British and American lawyers debate: Was the US Declaration of Independence legal, or not. WTF?

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corp) recently ran a news magazine article about a debate, held at Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Hall, over the legality of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.  Was it legal for America to declare itself independent or not.  It's interesting to think about this in the context of current events with the Arab Spring and now the Occupy Wall Street movements where the population is standing up to demand change.

To start with there can easily be a WTF reaction to there even being a question whether the Declaration of Independence is illegal or not.   (if you don't know what WTF means, you simply don't get out enough)  Let's start there … how could there even be a debate on this.  The U.S. is a fully legal country, recognized as a country everywhere, so how could there be a question that its founding moment was illegal.

The British case against the Declaration of Independence goes thusly: (Is the US Declaration of Independence illegal?)

The Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, but actually treasonable. There is no legal principle then or now to allow a group of citizens to establish their own laws because they want to. What if Texas decided today it wanted to secede from the Union?

Lincoln made the case against secession and he was right. The Declaration of Independence itself, in the absence of any recognised legal basis, had to appeal to "natural law", an undefined concept, and to "self-evident truths", that is to say truths for which no evidence could be provided.

Further they claim the grievances cited by the Founding Fathers were pretty minor things.  That's the British point of view mind you, and while I'm not entirely in agreement it does give interesting food for thought.

If a population has proper grievance against their rulers, what are they to do?  Lodge a complaint with the powers that be?  Vote them out of office come next election?  Run a recall election to boot them out of office right away?  Rise up in mass protest to demonstrate the ruler has no support and should therefore resign?  Pull your guns out of the closet and start fighting?

Those are a number of possible reactions and you can surely think of a few examples of each path.  For example Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California when a group of citizens started a recall effort against Gray Davis, booted Gov. Davis out of office, installing Schwarzenegger in his place.  In Egypt the Mubarak regime was toppled by a mass protest that was relatively peaceful.  However in LIbya the Qaddafi regime required a massive civil war, fighting from city to city, bloodshed, and outside intervention, before the regime fell. (http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/libya-real-us-drone-war.html and http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/will-economic-hitmen-undo-political.html)

I suppose from the viewpoint of the leaders of Egypt, the massive protests that ended up toppling the Mubarak government were illegal and perhaps treasonous.  From the viewpoint of the protesters, it was the government that was illegitimate, brutal, dictatorial, and had to go.  Would there have been a "legal" way for the Egyptians to change their government?  Apparently there wasn't because that government rigged the system to disallow any change.

In the case of Libya that leadership promised to crush any its own population who dared defy the regime.  Clearly Qaddafi thought the Libyan protesters (rebels) were illegal and treasonous.  Hence the Libyans who sought change had no choice but to battle for change, because Qaddafi wasn't going to allow peaceful change.

In other words it's all nice and proper to say populations who secede from their rulers are illegal and treasonous, what is a population to do when the rulers in question give no meaningful method for the population to peacefully create change?

Barack Obama in New Orleans, LA

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Barack Obama in New Orleans, LA

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Barack addressed a crowd of 3,500 supporters at Tulane University on Feb 2, 2008

New Orleans represents a central theme of his campaign.. Change does not happen from the top down, but happens from the bottom up. "When we understand we are the United States of America, there is not anything we can do as a country" He uses New Orleans, specifically the Katrina hurricane aftermath, as an example of how America failed its people. "For all of its wealth and power, something is not right in America... a President who only saw America from the window of an airplane rather than down here on the ground with the people..."

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The danger of voting for "Anybody but 'X'"

The Democrats have won the 2006 elections. Yay? In 2004 I made an interesting posting, The energy of "anybody but X" that seems even more appropriate today.

Okay, the Bush administration has done abysmally especially in the last two years. They go from one unconstitutional act to another. When will someone wake up and get the nerve to impeach these traitors to America? Finally with the Democrats taking control of Congress we could possibly see that happen, if they get up the courage to do so.

But, in the voters rage against the Bush administration .. what are they getting. This is clearly a vote against Bush and his failed policies. But .. what are we getting?

As I noted in 2004, if you vote against X you have not made a positive statement. There are a zillion people who are not GW Bush. But in your rush to rid yourselves of the Bush administration, have you instead ushered in a different set of crooks and liars?

