The beauty of hand-counts is that a self-auditing procedure is built into the count process. Oh sure, anyone is welcome to recount – but any recount worth its effort will use the same self-auditing techniques during the process.
We will never have a basis for confidence in reported results when the votes are counted in secret. All machines do this – all machines must go.
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, as Jeane Kirkpatrick explains. Instead, machines are “technical obstructions to make the right of voting insecure,” violating NY case law. Secret vote counting provides 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.
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.
Distracted
Other election integrity activists ignore the entire issue of how our votes are counted, as they work to confront other, less immediately-serious failures in U.S. elections. It’s like fiddling while Rome is burning, because music soothes people. No doubt:
- That fictitious entities known as “corporations” are legally permitted to contribute to campaigns turns elections into one dollar-one vote. Because I have fewer dollars than most Americans, my vote is worth less. This is not democracy, but plutocracy;
- That privatized, monopolized mass media deliberately deceives the public, so we have a woefully misinformed electorate who, when they do vote, vote against their own best interests;
- That candidates are selected in behind-the-scenes machinations and are funded by the same special interest groups provides Americans no real choice in most races;
- Computerized, centralized voter registration databases needlessly expose Americans to identity theft, as well as provide election officials and party operatives with a means to target their disenfranchisement efforts;
- Redistricting and voter ID laws allow for targeted disenfranchisement by election officials and party operatives; and
- U.S. electoral management bodies have a long and brutal history of election fraud extending back at least as far as 1742.
Each of these factors alone defeats democracy, and reduces U.S. elections to carnival shows that give politicians the appearance of legitimacy.
I have no argument with remaking the entire U.S. election system. But if the vote counts aren’t authentic, no other change will make any meaningful difference. If we can at least get accurate vote counts, as voters intended and as democracy demands, then we have a fair shot of working out these other, more complicated, features that encompass best electoral management practices.
“Negotiating with your hands”
Still others (myself included) would demand transparent vote counts, now, as the primary and crucial first step toward integrity. If politicians won’t give us what we demand – transparency – then we create it ourselves.
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:
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