“Frankly, without paper ballots and without audits, we would have let the wrong winners serve.” – Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher
It looks like this author Mark Adams only became aware of the issue of electronic ballots and electronic counting when someone emailed him about a South Carolina legislative decision on its elections:
OpEdNews – Article: South Carolina Elections Are UNCONSTITUTIONAL!?!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_mark_a___080114_south_carolina_elect.htm
South Carolina elections are unconstitutional? How could that be? Surely, no one in our government would conduct any election which violated the Constitution, and if any scheme threatened to undermine the very foundation of our government, our power to elect our leaders, the press would expose it, wouldn’t it?
After all, our government was founded upon the principle that all of its actions must comply with the Constitution. In fact, Article VI of the Constitution of South Carolina requires all of the State’s officers to swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of this State and of the United States.” So, they would probably at least read it before enacting any new law, right?
The Constitution of the United States includes a guarantee for a republican form of government in every state:
Section 4 of Article 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
What we need is to go back to paper ballots at each precinct voting station. On the official election day, people mark a paper ballot. Nothing else.
Here’s a good example of why:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9224
A public hand-count of paper ballots in Palm Beach County, FL over the weekend has decisively determined the winners and losers of several disputed elections after paper ballot optical-scan computer tallying systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems (now owned by Dominion Voting) declared the incorrect “winners” of several races in a March 13th election.
But due to recent legislation, it now ILLEGAL to hand-count ballots after they have been tabulated by a computer! That’s outrageous!
Somebody should sue Florida for this! That’s an outrage against the constitutionally recognized guarantee of a republican form of government. And why are ambitious politically minded prosecutors going after cases that look hopeless like the one against Zimmerman -wasting our money and setting up for worse political blowback than they wanted to avoid– and don’t go after the state for this assault on their own constituents’ rights?
English: Detail of Preamble to Constitution of the United States Polski: Fragment (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There were problems reported feeding paper into the electronic voting machines during the Illinois primary March 30 because of high humidity that warped the paper enough to cause those problems. But so what? Let us clearly mark a paper ballot, and then let’s hand-count them! Palm Beach County election workers re-counted their votes fast enough, after all.
But a dispute over who is to blame for the initial failure flared up again over the weekend as Dominion issued a statement that seems to contradict their previous admission that their software was to blame.
“The hand-count was 100%. We weren’t missing a ballot,” the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher told The BRAD BLOG this afternoon about what happened over the weekend. “Frankly, without paper ballots and without audits, we would have let the wrong winners serve.”
What will happen next, however — for Palm Beach County, one of Florida’s largest, as well as the other 285 jurisdictions across the country where the very same voting system is currently in use — is anything but clear…
Democracy’s Gold Standard
John Greene, who was initially announced as the loser of the Wellington City Council race by the Dominion/Sequoia system was pleased with the results of Saturday’s public hand-count which was only allowed in the state of Florida — where it is now illegal to manually examine paper ballots for a hand-count after they’ve already been tabulated by a computer — after a judge gave the okay.
Maybe even a CHOICE not mandate, to use a computer that prints out your votes onto paper, right there, no exceptions and that ONLY if there is a sufficient quantity of printed ballot forms handy for a backup.
But then ever voter has ALL his votes on a paper ballot that he then inserts into a box or receptacle, and at the end of the voting schedule the volunteers (paid or not or both) plus anybody who wants to watch, and everybody who wants to watch, monitor the counting.
The results are written down, and everybody agrees on them, and all participant and party representatives sign off on them ON PAPER, and THEN and only THEN they call in the results.
Okay, then they are counted at the next higher level, say, county, but IN PUBLIC, who in turn compile all the counts broken down by precinct, to the state, and repeat.
All in public, and at each step, immediately post the numbers on-line where the precinct workers and watchers are required to review them for accuracy.
Anything short of this is a cover-up for fraud. Not proof of fraud, but a built-in cover for fraud.
A recount is worth less than toilet sludge if it is just a reprint of the same electronic numbers.
We’re only HALFWAY there in Miami-Dade, it’s votes printed onto paper but we feed them into a machine that counts them. That’s a hidden counting program.
Voting is so simple and it is too valuable to trust to a black box, or software vendors and system administrators.
Trutherator's Weblog 