Maybe you think all Politicians are crooks and liars, and it doesn't matter who's in charge. I like to think there are upstanding people in every profession, just as there are crooks and liars in every profession. While it seems the power of holding office tends to corrupt, not everybody falls prey to the enticing voice of the dark side. Some remain the upstanding people they were going into office.

What this leaves us with is still needing to be activists standing for the world we want to have around us. Rather than sit back and think, "We won, the Democrats are in power, they'll take care of everything" we should instead take the attitude of "We have an opportunity, with the sea change of power structure, to have real change happen, so let's work with the new power structure and cause change to happen".

Otherwise it's a "The King is dead, long live the King" situation where no real change happens, just a change of the names filling the grey pinstriped suits with red ties.

HACKED! High Tech Election Theft in America

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HACKED! High Tech Election Theft in America

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HACKED! High Tech Election Theft in America presents to the American people the work of eleven experts on the issue of electronic vote fraud, stolen elections, and best solutions to the crisis. It explains how electronic voting has stolen our democracy; how elections in American have been privatized by large corporations; and how imperative it is that Americans start TODAY to reclaim their elections.

Black Box Voting

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Black Box Voting

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A citizen activist group investigating the credibility of elections in the U.S.A. Black Box Voting investigates election problems, communicates the problems to the citizenry, and teaches citizens how to manage their own government -- which means teaching citizens how to identify elections problems and providing citizens with the tools to oversee elections. Black Box Voting takes the position that being a citizen means taking an active role in government oversight. Elections procedures must be fair, they must be inclusive, they must prevent voter disenfranchisement, they must protect each individual's vote by reducing the ability to tamper or miscount. Systems do not achieve quality automatically -- citizen oversight is the key ingredient to fair and accurate elections . Because We, the People are the owners of our government, we citizens should expect to take an active role in managing the quality of the government systems we have created.

"Hacking Democracy", an HBO special looking into election fraud in the U.S.A.

Hacking Democracy is an HBO documentary showing the work of Black Box Voting to investigate the reliability of elections in the U.S.A. The special has been posted, in its entirety, on video.google.com which you can get to on the above link or view below. The special shows several astonishing things about electioneering in the U.S.A. and shows that the vote can be changed (hacked) surreptitiously. And the special shows suspicious behavior on the part of certain election officials.

If we wish our Democratic system to remain true to the will of the people, our elections must be fair and honest. We've seen time and again that in countries where elections are not honest, the people routinely are suppressed and abused by their governments. It is our duty as citizens of a Democracy to ensure the system represents our will.

In the 2000 election one astonishing result was in Volusia County, Florida, the election showed a negative vote total for Al Gore. Negative! That's ridiculous, the count should only come out positive because when a vote is cast it can only increase the total. How could one end up with negative numbers? But because the vote recount was ended in Florida before the recount was finished, that anomaly was not investigated.

In the 2004 election Black Box Voting filed Freedom of Information requests for the polling records from across the country, so that they could investigate the results in detail. One county they especially focussed on was Volusia County, and they found strange happenings. First the results "tapes" they were given were not the official record, but were printed two weeks after the election. They demanded the original results tapes, and were told those were at the County warehouse. So they went to the warehouse, and found that the workers there were in the process of throwing out some trash, trash that contained votes, election material, and the original results tapes. By federal law the results tapes are supposed to be kept preserved for 22 months, so why were they throwing them in the trash? More astonishingly the results tapes they found, in the trash, differed from the results tapes which the county claimed were the actual results.

In other words, Volusia County was at it again, apparently, reporting fraudulent results.

The documentary showed several ways which, on the Diebold voting machines, the vote results can be easily changed without any hint of tampering.

One way is to change the results database on the central tabulator computer. The votes are stored onto memory cards which are collected from precincts. On the election night the memory cards are then read into a central tabulator computer, and software on that computer tallies the results and reports the totals. This is pretty straightforward in concept. While the tabulating software has several checks and boundaries that prevent tampering, there is nothing to prevent tampering with the data files from outside that software. The data files are just some kind of database file, probably built around Access. One can double click on the database files and edit the results tables directly. Or one can write a program that directly modifies the file contents. Both methods were demonstrated in the documentary.

