that “secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny.” Votes counted on easily hacked software-driven systems do not provide us with “definitive” outcomes, but instead are “technical obstructions to make the right of voting insecure.” They provide us with no basis for confidence in reported results.

Machine fans, or defeated hand-count fans, argue that we must be “politically realistic” in our quest for election integrity. The argument goes that politicians aren’t considering hand-counted paper ballots, so to succeed in our agreed goal of honest elections, we have to accept machines.

What they call political “reality,” hand-count fans call self-defeating compromise. Surely, compromise is fatal to our cause.

To believe that what politicians want is the only course open to us is to deny the vast power of the will of the people. A 2006 Zogby poll determined that 92% want transparent elections. A February 2008 poll found that 78% disapproves of Congress. Clearly, corporate-sponsored Congress has no intention of doing the bidding of We the People, so whatever options Pols put on the table are necessarily suspect.

“Negotiating with your hands”

The election integrity movement is not the only social justice movement plagued by “political realists” who would compromise our position into meaningless “reform” such as low-percentage audits. In Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein contrasts two separate disasters that culminated in very different outcomes based on which reality was accepted, and thus, which strategy was pursued.

In the 2005 Katrina disaster in New Orleans, power holders successfully kept poor residents from returning to their apartments. As recently as two months ago, citizens were tasered and jailed for resisting the destruction of affordable housing. Land developers now stand to make substantial fortunes from the land grab. (Here we see Derrick Jensen’s 2nd, 4th and 5th Premises holding true.)

In the 2004 Asian tsunami, a different scenario played out. Klein writes:

“Dozens of coastal villages were flattened by the wave, but unlike in Sri Lanka, many Thai settlements were successfully rebuilt within months. The difference did not come from the government. Thailand’s politicians were just as eager as those elsewhere to use the storm as an excuse to evict fishing people and hand over land tenure to large resorts.

“Yet what set Thailand apart was that villagers approached all government promises with intense skepticism and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called land “reinvasions.”

“They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been. In some cases, reconstruction began immediately…

“The most daring reinvasions were performed by Thailand’s indigenous
fishing peoples called the Moken… After centuries of isenfranchisement, the Moken had no illusions that a benevolent state would give them a decent piece of land in exchange for the coastal properties that had been seized.

“So, in one dramatic case, the residents … ‘gathered themselves together and marched right back home, where they encircled their wrecked village with rope, in a symbolic gesture to mark their land ownership,’ explained a report by a Thai NGO…

“All along the Thai coast where the tsunami hit, community leaders say, this kind of direct-action reconstruction is the norm. The key to their success is that ‘people negotiate for their land rights from a position of being in occupation;’ some have dubbed the practice ‘negotiating with your hands.’

Shock Doctrine, pp. 463-464.
Also see http://www.achr.net/

Election activists “negotiate with their hands” by polling voters outside an official polling site. Citizen-run exit polling, or parallel elections, is a concept that proves hand-counts are on the table. Political realists (deliberately?) ignore the power this grassroots movement can have.

Starting in 2005, parallel polling has now been run in the U.S. by the grassroots of both major parties, as well as Greens and Independents. This idea generated from US think tanks, where they were deployed as early as 1986 to check election results in other nations. Today, they’re called citizen run exit polls, but the same structure exists: citizens ask voters to complete a parallel ballot (sometimes called an affidavit or a poll sheet) after they have finished voting in the official election.

Although I’ve been involved in parallel polling since 2005, including Florida’s in 2008, I have yet to see one that achieves ballot security – something we expect of our official electoral management bodies. Surely, we require a basis for confidence in reported results from whomever counts the vote. I expect chain of custody will be preserved with better training, and as more people grasp the significance of parallel polling. Meanwhile, I wholly support the spread of this action, coupled with better training.

Troy Seman of Columbus, Ohio calls parallel elections “the antidote to fraudulent elections.” Because we run these parallel polls, we know hand-counted elections are on the table. Politicians, of course, ignore the significance of parallel polling, while corporate media discounts discrepancies between pollsters and election results. This, despite that parallel polling is used to verify elections around the globe.

