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This is something Land Shark wrote that he gave me permission to post.
Are We Helping the Voting Companies, or Opposing Them?
Strategies for Dealing with the Business of Election Secrets.
You probably didn’t know that cigarettes have a lot to do with election reform – they have secrets in common.
The secrets in both election reform and cigarettes are both “trade secrets”. Phillip Morris has successfully claimed trade secrets in the list of additives in their cigarettes so that when Massachusetts passed a law requiring cigarette makers to disclose just the names of additives but not the “recipe”, Phillip Morris won a lawsuit claiming the state had “taken” their trade secret “property”.
Even though trade secrets are simply unprotectable ideas or processes that become protectable only because of the value a business claims they have, along with the business’s efforts at protecting that value through secrecy, they achieve the legal status of “property” more or less at the decision of private companies. Unlike patents, there is no uniqueness or invention required, just an investment-backed expectation of competitive advantage in secrecy.
With elections, the secret software used to count votes is also claimed as a trade secret, along with other items like operator’s manuals and so forth. This “property” trade secret interest means that any attempt to request information regarding the details of vote counting on electronic voting computers will be met with denials and lawsuits.
It gets worse. After having deliberately set up a veil of secrecy, government officials and vendors then tend to ridicule anyone who dares to ask questions about whether democratic integrity really exists behind the veil they’ve set up by suggesting citizens are a “conspiracy theorists”. While one must *necessarily* engage in some inferential thought about what is kept secret (which can then be termed “theory”), there’s nothing theoretical about the simple fact that entirely new election regimes based on secrecy and the absence of checks and balances are being set up all over the United States. Any attempt to object to trade secrecy or the lack of checks and balances is met with the trade secrecy argument, and the specter of having to pay the voting companies yet again, first for having privatized democracy, and then again for getting part of it back by open sourcing the trade secret code which is then claimed as a “regulatory taking”.
Even if made public, open source code is still problematic because it can still be hacked, and any computer or other interface that comes between a voter and her ballot, (just like any human being offering their “services” in filling out the ballots of others and then counting them invisibly and secretly) is a prescription at least for every category of election problems.
The same goes for a voter verified paper BALLOT (better) or TRAIL (worse) if these are appended onto a computer voting system interface. The need for a paper trail reveals the absurdity of the computerized voting in the first place, because it shows that what computerized voting really needs is a paper ballot added! In reality, the emperor has no clothes and computerized voting is an expensive bottleneck that creates election day lines in exchange for the $2500 to $5000 price per computer. Paper ballots need not create lines because they can be voted against a wall or on one’s lap.
Importantly, if we can get beyond the abilities of vendors to add poison pills to reform legislation, anything we would pass regarding existing computerized voting is at risk of simply giving the voting companies a legal claim for takings, impairment of contracts, and/or due process, depending on the specifics. To the extent Republican politicians (unlike Republican rank and file) remain opposed to reform, it is very likely that even the most favorable bill will change dramatically for the worse just prior to the final vote, via amendment.
So, if some well-meaning activists have their way, we will now pay voting companies yet again in order to get all or only part of our democracy back, especially if we hit certain types of home runs legislatively. We may also have to pay them again by buying voter verified paper ballot machines at $1000 a pop or so. Then, the various “cooperation clauses” in the sales contracts for voting computers force the government to cooperate with the vendors to legally quash (crush) any citizens’ subpoenas or requests for information regarding vote counting software. The loyalty of government has been shifted to the corporations and away from the people.
Because the voting machine companies are performing the most central governmental function of all by counting votes, we are well beyond corporate influence on government, or even corporate “control”. The corporations now claim our democracy as their private property.
We need to get beyond the charade of testing and techno-wizardry to the realities that secrecy in government except in very narrow areas is always corrupting, and even more corrupting is elections officials (local and secretary of states) purporting to “check and balance” themselves when they all want things to appear smooth so they can go home on time and not be humiliated in the press.
We also should realize that the most advanced system of voting is the one that offers the lowest payoff per election mistake or election crime. Computers offer big payoffs (with no witnesses), while paper ballots offer typical payoffs of one vote per intimidated or bribed voter (with many witnesses along the way).
The solution is not to aggressively seek new laws, except to the extent of mandating additional disclosure of data results and other things not claimed as trade secrets, but to realize that the imposition of secret vote counting and the contracts for sale of these machines were illegal on the day they were signed. Having never existed (because they are void), there can be no “taking” when they are canceled, and the voting companies can go back to the private sector they came from, if they wish to keep secrets.
So the plan is to launch lawsuits to expose this as the illegal and unconstitutional scheme it is, (such as the lawsuit linked to at www.votersunite.org ) and to check out www.velvetrevolution.us and send e-letters there to all nine major voting companies, pledging boycott and divestment actions if they don’t become public-minded in various specific ways.
More and more, trade secrets are being used not to protect value or innovation, but to hide defects and problems and lack of support for the public interest, something else tobacco companies and voting computer companies very much have in common.
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