Time to Mandate a Return to Paper Ballots Nationwide
Oct 22, 2016 by DAVE LINDORFF
Politicians of both major parties love to boast that the US is the world’s oldest democracy and of course a “model for the world.” Putting aside the matter of whether or not that is even true (US “democracy” cannot really be said to have begun until women got the vote in 1920, and maybe until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made voting by blacks truly a reality in parts of the country, and meanwhile Iceland’s Althing or parliament dates to 930 AD), the use of electronic voting machines in many jurisdictions has made any such claims a complete joke.
These needlessly confusing, often malfunctioning, and easily hackable devices, which have demonstrably done things like switch whole voting records from one candidate to another, or simply erased all votes cast in a day, and which are so costly that they are used as an excuse to provide only minimal opportunity to vote in many “undesirable” election districts, leading to lines that can require waiting hours outdoors just to get to cast a ballot, belie the claims made for the US to be a beacon of liberty and democratic governance.
So what’s the deal with these machines? Why do we even have them?
The goal of any voting system should be accuracy, not speed of counting, and yet we see state after state and county after county getting sold on electronic equipment that is costly, error-ridden, failure prone, and unnecessary. For centuries, people in democracies have voted by raised hands or with paper ballots, with minimal problems given good official and volunteer oversight.
What is driving the switch to machines in the US is the media. The same corporate media that have turned campaigns into battles over soundbites, “gotcha” questions, and a focus on non-issues like whether a candidate’s hair is silly looking or whether he/she believes in God.
For the corporate media, Election Day and Election Night are all about money – specifically a race to “call” election results. Who will be first to announce a winner as the votes are tallied? In an industry that has been paring down news budgets year after year to the point that little serious reporting gets done, vast sums are spent having people stationed at polling places everywhere calling in the tallies as they get read out of the machines.
But why should we care — particularly when it comes to national races — when newly elected, or re-elected, members of Congress, and the president, are not actually installed in office until January, more than two months after the voting is over and done with?
There is plenty of time to get it not first, but right, and that would be true even if we were to use paper ballots and count them by hand, as used to be the standard procedure.
Many countries that have fallen for the lure of electronic voting have later seen the error of their ways and have gone back to paper ballots, precisely for that reason. Some jurisdictions in the US have recently gone back to paper ballots, too. Their people want to make sure that votes are tallied properly, and that in the case of close races, the count can be checked accurately. Out of eight European countries that experimented with electronic voting machines, six have rejected the idea and have gone back to paper ballots. We saw that system at work earlier this year in the bitterly fought and unexpectedly close “Brexit” vote that saw a narrow majority of Britons vote to have the UK leave the Eurozone.
As a Fulbright journalism professor in residence at Sun Yat-Sen National University in Kaohsiung, I witnessed and reported on a hard-fought election in Taiwan in 2004 that showed just how reliable paper ballots can be. On that island, where democracy is a recent and enthusiastically practiced affair following decades of a nasty dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, there was a fierce election contest between the incumbent president of the Democratic Progressive Party and the candidate of the old Kuomintang founded by Chiang. The big issue, as always in Taiwan, was relations with the People’s Republic of China, which doesn’t recognize Taiwan’s independence and considers it a province of China and China’s “largest island.” The DPP favors open independence and a standoffish approach to China, while the KMT typically wants better relations and closer economic ties.
In 2004 the race was unusually tight. Then, a week before the voting, both President Chen Shui-bian and his running made, VP Annette Lu, running on the DPP ticket, were hit by an apparent assassin’s bullet during a motorcade. Chen’s abdomen was grazed, leaving a horizontal gash across his abdominal muscles, while Lu’s kneecap was struck. There was a huge dispute over whether the shooting was staged or a real assassination attempt, though the path of the bullet, which entered through the front windshield of the jeep carrying the two candidates, followed a remarkable, ricocheting course hitting but only wounding both Chen and Lu (it was reminiscent of the “magic bullet” that is said to have killed JFK and wounded then Texas Gov. John Connally). Turnout on election day after that incident was a record, with the final tally being 50.11% for the DPP candidates and 49.89% for the KMT slate. That was a margin of about 0.23%, out of 12.9 million votes cast. Talk about Florida in 2000!