But as this movement grows, and as more voters experience self-empowerment from citizen-run elections, there will come a point when even politicians will admit that hand-counting is “on the table” simply because We the People put it there.

Several other methods of “negotiating with our hands” are recommended: Be an official domestic observer, video the vote, count the signatures in polling books and compare them to official results for in-person voters, follow the voting machines on Election Day, and blog, blog, blog about all of it. Much of what you’ll discover is that the records are unauditable and chain of custody is wholly lacking, but even that is important to convey. Overall, a citizen’s job is to study how elections are run, as if you are the boss, because you are.

Others actions include filing suit, on a variety of different premises. One campaign in the works now demands a voting machine recall.

Incrementalism As a Strategy in New York

Refusing to compromise the demand for hand-counted (“HC”) elections does not mean that an incremental approach is off the table. Attorney Andi Novick is leading the hand-count movement in New York (where machine fans far outnumber those who comprehend the utter failure and completely inappropriate use of software-driven systems in democratic elections). Her strategy is to move New Yorkers toward a full hand count of all elections by starting with hand counting just the two federal races this November (thus allowing New York to be HAVA-compliant).

She sent some research provided by a local activist who raised Avi Rubin’s article, Secretary Bowen's Clever Insight, where he said, in part:

"Back to Bowen's comment about software not being suitable for the way election equipment is certified. It is right on the mark. The current
certification process may have been appropriate when a 900 lb lever voting machine was deployed. The machine could be tested every which way, and if it met the criteria, it could be certified because it was not likely to change.

“But software is different. The software lifecycle is dynamic. As an
example, look at the way Apple distributes releases of the iPhone software. The first release was 1.0.0. Two minor version numbers. When the first serious flaw was discovered, they issued a patch and called it version 1.0.1. Apple knew that there would be many minor and some major releases because that is the nature of software. It's how the entire software industry operates.

"So, you cannot certify an electronic voting machine the way you
certify a lever machine.”

Understand that “electronic voting machine” includes optical scan machines as well as touch screen systems. Our Orwellian culture will try to confuse you into believing that “electronic voting” somehow only applies to touch screens. The term applies to both, as do the lack of securability.

Incrementalism As a Strategy in the Democracy Movement

Several writers address incrementalism as a strategy. Arthur MacEwan's Neoliberalism or Democracy discusses the idea of incrementalism and reform, in slightly different terms, but making the same general point. This book, along with Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (2007), brings home the point that any democracy requires democratic organization of economic affairs, not just democratic elections. MacEwan writes:

"When I advocate 'democracy' as the basis for an economic development strategy, I mean political democracy as it is usually understood: elections, civil liberties and the right to organize. But beyond these essential forms of democracy, I mean something more substantive. A democratic economic development strategy is one that puts people in a position to participate in decisions about and effectively exercise political power over their economic lives. It puts
people in a position where their lives are not dominated by either the market or the state."

Or by privatized elections where votes are counted in secret by corporations. With that as the premise (which totally captures my attention and makes my heart flutter with hope), I can quote him and apply his thinking to hand-counted elections:

"If the goal is to alter the nature of the system and make a real difference in people's lives, then we need to formulate and implement practical programs that both improve economic conditions and challenge the structure of social-political power."

Hand-counted elections certainly challenge the current power structure, and being far less expensive than computers also affect local economies with the billions spent on computerized voting systems. Sally Castleman writes:

“DREs and Optical Scanner equipment are more costly than any hand count system. Not only is the initial cost substantial, but other costs include ongoing testing and certification, secure storage (often necessitating temperature controlled environments), maintenance, reprogramming, updates, service, batteries, upgrading to newer models to keep up with specification requirements, and salaries for specialized technical experts.”

Back to MacEwan:

"Programs of this type have been dubbed 'non-reformist reforms' ... which advance toward a radical transformation of society and can be contrasted with 'reformist reforms.'"

All hand-count fans assert radical change by demanding election night counts in full public view, which restores some power to the people.

"A reformist reform is one which subordinates its objective to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system and policy."

(a.k.a. 'political realism’)

“Reformism rejects those objectives and demands - however deep the need for them - which are incompatible with the preservation of the system.”

Hand-counts remove corporations and experts-only from counting or verifying vote totals - a government-run expert system with a vested interest in the outcome that may conflict with the public will.