Another form of tampering is to rig the memory cards ahead of time. The documentary showed a small test election conducted by Black Box Voting using the voting machines owned by a different Florida county. They set up a test election, used a rigged memory card to record the election results, filled out a known number of optical scanned ballots with known results, ran the ballots through the machine, and ended up with a fraudulent result.

The Road to Clean Elections

In the U.S. candidates for office are routinely bought and paid for. For years and years U.S. Presidential campaigns, and especially news media coverage, have been more about who raised the most money, and not about issues and reaching voters. In the 2000 election cycle on the Republican side the candidates were clearly chosen based on their money raising, with George W. Bush having a home-grown advantage in that regard. This is dirty, and it leads to politicians who owe favors to the lobbyists who've brought them their money. When a politician meets with a lobbyist who is pushing for some legislation etc, that politician knows that in 2 yrs when its time to run again they may have to go to that lobbyist for more campaign money.

Is this democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people? Nope. It's pandering.

If we are going to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the election system must change. There's a number of important changes, and election finance is one of them.

Election finance reform to remove any form of private donation may be the vital change to make. If a candidate takes any private donations, the candidate may feel some obligations to the donors. Possibly only by removing private donations will candidates be free to actually represent the people they are supposed to represent. Otherwise they are, as today, clearly feeling pressured to represent corporate interests because they're the ones with the money.

This video covers a "clean election" system put into place in Arizona and Maine. The same system is on the ballot in California as Proposition 89.

89now.org is the home of the California ballot initiative.

buckthesystemnow.org is doing fund raising for proposition 89.

publicampaign.org is the national movement.

Disease Warning

32% of the population is still "infected" with this new strain of STD....be sure to read the whole msg....

ATLANTA The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The disease is contracted through dangerous and high-risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced "gonna re-elect him." Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the past four years.

Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: antisocial personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado, uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history, tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing behavior. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this destructive disease originated only a few years ago from a bush found in Texas.

"I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country"

"I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country.." - G.W. Bush in the wake of an unexpected landslide victory by Hamas in the latest Palestinian elections. Hamas has been a bloody terrorist organization, but has recently turned to political action and has now won the elections in the Palestinian territories.

It seems the U.S. is two-faced about wanting democracy. We say we want democracy, but then when democracy turns up an unwanted result then there's only complaints. In this case the election chose Hamas, but no sooner than the results were in than the complaints began. President Bush, I label you HYPOCRIT.

In case it's not obvious -- what's really galling about the above quote is that GW Bush himself laid out a call for the destruction of another government. Which? Iraq's government under Saddam Hussein. That's what the phrase regime change means, the destruction of another government. Further the NEOCON strategy for the middle east is to destroy not just the Iraqi government, but also that of Syria and Iran.

Oh, and apparently the U.S. government was meddling in the Palestinian election by giving huge funding to Hamas opponents:

Palestinian Groups Accuse U.S. of Meddling in Elections: And in the Occupied Territories, the Bush administration is being accused of meddling in this week's Palestinian parliamentary elections. On Sunday the Washington Post reported the U.S. has clandestinely funneled $2 million into public service projects ahead of the elections in an effort to increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority and its governing Fatah party. Officials from Hamas have questioned whether the aid violates rules barring Palestinian political parties from receiving funds from foreign sources. Independent candidate Mustafa Barghouti warned the Bush administration's efforts could backfire and end up helping Hamas in the elections. Barghouti said, "Every time the United States says it doesn't want Hamas, they boost Hamas. Let us do our elections entirely on our own. These interventions run counter to our efforts, and they hurt the Palestinian people. This effort was completely counterproductive." -- Democracy Now, Jan 24, 2006

But the Bush administration has demonstrated anti-democracy tendencies in the past. For example all the actions taken to undermine Hugo Chavez's rule in Venezeula, including a U.S.-backed coup attempt against the Venezuela government. For example the U.S. backed coup that tossed Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti. In both cases it's a democratically elected government that wasn't to U.S. liking. But this isn't new to the Bush administration, as the U.S. government has been toppling democratically elected governments for decades.