Naturally, the KMT demanded a recount. There were battles in the courts and in the legislative Yuan over whether and how to do it, but ultimately the president agreed to a recount. I, along with most of the Taiwanese people, then watched in astonishment on television as bales of ballots were painstakingly hand counted in each voting district, each paper ballot passing from the hand of a representative of one party to the hand of a representative of the other party and then to a neutral judge before being counted. It was a grindingly slow process that took over a week to complete. In the end, Chen and the DPP still won the election, though his margin of victory slipped slightly from an original 29,518 votes, or 0.2291% of the total, to just 25,563 votes, or 0.2289%.
After all that effort, in other words, out of 12.9 million votes cast (about one tenth of the number cast in US presidential elections), the difference between the initial count and the recount was only 3955 votes.
Try to imagine a recount in any major election in the US coming out that close to the original count — especially in an election that close that included an assassination attempt! Many election districts in the US wouldn’t even be able to recount their votes, because their electronic machines have no paper record of individual votes – just the recorded totals – if that. In fact, according to one expert, electronic machines, which all have documented error rates, some as high as 5% of votes cast, because of both human error and inevitable internal glitches, mean that a recount of a really close race where the margin of victory was within that error rate wouldn’t prove anything.
Clearly, paper ballots work. They don’t provide a rapid result, which means that the ratings and the ad revenue from bleary-eyed voters watching endless blather on the tube interspersed with commercials for drugs, reverse mortgages and Ginsu knives, will plummet, but if the goal of a voting system is to get it right, paper ballots win by a landslide.
Why doesn’t the US go back to paper ballots?
Ask your local media.
Maybe someone should do a poll of us voters, and ask whether we want our elections to be fraud-free, or just want fast counting and a quick answer to who won. I suspect the fraud-free option would win hands down.
Of course, there can be fraud with paper ballots, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to stuff ballot boxes with paper ballots (there are, after all, records of how many people voted, so you’d have to steal away an equal number of cast ballots to make that work), or to alter a large number of cast ballots, or to steal and “lose” cartons of ballots. And it’s also easier for voting officials to put physical security around paper ballots until they are counted and until any recount has been done, than to guard against software viruses or hacks. For one thing, the competing parties’ officers and volunteers can physically verify the presence of secure guard personnel over cast paper ballots, while there’s no easy way to verify that proper measures are being taken to protect electronic systems and electronic records of votes cast.
The US has a long way to go to before it can make a credible claim to be one of the world’s leading democracies, even if not the oldest. Returning to paper ballots, and requiring all jurisdictions to have a long period before election day during which people can mail them in, would be a good start.
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Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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SHOCK: Texas County Switches to Paper Ballots Because…
Oct 26, 2016
Early voting has been a big concern given the ripe climate for voter fraud, and a Texas County has had to switch to paper ballots temporarily because of a “software glitch.”
Breitbart reported:
Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne told Breitbart Texas Tuesday morning that all electronic voting was temporarily halted until her office completes a “software update” on ES&S machines that otherwise “omit one race” when a straight ticket option is selected for either major party. The Texas 14th Court of Appeals race was reported to be the contest in which voters commonly experienced the glitch.
Hawthorne explained that she expects the technical difficulties to be completely addressed by end of business Tuesday. In the interim, regular paper ballots will be used. The county clerk told Breitbart Texas that before the machines were pulled, poll workers were instructed to alert voters to the glitch and double-check their selections.
Infowars reported that there have been reports of ballots being changed from Trump to Clinton int Texas on straight Republican ballots.
“Gary and I went to early vote today,” wrote Lisa Houlette on Facebook. “I voted a straight Republican ticket and as I scrolled to submit my ballot I noticed that the Republican straight ticket was highlighted, however, the Clinton/Kaine box was also highlighted!”
“I tried to go back and change and could not get it to work,” she continued. “I asked for help from one of the workers and she couldn’t get it to go back either. It took a second election person to get the machine to where I could correct the vote to a straight ticket.”
“I had a family member that voted this morning and she voted straight Republican,” wrote Shandy Clark of Arlington, Texas. “She checked before she submitted and the vote had changed to Clinton! She reported it and made sure her vote was changed back. They commented that It had been happening.”
The Donald Reddit featured a post with the headline: “Multiple reports on my Facebook, Periscope, Snapchat, and Twitter from my friends in Texas, and all of them had their vote switched to Clinton automatically.” The headline also urged Texas voters to double check their ballots.
