Democracy Counts!

Election fraud in America has been a taboo subject for decades. Yet it almost certainly exists -- and the spread of insecure electronic voting systems has allowed vote stealing and flipping to be conducted with less risk of exposure than ever, in more elections than ever before.

Paperless touchscreen machines are especially suspect: Researchers have identified extraordinary correlations between the use of touchscreen machines and unusually large winning margins that always benefit just one candidate or party, while the margins in areas using other types of machines in the same election show normal and irregular margins.

The unavoidable conclusion that must be drawn is that these elections are being “flipped”, and that candidates who did not win fair and square are taking office illegitimately. Does this matter? Yes. Stolen elections destroy accountability to the governed and encourage government policies that are inconsistent with majority wishes. And this stimulates distrust, cynicism and resistance to authority.

Democracy Counts!, a nonprofit organization, has developed an election audit system that citizens can use to audit their elections and to expose fraud where it exists. We are planning to deploy it nationwide in this November’s elections.  The audit system is absolutely neutral and impartial. It can be deployed by nonpartisan organizations, electoral authorities, independent observer missions, campaigns of any party, and activists of any persuasion. It uses cutting-edge, highly secure, transparent and verifiable software, and will provide credible and convincing direct evidence of voter intentions, allowing reliable comparisons with official results. If official results are significantly discrepant, legal teams can use the evidence immediately to request injunctions and to demand thorough internal investigations of suspect electoral machinery.

The legal effects could be profound. Recent court decisions have held that voting machine companies’ right to maintain the secrecy of proprietary software trumps the public right to verify the reliability and truthfulness of election machinery. If audit evidence casts suspicion on suspect systems’ honesty, courts may order investigations, in turn affecting the outcome of important races. We could see the development of case law that increases the rights of the public to accurate voting systems. This would have the effect of magnifying judicial participation in election oversight and producing both legal and political pressure on local jurisdictions to end, once and for all, the travesty of election fraud.