Bush sees vote proving 'power of democracy' But he urges Abbas to stay in chief post (Boston Globe, By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff, January 27, 2006)

Hamas invited to form government (BBC, Jan 27, 2006)

Hamas’ victory upends Israeli politics Opposition politicians blast government for failing to stop group's ascent (By Scott Wilson, The Washington Post Updated: 5:29 a.m. ET Jan. 27, 2006)

Hamas victory explodes Middle East peace plans (theage.com.au)

Voters did not elect Hamas because its charter commits it to the destruction of Israel; indeed, that goal was dropped from its election platform, an implicit acknowledgement of public opinion by an increasingly pragmatic political force. Hamas has observed a ceasefire for the past year, after carrying out about 60 suicide bombings since the second intifada began in 2000. Only a minority of Palestinians subscribe to its hardline Islamic ideology; instead, they rejected Fatah because of its divided and ineffective administration and its entrenched corruption. Hamas has quietly attended to the practical side of community politics, providing services to the poor and building a reputation for discipline, efficiency and integrity. Its officials in Gaza, where Hamas first won municipal elections, have even co-operated with Israel on administrative matters, out of necessity. Hamas has sent out mixed signals on broader co-operation, and even the taboo matter of peace talks, which it may decide to let President Abbas pursue, as this was the platform on which he was elected.

All politics is local, eh?

Susan Pynchon: Diebold in Florida

There's been big questions from the 2000 and 2004 elections about whether the election system is rigged. In the 2004 elections a big sideshow formed around electronic voting machines, especially those from Diebold. The electronic voting systems (a.k.a. touchscreen voting) was supposed to fix the glaring problem with the 2000 election fiasco, which centered on the punch card system. But that's presuming touchscreen voting is the only alternative, which it is not.

"I Saw It Hacked": Diebold in Florida by Susan Pynchon relates a test performed in Leon County Florida of the Diebold voting system installed there. This test has become rather infamous as the "Harri Hursti Hack".

What she describes is a staged test. They ran a small mock election in which Harri Hursti demonstrated a vulnerability with the Diebold voting software.

Her article contains this very powerful paragraph:

And there, on the central tabulator screen, appeared the altered results: Seven "Yes" votes and one "No" vote, with absolutely no evidence that anything had been altered. It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as "conspiracy theorists" and "technophobes" when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.

Okay, so she managed to put together a powerful paragraph, but I don't see her report demonstrating what she claims. Nowhere in her report is this claim substantiated:

However, the Hursti hack is individually significant because the flaw it exposed is a planned vulnerability in the system, not something that is accidentally there. It had to be PUT there (programmed) on purpose.

I work with software and software quality in my job. I know very well that every piece of software has bugs in it. The existance of a bug doesn't constitute proof that the author purposely put that bug there.

She has not demonstrated that Hursti's hack is anything more than a bug in Diebold's software.

It's easy to point a finger at the Diebold corporation and claim they're evil. Their CEO was widely quoted before the 2004 election as boasting about how GW Bush would win the election. And of course it's easy to think, that might not have been bravado, but knowing that he can go in and twiddle the election results and ensure that GW Bush would win the election.

I agree with her theory -- it's very possible for Diebold or any other election hardware vendor to be selling machines which contain backdoors allowing elections to be rigged. For our democracy to succeed we have to ensure that's not the case, and that has to involve independant auditing of the voting machines. The secrecy surrounding the election hardware is troubling as it impedes the public from independantly verifying the voting machines are trustworthy. Unless the people can trust the voting machines, how can the people trust that our representatives were properly elected?

But that's just a theory until you can prove the assertion. In her story she brushes over the proof, jumping from describing the test to concluding that therefore Diebold purposely implanted the backdoor which Hursti walked through.

A possible push for e-voting audit trails

In the push for simpler to use voting systems, that use current technology, we've (the U.S.) have embraced touch screen voting in a big way. Sure, it's a big advance over using paper cards, a technology developed and perfected in the 1930's.

E-voting report could push audit trails (Published: October 4, 2005, By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com)

Last month a study headed by President Carter and former Secretary of State Baker was unveiled. In their recommendations was one to give national identification cards to everybody, presumably to give higher faith in the accuracy of one-vote-per-person.

However this current article goes into one of the lesser publicized recommendations. To insert "voter-verified audit trails" into the system.

The article doesn't go into what those audit trails might be. Of course it's a political, not a technical, recommendation.

