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.