You asked which machines meet the requirements we are talking about. To the best of my knowledge, right now those are the ES&S (Election Systems and Software) DS200, the ES&S DS850, the Dominion ImageCast Precinct and ImageCast Central, the Hart Intercivic Verity Scan and Verity Central, and the Unisyn Voting OpenElect OVO. Anyone can go to terrific website called VerifiedVoting.org and see exactly what kind of machines are in use in their county!
JB: NY and MD, where all the machines generate digital images, are outliers. For the other 48 states, even if they consult the digital images when available, it's not uniform because not all votes are captured that way. What happens then? As you pointed out, getting an actual look at the paper ballots, let alone digital images, has been made all but impossible, if not illegal.
RL: Yes, NY and MD are outliers, in that they are the only states which have 100% voter hand-marked paper ballots, counted by late-model optical scan vote counting machines which make and store digital images of each ballot. But the good news is that a nationwide, hack-proof, transparent vote counting system is really within reach, because around half of US counties and cities already use the right kind of machine. It's just not standardized across every state. This is where citizen awareness and lobbying come in.
Citizens should be demanding, and it's important to get the wording right, to have 100% voter hand-marked paper ballots, counted by machines which generate high resolution images of the ballots. It's important because there are many ways to easily go off-track and wind up with a system that was worse than before. Tulsi Gabbard has a bill out for election reform, but it's terrible, because it allows touch screen machines and makes no mention of ballot images. Any touch screen system, except for disability, should be outlawed. So should any system which does not even generate a paper record of any kind, like they still use in South Carolina. Think of it, South Carolina is a critical early presidential primary state, where campaigns pick up or lose momentum that affects the rest of the presidential primaries. Yet it is totally opaque, unaccountable, and hackable. Maybe that's exactly why it's an early primary. It's the place to stop non-establishment candidates in their tracks, like a Bernie Sanders or a Ron Paul. And that's exactly what happened to both in South Carolina.
Voter hand-marked paper ballots, counted by machines which generate high resolution images of the ballots. Then, you post these images for the general public to crowd-source count, if you will, to verify the vote counts. This would be easy. Another thing: early mail-in voting should be kept to a minimum, only for good reason like deployment or absence. If you really want your vote to count, make sure you see it go into the box yourself. Hundreds of ballots lying around in an office for a week is a recipe for mischief.
JB: Very true.
RL: Then, you might see a lot more candidates, like Ocasio-Cortez, winning primaries against powerful incumbents like Joe Crowley, among the hardest thing to do in politics. Why? Are these dinosaurs really that popular? Are people really that resistant to change? Maybe not. Because we never get to see the paper ballots, we never really know who won. Our entire system to date has been based on trust in election officials, and trust that the machines are not hackable. In the last two years, both these assumptions have been blown out of the water. It's time for full transparency in vote-counting, and secure chain of custody. No more election officials moving boxes of ballots around in the middle of the night, and asking us to take their word for who won. Folks interested in learning more should go to www.auditelectionsusa.org.
JB: Thanks for explaining all this. I don't know about our readers but this is still not very clear to me. Everyone votes. The machines which count the votes produce, at the same time that they're counting, a high-resolution digital ballot image. Correct so far? I don't see how posting a bunch (or millions for that matter) of ballot images is going to give anyone a sense of whether any monkey business went on with the ballots. Can you flesh that out for us a bit?
RL: Absolutely. So you've marked your ballot, filled in the bubbles with the Sharpie. You walk it over to the box, and either you or the election worker feeds it into the slot of the box that holds the paper ballots. It sucks it in, kind of the way your bills get sucked into an automated cash-counting machine at the drugstore, which then spits out your change. At that moment, while it is going into the slot, the vote-counting machine does two things. It "reads" the votes through optical scan technology, and adds them to the tallies for the candidates, and at the same time it takes a digital picture of the ballot, and stores that image in memory.