My technical recommendation is for the touch screen machine to print a paper ballot. The touch screen machine would have zero long term storage, and not be connected to any tallying computer. Instead the paper ballot is what's counted. The printed ballot could be easy to scan with a computer, all one has to do is use a known font and locations on the page. This would make the system just as convenient as a purely electronic and computerized voting system, but with the added assurance to the voter that their vote is what they meant, plus its easily recountable in case of questions.

However, one concern remains even with such a scannable paper ballot. What of security holes in the computers used to tally the votes?

This was demonstrated during the 2004 elections. One hole is that the Deibold machines have modems in them, and the modems might well be unsecured allowing "anybody" to log into the computer remotely. Barring physical access is the first barrier to creating a secure system, but the Deibold tallying machines don't provide that barrier because of the modem. The next level of the problem is that the Windows-based software Diebold implemented itself is not secure. For example there would be known passwords used to log into the computer. Secondly, once someone is logged in they can easily modify the underlying data files without using the vote tallying software at all. Hence, even if Diebold did a good job of making their application software secure, it doesn't matter because someone with access to the computer (e.g. by calling the modem) can fiddle with the data file directly.

This points to another political requirement that's needed. That a thorough security audit be done by computer security professionals.

I'll note that security audits are easier when the voting system uses open source software. With a closed source system like Diebolds, the proprietary nature of the software business prevents outside experts from doing an adequate review. The details would be hidden in unrevealed software, and if you can't see the details then how can you adequately review them?

Carter-Baker commission recommends voting system improvements

Panel calls for improved voting lists, ID requirements (Monday, September 19, 2005, CNN.COM): Concerns a bipartisan commission chaired by Pres. Carter and James Baker. The commission was geared to making recommendations concerning the conduct of American elections.

What is the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform?

The Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform is a panel of distinguished civic and political leaders co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Dr. Robert Pastor, Director of American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management, serves as Executive Director of the Commission. The twenty-one members of the Commission represent a broad spectrum of the American political experience.

COMMISSION ON FEDERAL ELECTION REFORM

The full report and other information is available here: http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/

The CNN article lists these as some of the recommendations:

• Congress should pass a law requiring voter-verifiable paper audit trails on all electronic voting machines.
• States should require voters to present photo IDs and offer free photo IDs to those who don't have drivers' licenses.
• All "legitimate domestic and international election observers" should be granted unrestricted access to the election process, within the rules of the election.
• News organizations should voluntarily refrain from projecting any presidential election results in any state until all polls have closed in all states but Alaska and Hawaii.
• States should establish uniform procedures for the counting of provisional ballots, which voters can use when there are questions about their registration.
• Also, states should develop registration systems that allow easy checks of voters from one state to another and the purging of outdated voter records

The article also discusses a recommendation by the private Commission on Federal Election Reform to change the primary system to schedule the primaries regionally. But it isn't clear from the article whether this recommendation was also made by the Carter Baker commission.

The theme I see is increased reliability of voter identification, and improved verifiability. I of course strongly support voter-verifiable paper trails.

For example if the election were conducted with a touch screen system, and the touch screen computer produced a paper card containing the votes. So long as the card is printed with a known font, font size, etc, then it's easily scannable by a computer, and at the same time is easily human readable. Hence, we would have the advantage of digitized information allowing a quick counting process, while at the same time giving the people comfort knowing their vote was registered properly and can be recounted easily.

But that leaves as an issue the red flag discussed yesterday. There's a concern with Deibolds tabulating computers whether or not there's security holes. You could have the front end of the system, the vote taking, be nice and orderly, but with insecure tabulating computers the election validity would still be unclear.

The commission was conducted with the assistance of: http://electiononline.org/

Deibolds role in rigged voting

Background: Following the fiasco finish to the 2000 U.S. presidential elections (effectively dramatized by Michael Moore) there was major hue and cry to "fix" the election system. I guess some people took "fix" a different way than the people meant them to take it. In the 2004 election we had the rise of "voting machines" which were supposed to be easier than the punch card system. The spin put forward was the 2000 fiasco was due to confusion on the voters part, with the punch card ballots being problematic to use. Supposedly having a touch screen is easier.

