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Departments Election Issues Hacking the recalls: Why we must have hand-counted paper ballots and citizen exit polls In at least some cases, the candidate receiving the lesser of the actual votes cast — perhaps, in fact, the candidate you passionately opposed — will be declared the official victor. Chances are, you either think we are nuts or you are already upset with the dismal state of elections in Wisconsin, if not the country. Either way, we hope this article will change your view of both (a) the security of the elections and (b) the ability of ordinary citizens like you to improve that security. Here’s a second prediction which gets to the heart of the real problem: No one — not the Government Accountability Board, not the media, not any elected official, and most certainly not you – has the slightest hope of ever disproving our first prediction in light of current election procedures and practices. While our first prediction is open to debate, the second is rock solid. Why? Because our appallingly compromised election procedures in this state are simply incapable of detecting or preventing election fraud, due to a combination of wholly inadequate statutory safeguards and criminally negligent enforcement. (Note by the way, that we are not talking about voter fraud, which was ostensibly the reason behind the recently enacted voter ID law. Both the prevalence and practical significance of voter fraud is a discredited myth. If you want your candidate to win an election dishonestly, it is far easier and more effective to rig the counting of the ballots on the electronic voting machines. We find it interesting and significant that those in the Wisconsin Legislature who rammed through the voter ID law have so little to say about the far greater threat of election fraud. ) Election fraud is not just a hypothetical concern. In addition to strong circumstantial evidence in countless other cases, instances of clear fraud have been uncovered that led to actual indictments in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and Clay County, Kentucky. Echoes of Cuyahoga can be heard (by those inclined to hear them) in the recent Waukesha recount. Experts on election integrity have been sounding two main alarms for at least ten years: (1) it’s far too easy to rig elections in ways that are difficult to detect, and (2) there is considerable circumstantial evidence that it is regularly occurring. Consider this: Approximately 1.48 million votes were cast in the Prosser v. Kloppenburg election. The final published difference between them was a mere 7,004 votes, so flipping only 3,502 of them could have given the election back to Kloppenburg. That’s only a single vote flipped (or, alternatively, two Prosser votes simply discarded) per 422 cast! Now consider this: Electronic voting machines use proprietary software to tabulate votes. Not even election officials are allowed to view or test the integrity of the software or the memory cards. The counting of votes simply cannot be observed or verified by the voting public or the election officials. It is impossible to know whether it is being done correctly and honestly. We are being told to take it on faith that the voting machine vendors, and those who have access to the machines, are honest. This is not merely risky, it is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. The Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy (free viewing online, 81 min.) presents a shocking demonstration of how easily electronic votes can be hacked, and it also offers troubling evidence that election rigging is actually occurring. Even if you don’t read beyond this point, please view Hacking Democracy and urge family, friends, and acquaintances to watch it as well. You will never view our elections or electronic voting machines the same way again. We’re accustomed to hearing the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” applied to suspects being tried for crimes, and that’s as it should be. But we in the United States, more so than in many other developed countries, inappropriately apply the same standard of evidence to our elections. Our naive assumption is that unless unambiguous evidence of fraud or gross error is actually uncovered, it most likely didn’t occur. If you can’t see it, it must not exist. This is what those who corrupt the election process count on. Election fraud, like any crime, requires both motive and opportunity. And ample motive can already be found on either side of the current ideological divide in our country. Imagine the zealous conservative who sincerely believes that abortion is murder and that liberal politicians are therefore condoning murder on a large scale. Or imagine the zealous liberal who sincerely believes that conservative policies will condemn the earth to perish, and soon, from runaway greenhouse warming. Either of these individuals might be persuaded that it’s morally justified and urgently necessary to commit election fraud in defense of humankind. Would anyone who cares about honest elections deliberately put either person in charge of actually overseeing and enforcing election procedures? But that’s exactly what we do with our partisan elections for county clerks! As we saw in the last recount, many judgment calls were made as to