Infowars tried to question Texas Director of Elections Keith Ingram, but he refused.
But you guys, Clinton and President Obama say that voter fraud isn’t real and Trump should get over it – all while they blame Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin for interfering with elections to scare people into allowing them to federalize the election systems.
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Maryland Goes Back to Paper Ballots for Primary Election
Maryland is going back to basics, with an ink pen and paper ballot, for the presidential primary elections.
State Board of Elections Administrator Linda Lamone says that despite advances in digital technology, nothing safeguards a secret ballot like marking a piece of paper. The ballots are tabulated by an optical scanning machine.
The system replaces touch-screen terminals that became popular after the hotly disputed 2000 presidential election. You might remember the “hanging chads” from Florida’s punch-card ballots.
The Maryland General Assembly voted in 2007 to go back to paper ballots due to security concerns with electronic voting.
Lamone says the system is working well during the early voting period, which began April 14 and continues through Thursday.
Primary Election Day is April 26.
Published at 5:35 AM EDT on Apr 19, 2016 | Updated at 8:47 AM EDT on Apr 19, 2016
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Maryland-Goes-Back-to-Paper-Ballots-for-Primary-Election-376185461.html
Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence
Oct 26, 2016 By Michael Snyder
Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton.
And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country.
At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day…
A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that.
More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square.
But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax…
Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex-Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Famewas destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first.
And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June…
This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day.
We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika.
There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece…
On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?”
Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt.
On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope.
There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating.
Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge.
For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election…
Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president.
Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”
And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today…
“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election.
Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another.
Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960.
If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then.
And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month…
As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be.
But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome.
Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House.
Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it.
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TRUMP WARNS OF ‘VOTE FLIPPING’ ON MACHINES
“People are not happy. BIG lines. What is going on?”
Oct 27, 2016 by Steve Watson
GOP Nominee Donald Trump, who has for weeks warned that the election could be rigged against him, shot out a tweet Thursday indicating that he is aware of reports of machines ‘flipping’ to register votes for Hillary Clinton, when voters choose Trump.
“A lot of call-ins about vote flipping at the voting booths in Texas,” Trump tweeted.
“People are not happy. BIG lines. What is going on?”
A lot of call-ins about vote flipping at the voting booths in Texas. People are not happy. BIG lines. What is going on?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2016
As Infowars has highlighted, there have already been numerous reports of early voters in Texas seeing their ballots flipped from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.
While election officials have dismissed the reports, suggesting ‘user error’ is to blame, tech experts have long warned that the machines can become less accurate over time.
Larry Norden, a voting technology expert, told NPR that the reports usually arise where outdated technology is being employed.
“Over time, as people vote, that calibration becomes less and less accurate,” Norden noted.
During elections over the past decade and more there have been reports of voting machines ‘flipping’. Indeed, the reports were so widespread that even entertainment shows such as The Simpsons drew attention to it:
Meanwhile, The Washington Post has admitted that the press is engaging in voter suppression, bizarrely claiming it is a legitimate way of countering Trump’s ‘rigged’ election claims.
Callum Borchers, author at the Washington Post blog The Fix writes:
Since the final presidential debate last week, many news outlets have been delivering an unvarnished message to Donald Trump supporters: Your candidate is virtually certain to lose the election Nov. 8.
“Clinton probably finished off Trump last night,” FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver wrote the day after the debate. “Hillary Clinton is almost certain to be president,” Guardian columnist and former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson added.
A day later, the Times’s Upshot blog increased Clinton’s chances of winning to 93 percent, an all-time high. On Monday, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger wrote that “Donald Trump’s path to an election night win is almost entirely closed.” Here at The Fix, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake wrote that “Donald Trump’s chances of winning are approaching zero.”
These are accurate, statistically sound statements. But they are something else, too. Declarations that Trump is highly unlikely to win also serve as counters to the Republican nominee’s warning that the “rigged” election could be “stolen from us.”
The latest polls, which Trump insists are rigged due to oversampling, show Clinton with a double digit lead.
However, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook has warned that Trump’s suggestions that the polls are wrong and he can still win are “absolutely right.”
“We’ve seen polls tighten since the third debate and we expect things to get even closer before Election Day.” Mook said, urging Clinton supporters to vote.
“Make no mistake. With only 10 percent of votes cast, Donald Trump could win this election,” Mook said.
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