While punch cards are straight out of the 1930's in terms of technological prowess, I think the use of voting machines ought to be rethought. As a computer professional I know damn well that digitally recorded information is very changable, and as a U.S. citizen I dearly want my vote to be properly recorded and counted.

Digitally recorded votes are susceptible to being untraceably changed, with the only safeguard being the security of the computers used to take votes, transfer votes, and process votes.

One of the stories that emerged in 2004 is at http://www.BlackBoxVoting.org/ ... it concerns relative insecurity of the dominant voting machine, built by Diebold. For example, the Diebold CEO was also highly involved with the Bush campaign and was recorded boasting that Bush would win the 2004 election. Considering the closeness of that election, it's very "interesting" for him to have made such a boast.

One of the things BlackBoxVoting.org did in 2004 was locate and publish a bunch of Diebold internal memos detailing known security problems with their voting machines, how they had circumvented the qualification processes which were meant to properly certify the machines for use in elections, etc.

Now we have "The Brad Blog" with this stunning exclusive story: EXCLUSIVE! * A DIEBOLD INSIDER SPEAKS! DIEB-THROAT : 'Diebold System One of Greatest Threats Democracy Has Ever Known' Identifies U.S. Homeland Security 'Cyber Alert' Prior to '04 Election Warning Votes Can be 'Modified Remotely' via 'Undocumented Backdoor' in Central Tabulator Software!

Basically what we have here is an insider anonymously contacting this Brad fellow. Apparently the insider is fairly high level, having represented Diebold to the public at times. He tells that certain problems are well known within the company, but that there is a top-down demand for silence on these problems. The people who have spoken up about it have been "isolated".

The problem cited is "remote access" to the GEMS central tabulator machines. Each one has a modem in it which, if connected to a phone line, allows remote access to the tabulator machine. Further the security on the remote access port is weak enough that the US-CERT (a cyber-security team) has rated it a "medium" risk, which is pretty damn flimsy. Hence, modifying the election on a broad scale wouldn't require cooperation from a large team, but could involve a small team who goes around accessing tabulator machines remotely and changing the election results.

It's easy to see in this the typical scared corporates trying to cover up a problem 'lest it hurt the sales figures which directly ties to the stock price. This reaction has happened over and over in various corporate-connected disasters throughout the ages. For example, take tobacco and smoking. For decades, while people were continuing to die from smoking tobacco, the people being told there wasn't any proof connecting tobacco smoking with lung cancer, but all along the tobacco companies knew there was a connection. Their denials were directly tied to preserving sales, because if they told the truth their sales probably would have plummeted. Well, considering what's happened now that we know that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer ... their sales might not have plummeted as badly as they feared.

In any case, the Brad Blog guy got to talk with a Diebold PR guy who denied everything and provided a whitewashing study that supposedly proves the Diebold machines helps with greater accuracy in the elections.

I don't care if their machines helped in a few ways ... so long as they cannot be independantly validated, so long as they're provided under veils of corporate secrecy and whitewashing, so long as there's no paper trail allowing truly independant validation of the election results, etc, then we cannot trust our elections. If we cannot trust our elections, then how can we trust that the politicians are going to be held accountable to us???

In the U.S. the politicians are theoretically supposed to serve us. Obviously in recent years this theory has been demolished. But that's part of the social contract forming the bedrock of this country. We the people need to take our country back.

Ensuring an accurate and AUDITABLE vote

Democracies are about the people having a say. In the U.S. Constitution we proclaim our government to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. When we hold elections, those elected are supposed to represent us. Most importantly we need to be able to trust that the will of the people has been spoken, and that the people who are elected are the ones the people voted for.

After all the U.S. isn't some tinpot pretend democracy like many of the worlds countries have.

I urge people to read this article,

Teresa Heinz Kerry - Hacking the "Mother Machine"?
(by Thom Hartmann;
Published on Thursday, March 10, 2005 by CommonDreams.org)

Now, you may see the name "Teresa Heinz Kerry" and think, isn't she just ticked off she's not the First Lady right now? Maybe she is, but the article wasn't written by her, most of the article contains the work of people other than her, so the article isn't even really about her point of view.

