Courts Order Re-Do of Presidential Election - WHAT?!

EC: "Faith-based voting" entails our reliance on electronic voting systems.

The problem was summed up by CIA cybersecurity expert, Steven Stigall, during a 2009 address to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). "I follow the vote," Stigall told the assembled commissioners, "and whenever a vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that's an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to...make bad things happen."

With rare but important exceptions, votes in the United States are, ostensibly, electronically tallied. I use the word "ostensibly" because, in the absence of access to trade-secret protected source codes, there is no way to know whether what takes place inside the electronic bowels of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting machines entails the counting of votes (or inside the optical scan central tabulators)--as opposed to a pre-programmed percentage result. And that can occur irrespective of whether the voter actually sees their vote flipped on screen, as has often occurred.

All three electronic tabulation systems, optical scan, DREs and, especially, the Internet are subject both to malicious manipulation of the electronic count and to unintended systems failures.

It is possible to verify or refute an official count produced by an optical scan system via a hand-count of the paper ballots. There have been instances where hand-counts have turned the machine count winner into the final official count loser. But those hand-counts are nearly as scarce as hen's teeth. In most U.S. elections, there's a winner and a loser even though not even one single ballot has been counted by any human being.

With respect to foreign elections, our own government treats an absence of transparency combined with significant gaps between exit polls and the official count as evidence of election fraud. But, when it comes to our own elections, both the U.S. government and corporate-owned media almost always ignore both a complete lack of transparency and what are often startling gaps between the unadjusted exit polls and the official count. Indeed, those who so much as raise concerns in such cases are often derisively dismissed as "conspiracy theorists." The voting public is simply expected to accept the official count as valid. That is why election integrity advocates refer to U.S. elections as "faith based."

JB: That is not good news. And we shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel here if elsewhere they've successfully dealt with these same issues. You alluded to other countries; how do they do it? By that I mean, how do they count votes in a way that the public is correctly reassured that the "official" vote count has been arrived at in a transparent and verifiable way? Is that too much to ask? Faith definitely has its place but not in elections, when there is so much at stake.

EC: I should point out that the problems related to e-voting are by no means confined to the U.S. We now know for a fact, for example, that Mexico's 1988 presidential election was electronically stolen.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).