"(A non-reformist) reform is one which is conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands."

Hand-counts meet the transparent vote counting criterion of democratic elections, something all advocates of free and fair elections demand.

MacEwan suggests that this latter reform is possible without the chaos of revolutionary upheaval, given certain criteria are met. It is here where we get to incrementalism. He argues that incrementalism can be used to advance our agenda without compromising our position. The third criterion seems most relevant, but I don't want to dilute his position by leaving out the first two.

"Democratic initiatives must: 1. Make a positive difference in people's lives. They should not demand that a sacrifice be made in the name of some greater good; they must bring something good in themselves. Their goals are defined by what should be;"

Auditing an election system which is vulnerable to undiscoverable tampering is no safeguard. We do not sacrifice election integrity on the grounds that politicians have taken hand-counts off the table.

"2. Challenge the existing relations of power and authority and in some way move society towards a more democratic structure. They need not overturn or destroy the existing social structures. Yet in some manner they must pose a threat to the existing social and economic structures. The essence of this threat is that these initiatives expand the realm of democracy and enhance democratic authority;"

Clearly, citizen-run elections do this; as well as citizen-oversight of the count on election night.

"3. Be possible in the sense that their implementation does not require a prior revolutionary, structural reorganization of society. They may set in motion a process of change that pushes society in the direction of dramatic structural reorganization - that is precisely their point. Yet, because they are particular and partial and therefore are not themselves dependent on that reorganization, they are possible."

When thinking about hand-count initiatives, it's hard to miss the idea that we are seeking to alter the existing economic power structure and authority by demanding citizens count paper ballots. Not only do we shut down a new product (albeit wholly inadequate and inappropriate for the task), and thus threaten vendors, but we also challenge government authority to determine its own election results by counting the ballots ourselves.

Political Realism - A Policy of Failure

Incrementally implementing hand-counted elections (first the federal races, then the local ones, for example) is wholly different from believing that hand-counts aren’t possible in the U.S. My hope is that election activists move away from this position of defeat, and insist on transparent vote counts, now, as are done the world over in emerging and stable democracies.

Just because the last two presidential elections were stolen is no reason to accept that 2008 will be stolen. All it takes is motivating the masses into Election Day action. Given that grassroot Republicans are now on board with parallel polling, our movement for transparent elections has a real chance of success. We implement hand-counted elections by doing it ourselves – not by waiting for politicians to do it for us.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire explains:

"In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a 'quick return to power,' forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into impossible 'dialogue' with the dominant elites. It ends up being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls ‘realism.’"

In Age of Consent, George Monbiot gets right to the point:

"Had those people who campaigned for national democratization in the 19th century in Europe approached their task with the same hopeless realism as the reformists campaigning for global democratization today, they would have argued that, as the authorities were not ready to consider granting the universal franchise, they should settle for a 'realistic' option instead; and their descendents today might have been left with a situation in which all those earning, say, $50,000 a year or possessing 20 acres of land were permitted to vote, but those with less remained disenfranchised.

"Every revolution could have been - indeed most certainly was - described as 'unrealistic' just a few years before it happened. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, female enfranchisement, the rise of communism, the fall of communism, the aspirations of decolonization movements all over the world were mocked by those reformists who believed the best we could hope for was to tinker with existing institutions and beg some small remission from dominant
powers.

“Had you announced in 1985 that within five years men and women with sledgehammers would be knocking down the Berlin Wall, the world would have laughed in your face. All of these movements, like our global democratic revolution, depended for their success on mass mobilization and political will. Without these components, they were impossible. With them, they were unstoppable."

Age of Consent, pp 65-66

To imagine 10-12 voters per neighborhood counting the ballots on election night is easy to imagine. It takes an hour to train people in hand counts... and just think how things might change if reported election results were authentic. I imagine Congress would be freaking out that 4/5 of the nation disapproves of it. They’d worry about their jobs and change they behavior right quick, if elections were honest.

There is no honorable justification to continue using these machines. They must go, and they must go now.We must reject the defeatist notion that hand-counted elections are off the table for 2008. The grassroots already have the political will for fundamental change; our self-appointed leaders simply need to articulate nationally what we’ve been doing locally.

