New York State? They have problems with their Democrats up there. Ohio is different. We gave the world a Boehner. Election Integrity work needs to be bipartisan but unfortunately there are those who insist that an election was rigged if ANY republican wins at all. Also, unfortunately, the shenanigans occurring with election administrators almost always favor Republicans. The Democrats classically use outside attacks like voting the grave yard, etc. and the system can protect itself from these kinds of attacks. Of course all forms of fraud are equally wrong but this is what we've been seeing in the field.
I posted the article from Bev's press release. I worked on election fraud in 2004 for six years in Ohio. I was *hoping* all that time that we would find Democrats rigging for democrats. I had a punnet square going in my head. By and large 2004 was rigged for Bush. However, in the 18 of 88 counties we looked at what we found in over 30,000 photos of 126,000 ballots, poll books and signature books is that yes, Democrats sometimes rig for Republicans and Republicans sometime rigged for Democrats in down ticket races. The thing is that in a lot of Boards of Elections (county level) the "bipartisan" means someone switches parties. Sometimes this is a even a family member (the easiest one to push around).
The recommendation and rationale goes like this...
The person I trust is not necessarily the person you would trust therefore we need transparency.
No system can be secured against its administrators therefore we need transparency over security.
We must be able to verify four things.
1) Who can vote
2) Who did vote
3) Chain of custody
4) Vote count
Failing any of these points our elections are simply staged theater. Right now, we're failing ALL these points. No electronic system can be verifiable. Can't be done. Even under a paper system its difficult to put checks in place and to have mechanisms where a single voter or group of voter can raise a concern (even an honest mistake) and have it taken care of. A botched election is notoriously hard to clean up. Especially because recounts can and have been rigged. Litigating election issues is nearly impossible. The integrity of the election cycle must be maintained so no voter off the street and even most candidates can't get an issue in court with enough time to change the outcome of an election.
Therefore. *Most* Long term Election Integrity activists have come to support this basic starting principal: "Voter Marked Hand Counted Paper Ballots, Counted at the polls, on election night, no matter how long it takes, in full public view before all those who want to witness the count and before the ballots are moved and chain of custody issues arise."
Now. That handles points 3 and 4 but to be honest. 1 and 2 are tricky. They kinda require databases at this point because unlike the pool of poll workers this system don't scale well with the population. Bev's been finding voter histories have been erased in several counties in Tennessee. This is important because if a registered voter hasn't voted in a while then as part of house keeping (the person may have died or moved) they eventually get purged from the voter rolls. So someone(s) in Tennessee is erasing peoples' vote history so they get purged, show up at the polls and can't vote. There's already been some court rulings to handle this. The point is we need to remain vigilant and we need things transparent so we CAN be vigilant. We don't need computers to solve everything. We need the public to relearn how to do their civic duty and to do that civic duty.
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New York State? They have problems with their Democrats up there. Ohio is different. We gave the world a Boehner. Election Integrity work needs to be bipartisan but unfortunately there are those who insist that an election was rigged if ANY republican wins at all. Also, unfortunately, the shenanigans occurring with election administrators almost always favor Republicans. The Democrats classically use outside attacks like voting the grave yard, etc. and the system can protect itself from these kinds of attacks. Of course all forms of fraud are equally wrong but this is what we've been seeing in the field.
The recommendation and rationale goes like this... The person I trust is not necessarily the person you would trust therefore we need transparency. No system can be secured against its administrators therefore we need transparency over security.
We must be able to verify four things. 1) Who can vote 2) Who did vote 3) Chain of custody 4) Vote count
Failing any of these points our elections are simply staged theater. Right now, we're failing ALL these points. No electronic system can be verifiable. Can't be done. Even under a paper system its difficult to put checks in place and to have mechanisms where a single voter or group of voter can raise a concern (even an honest mistake) and have it taken care of. A botched election is notoriously hard to clean up. Especially because recounts can and have been rigged. Litigating election issues is nearly impossible. The integrity of the election cycle must be maintained so no voter off the street and even most candidates can't get an issue in court with enough time to change the outcome of an election.
Therefore. *Most* Long term Election Integrity activists have come to support this basic starting principal: "Voter Marked Hand Counted Paper Ballots, Counted at the polls, on election night, no matter how long it takes, in full public view before all those who want to witness the count and before the ballots are moved and chain of custody issues arise."
Now. That handles points 3 and 4 but to be honest. 1 and 2 are tricky. They kinda require databases at this point because unlike the pool of poll workers this system don't scale well with the population. Bev's been finding voter histories have been erased in several counties in Tennessee. This is important because if a registered voter hasn't voted in a while then as part of house keeping (the person may have died or moved) they eventually get purged from the voter rolls. So someone(s) in Tennessee is erasing peoples' vote history so they get purged, show up at the polls and can't vote. There's already been some court rulings to handle this. The point is we need to remain vigilant and we need things transparent so we CAN be vigilant. We don't need computers to solve everything. We need the public to relearn how to do their civic duty and to do that civic duty.