The image is in a standard digital format like a jpeg image. Now, you have a digital image of every ballot that went into that box. The problem has been, it has been proven very easy to hack the vote count, so that the machine's software is, for example, subtracting a vote from a candidate when it should be adding one. Or adding extra votes to a certain candidate. One for you, one for me, one for you, two for me, that sort of thing. If the ballot images for every precinct are posted, anyone can go in and count the votes for themselves and expose these kinds of shenanigans. If the official number released says that candidate "A" got 100 votes, but you only count 80 from the ballot images, then that indicates the counting software may have been hacked. This has been proven easy to do time and time again. That would justify demanding that the election commission access the paper ballots and do a hand count. As it stands, that discrepancy would have gone unnoticed, and perhaps the wrong candidate may have been declared the winner.
Does this happen? If it doesn't, then why do election departments constantly do everything in their power to prevent hand recounts? This happened in the 2016 presidential election between Trump and Hillary, when Jill Stein tried, unsuccessfully, to get full hand recounts of critical swing states, especially Wisconsin and Michigan, where the results said Trump won.
Why did the Broward County election commissioner take the blatantly illegal step of destroying the paper ballots, in the Democratic primary race between Tim Canova, a Bernie Sanders protege, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Clinton ally? If we had ballot images posted in every election, elections would be much, much harder to steal. Until then, I think the same old establishment incumbents will be declared winners until they decide to retire, and nothing will ever change. Think of how different this country would look today if, say, Ron Paul had won the Republican nomination in 2012, or if Bernie Sanders had been declared the winner of the Democratic nomination in 2016. All indications are that Sanders would have easily beaten Trump. Full transparency in vote-counting. That's all we're saying.
JB: Over the years, every time there has ever been a report about a "glitch" or "hitch" or abnormality, election officials as well as the press have hastened to reassure us and say that there's no evidence that the vote tally was affected or that the outcome was changed. This includes officials, elected representatives of both parties, the media and even the possibly 'wronged' candidates themselves. Despite lots of evidence that election 'glitches' were rampant, first Gore in 2000 and then Kerry in 2004 quickly conceded, leaving millions of concerned voters in the lurch with no assurances that the election had been conducted properly or that the vote count was accurate.
The media has studiously avoided any serious investigations, despite the numerous hacks by computer experts, including the DefCon Convention in July 2017* where, in less than a day, they exposed serious vulnerabilities in all five voting machines they targeted. The average voter must bite the bullet and acknowledge, however sadly, that we live in a cheating society and that elections are the jackpot for players attempting to game the system for their own advantage, be they corporations, lobbyists, dark money donors, foreign governments, fanatics with an agenda, voting machine insiders or candidates and their teams who simply don't trust the system and who believe that the ends justify the means. How do we overcome the massive psychological resistance to even contemplating that our elections are broken and that without transparency, we have no reason to trust the results?
RL: Very good question, and this is where I see an opportunity arising that we didn't have before, in that over the last couple of years, election-hacking has really been on the front page. It doesn't matter if one thinks the Russians did it, or someone else. The one thing people seem to agree on now, is that it's possible to hack elections, and you have many parties with all kinds of motives to do so. Just the US federal budget is nearly $5 trillion, a lot of that going to contractors for the defense department, HUD, transportation, etc. Then you have the tax code and regulations that no one understands, buried in millions of pages of government documents for the benefit of a small number of players.
It is truly an enormous jackpot of money which is at stake, depending who wins or loses key elections. The only thing that's really hard to believe is that some people WOULDN'T hack certain elections if they could. Now, we have this confluence of technology, meaning ballot images, and awareness which finally might push this issue to the fore. But it is so very, very important that people know what they want and can demand it of the politicians, because they [the politicians] are so slick at making something that looks like a reform when really it is worse than what we had before. Voter hand-marked, paper ballots counted by modern optical scan machines which take ballot images, then post those images online, or burn them onto a DVD. Minimum early voting or vote by mail. Secure chain of custody. Again, folks can study all this at AuditElectionsUSA.org.
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