Instead the article starts with this statement by Mrs. Kerry

"Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

And the article goes on to explain who those two brothers are. One is Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, who famously said promised the 2004 election cycle that George W Bush would win the election. The other is Todd Urosevich, who was vice president for customer support of Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES&S, and Chuck Hagel is now a Senator.

I hadn't realized the centralization of control over the voting systems was so complete. This is something we should be very deeply concerned about. As I said, the vote needs to be representative of our will.

Most of the article discusses research done by a few organizations, http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ being the principle one. This research is about documenting and publicizing the problems with the newfangled voting machines that have grown in popularity since the 2000 election.

In 2000 we had a crisis, the vote was too close to call. It became an alarming issue, one of national concern. So "THEY" offered a solution during the crisis, "touch screen voting machines". Those machines offered to fix the immediate problem, namely that puch card voting resulted in a large percentage of "spoiled" votes (the hanging or dimpled chads), plus in some Florida counties the way the instruction card was printed led to confusion.

However the machines that were chosen, the aforesaid Deibold being very popular, have a huge flaw. ZERO PAPER TRAIL. Consider how easily "hacked" computers are in general, especially ones based on the Windows OS (as these voting machines are). It's easy to diddle with binary files and change things, so doesn't this raise the possibility of someone with nefarious intent diddling with the election?

Which just raises the issue of wny Bob Urosevich was so loudly proclaiming that George W Bush was going to win. With an insider obviously rooting for one of the candidates, a nefariously intended individual would not need to work very hard to diddle with the election, now would they?

However, if the voting machine produced a piece of paper, then the voter could easily verify that the paper represented their intentions, and the paper could also be easily scanned by a computer.

"Ranked Choice" or "Instant Runoff" voting

In the 2000 election an issue Ralph Nader pushed very strongly is the disproportionate representation we have among elected officials.

The election system in the U.S. is "winner take all" which ultimately means that we end up with two parties getting the vast majority of the vote. But, really, is the range of individual opinion adequately represented by two parties?

Let me suggest, echoing Ralph Nader, that the two-party winner-take-all system is not doing a good job of representing the will of the people in this country.

We have to take this carefully because this country has a couple hundred years of experience with the system we use. But we can point at many countries around the world where proportional representation exists, and does work. In all those countries there are many "minor" parties, and I believe that the range of individual opinion is much better represented.

Unfortunately I think (haven't verified) that these countries are also ones lacking a separation of power between the branches of government. That is, the Prime Minister of England (currently held by Tony Blair) is a member of Parliament. That would be like the President of the United States being a Congressman (either Senator or Representative) as well as being President.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America purposely chose separation of powers. Congress (the Legislative branch) is a different branch of government from both the Judicial and Administrative branches of government. Under the equal branches of government theory, the President is elected separately from the Legislature and the President cannot also be a Legislator.

This makes the style of proportional representation used in those other countries unusable in the United States.

However the system that Ralph Nader promoted during the 2000 election cycle is very workable in the United States. A few locations in the U.S. are now using this very same system:

Instant Runnoff --or-- Ranked Choice

The idea is that instead of voting for one person, you rank the top two or three choices among the candidates. You might end up with

Favorite: Mickey Mouse
Next Favorite: Prince Valiant
Least Favorite: Dick Tracy

The individual voter then has more say about who they like. That, by itself, would be a vast improvement over the current situation that devolves our choice into "hold your nose, and vote for the least smelly candidate".

What happens next?

Why, this is magic. In the vote counting machines a fancy dancing shuffle is done.

Say that Mickey is showing badly in the count (Minnie may have cussed out a reporter, for example). Your vote for Mickey is then applied to your next favorite. Suppose Prince Valiant is also not doing so well (maybe Saracens are getting a lot of sympathy this year), so your vote is then moved over to Dick Tracy. This process is repeated for up to three times, or until a winner is found.

What this means to the winner is they have a better assurance that their voters truly preferred them over the other candidates. Under the current system, a voter for Mickey Mouse may have simply found him the least offensive of the available choices, and not truly preferred Mickey at all.

One may think it unfair that when ones vote is moved to a secondary or third choice, that the vote count in full. There is a simple solution to this:

Primary preference: counts full
Secondary preference: counts 1/2
Third preference: counts 1/3

More information

Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) A Fairer Way to Conduct Single-Winner Elections (http://www.fairvote.org/irv/index.html)