which ballots would be declared valid and which discarded. And whenever judgment is in play, so is bias. If you are unfortunate enough to live in a county or municipality where your election officials oppose the party or candidate you support, you should be very, very concerned about whether your vote will be fairly counted. But it doesn’t stop at the county level. Consider further the wealthy industrialist who quite plausibly believes that if a certain pro-regulation candidate for Congress loses, s/he and their allies stand to make millions of dollars more per year. Might s/he not be tempted to invest considerable political and financial capital in getting voting machines adopted that can be easily and undetectably hacked? Would they perhaps even get into the business of building them? We may never be able to eliminate the motive, but we can, and we must, identify and eliminate the opportunities to undetectably rig our elections. Until we do, we cannot rationally assume that elections are clean and fair. And we therefore cannot rationally trust the official outcomes of elections. Here, in summary, are the major weak links in Wisconsin elections: Vote tabulation. Can we be certain votes are being honestly and correctly tabulated by electronic devices? No. Unfortunately, current procedures and the electronic voting machines themselves provide absolutely no way to independently verify the accuracy of electronic vote counts short of a full hand recount of paper ballots. And by Wisconsin law, most of the recount must be done on the same electronic voting machines that could have been hacked in the first place. Be aware that the memory and printouts can be made to differ from the real voter intent and that the pre-election testing is useless for detecting fraudulent programming! Also, although required by Wisconsin law, touch-screen machines used in some districts were found to provide no paper record and thus no voter-verifiable (or recountable) record of the vote! Chain of custody. For the purposes of a recount, are we ensuring that ballots can’t be added or subtracted between the time they are cast by the voter and the time they are recounted? As we clearly saw in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court recount, the mandated procedures for our elections are not always followed. Citizen observers witnessed a stunning range of abnormalities in the labeling/sealing of ballot bags and even discovered a poll tape dated March 30, days before the election. The poll tape in question, with its time stamp of 1:40 AM, was sworn to as actual votes. This claim was later retracted only when persistently questioned. We have sampled just some of the evidence suggest that the upcoming recall elections in Wisconsin cannot, and should not, simply be trusted to be honest. Now we come to the most important part: What can still be done to restore confidence in the outcomes? There are in fact a number of effective steps that can still be taken. All of them require citizen engagement. Wisconsin Citizens for Election Protection are urging hand-counts for the recalls. They have sent letters to all the clerks asking that they hand-count the recalls. You can contact them at Protect Wisconsin Contact your county and municipal clerks, the election inspectors and the mayor and councilpersons or the town chair and the supervisors. They can authorize the little extra money that it would take to hand-count paper ballots (HCPB) for the recalls in your municipality. Talk to them about the many jurisdictions in Wisconsin and elsewhere that already count their ballots by hand. Acton, Maine (with seven races and two initiatives, six teams of two people each — a Republican and a Democrat — were able to hand-count, twice, 944 ballots in four hours) and Lyndeborough, New Hampshire are potential models for the rest of the country. Volunteer to serve in non-partisan citizen exit polls being organized by the Election Defense Alliance to rigorously and independently verify vote tabulations and chain-of-custody of ballots. Our final prediction: Unless the Wisconsin recalls are hand-counted in every race, with secure hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) elections, at least some of them will be rigged, with major implications for the balance of power in the Statehouse. Alarmist? Perhaps. But the only way to be certain is to act immediately to close the massive security holes in our elections. Please use social media to share the information and links in this article, and help educate those who naively think that outcome of the recall elections depends solely on getting out the vote, who votes and how they vote. Protecting election integrity is not ‘left’ or ‘right.’ If any commentator or political leader actively objects to making our elections more secure, please ask yourself what their real stake is in the current deeply flawed system. “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.” – Josef Stalin ---------------- Grant W. Petty, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sheila Parks, Ed.D. Founder, Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots This article may be reproduced in whole or part with attribution of authorship and a link to this article. Copyright July 2011, Grant Petty and Sheila Parks. |
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