No compromise with political realists is necessary; negotiating with our hands – counting, observing, investigating and videoing the vote ourselves – will bring us an accurate vote count. Power is never given; it must be taken.


Much thanks to attorney Andi Novick for the 1895 NY case law quote.

References:

Rady Ananda, Annotated Bibliography of Expert Reports on Voting Systems, Dec. 11, 2007 at GuvWurld.org.

-- Revolution in Florida: Repubs Question Elections, Too, January 30, 2008 at OpEdNews.com.

Asian Coalition for Housing Rights www.achr.net; and see Tom Kerr’s New Orleans Visit Asian Tsunami Areas, September 9-17, 2006, p. 11 for the wonderful “negotiate with their hands” quote.

Dave Berman, Voter Confidence Resolution, 2005 at GuvWurld.org.

Sally Castleman, Summary: Estimating hours and costs for hand counters, New York, December 2007, at GuvWurld.org

Alan Fram, Bush, Congress Hit New Low in AP Poll, February 8, 2008 at Boston Globe.

Amy Goodman, New Orleans Police Taser, Pepper Spray Residents Seeking to Block Public Housing Demolition, Dec. 21, 2007 at DemocracyNow.org.

Bev Harris, The New Hampshire “Shame of Custody,” January 25, 2008, OpEdNews.com.

Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100, Shasta Publishers, 1953.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame (Volumes I and II), Seven Stories Press, 2006.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, Legitimacy and Force (Vol. I: Political and Moral Dimensions), Transaction Publishers, 1988.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism, Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Arthur MacEwan, Neoliberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets and Alternatives for the 21st Century, St. Martin's Press, 1999.

George Monbiot, The Age of Consent: Manifesto for a new world order, new ed., Harper Perennial, 2004.

Andi Novick, Alarms Should Go Off Whenever the Discrepancies between “Official” Results and the Polls Can’t Be Explained, January 10, 2008 at OpEdNews.com.


Sheila Parks, On-Site Observations of the Hand-Counting of Paper Ballots and Recommendations for the General Election of 2008, July 18, 2007 at OpEdNews.com.

Brian Rothenberg, Shadows on High: Election Machine Drama, All Dam-ed Up and Nowhere to Go, February 9, 2008. Regarding “political reality” see the first and second comments posted beneath this article.

Avi Rubin, Secretary Bowen’s Clever Insight, August 7, 2007 at avi-rubin.blogspot.com.

Paddy Shaffer, OEJC Calls for Ohio Voting Systems, Machine Recall, Return and Refund, November, 2007 at electionDefenseAlliance.org

Zogby International, Americans Concerned About Election Transparency and Security, August 23, 2006.

Exposing Official Misconduct

John Burik is correct that many activists felt that California's Red Team Reports were sufficient, since Ohio uses the same machines. So we grumbled about the additional cost to taxpayers for Ohio to run its own tests. Given what's been exposed in Rothenberg's article, we see now that in Ohio's political climate, Brunner had to run new tests: all of Ohio was ignoring what California (and Florida, and others) found.

Both Burik and The Brennan Center still fail to recognize that using machines to record or count our vote constitutes a secret vote count - we can't see inside those machines. Secret vote countes are not used in democracies.

As this idea sinks in to justice advocates across the nation, the movement for hand-counted paper ballots is growing.

Instead of spending more money on technological fixes to attempt to secure unsecurable and otherwise outrageously expensive systems, we should upgrade to hand-counting the ballots at the precinct, on election night, before all who wish to observe.

No machine will provide us with a basis for confidence in reported results because the use of machines obscures the vote count. Why should we trust government? This nation was founded on distrust, ergo a system of checks and balances was developed.

BlackBoxVoting has been presenting video and written reports on what's wrong with the "Trust Us Model" of electoral management. Only a fool or a fascist would allow public elections to be obscured from the public.

The way to begin to restore a basis for confidence in reported results is for citizens to observe and perform the vote count. It means donating time on Election Day, instead of waiting to be told who you voted for. Instead, we tell them.

Given that the ACLU sued in Ohio to continue using the absolute worse election system devised, Brian Rothenberg's point is well taken