The Truth will prevail, but only if we demand it from Congress!

9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004

SCROLL DOWN

Home ] 9-11 Inside Job ] Federal Reserve ] Hacking Elections ] Iraq War ] Fake War on Terror ] New World Order ] Media ] Peak Oil-Petro Euros ] Fascism in U.S. ] Editorials ] About Us ] Links ] Contact Us ]

 

Home
Up

 

Reframing the Issue of Electronic Voting

George Lakoff on framing

• "Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world."

• "Don’t think of an elephant… Because every word evokes a frame, we

don’t use the words, the language of the other side."

• "Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing

what counts as common sense."

Elections Belong to the People

1. Elections belong to the people, not to election officials, not to software programmers,

not to private corporations, not to technicians of any description. The proper role of

elections administration is to assist the people in the conduct of their own elections.

2. Elections are not an administrative fiefdom, though by our neglect, we have allowed

them to become one. It is time to wrest a significant measure of control away from

election officials, and back into the hands of the people. Elections must be strictly

protected from those who would reduce them to a stepping-stone for higher office.

3. Any election system that begins with the assumption that a self-governing people

cannot execute the ordinary tasks of hand-marking, casting and counting ballots has

turned its back on democracy.

4. The only true remedy for our electoral crisis is to redress the structural imbalance that

has shifted control of elections away from the people, and into the hands of prominent

election officials. Public, election-night hand-counting of paper ballots in the precinct

redresses this structural imbalance decisively.

Our Elections Cannot Be Privatized

1. By replacing pen and paper, electronic voting has created an intolerable situation,

whereby the votes of every citizen are recorded, cast and tabulated by a private

corporation. Private corporations are by design unaccountable to the general public, and

therefore have no legitimate role in the conduct of the people’s elections.

2. Privatized, outsourced and monopolized elections serve not the interests of the people,

but only of insiders who have a vested interest in their perpetuation. Legislators, election

officials, public regulators and private "certifying" authorities all lay claim to their piece

of the pie. In the meantime, the public’s right to fair elections stands little chance

against the media and marketing forces mobilized in defense of the electronic voting

industry.

3. The wall of proprietary secrecy that protects the electronic voting industry from public

scrutiny and legal challenge is beyond outrageous. Particularly given the insidious role

played by software programming in electronic voting, proprietary protections all but

guarantee that criminal election fraud enforcement has become a thing of the past.

Election Outcomes Must be Based Upon

Evidence of the Voter’s Intent

1. Without voter-verified evidence of the vote, there is no way to demonstrate the

accuracy of machine-produced totals, and therefore no way to verify election results.

That means there is no way of knowing who actually received more votes—the officially

declared "winner," or the officially declared "loser." Paperless election outcomes are in

fact based upon hearsay—official declarations—rather than evidence of voter intent.

2. Historically, the only way election fraud has ever been uncovered is by virtue of the

paper evidence in the voting system. Take away the evidence, and indeed any system can

appear beyond reproach.

3. Evidence is needed not for the purposes of auditing the vote, but rather for purposes of

counting the vote. When unverifiable, non-transparent, insider-conducted audits are

proposed as the sole legitimate context for inspecting voter-verified evidence, we have

made not a single step in the direction of returning elections to the people, where they

belong.

Elections Require an Unbroken Chain

of Citizen Custody of the Vote

1. Democratic elections are not built upon trust, but rather upon citizen verification of the

vote. The very function of a ballot—privately marked, publicly cast and counted—is to

assure an unbroken chain of citizen custody—and democratic verification—of the vote.

2. Electronic voting abolishes the chain of citizen custody, replacing every citizen

function with software acting as an invisible agent in the voting booth. Without voterverification

of the official paper ballot, electronic voting machine software has complete

freedom to manipulate votes as it chooses, without any fear of detection.

3. Private ballot-marking and public casting and hand-counting assure that the right eyes

are watching, at the right time. Privately, the voter does what only s/he can do, which is

verify her/his own vote. Publicly, the observing citizens provide the "many eyes on the

ballot box" verification that is essential to democratic legitimacy. (Note: mediated

participation of the blind is not excluded from the chain of custody, despite the

importance of visual evidence)

4. Election auditing, early voting and cryptography all break the chain of citizen custody

of the vote, and create insurmountable obstacles to the informed verification of ordinary

voters. Informed verification must require no special qualifications or legal privilege, and

require nothing more than ordinary human capacities to accomplish.

Evidence-based arguments in support of electronic voting cannot be made.

Evidence-based evaluation and oversight of electronic voting cannot be

done.

Evidence-based demonstrations of fraud, to satisfy the burden of proof, cannot be

provided.