E-voting Gives Election Cheaters & Actual Conspiracies a Free Hand
With a Free Hand, Might Anyone Try to Control the World’s Richest Country? By Paul R. Lehto, Attorney at Law, lehtolawyer@gmail.com
Thinking about committing election fraud? As an election attorney, I'd advise you that it would be illegal to do so, and that you really should not commit such crimes against democracy.
But, it appears Congress, the only party with the power to specify how federal elections shall take place, has left the door wide open for crimes against democracy. Congress has used its lawmaking privilege, power, and conflicts of interest with regard to its own elections to ensure that the votes for all federal races including Congress are determined on electronic voting equipment that features secret vote counting on unaccountable computerized voting systems.
Consequently, Congress has in fact created a system where your exposure to prosecution should you commit election fraud is extraordinarily low relative to other crimes. Of course, this applies to the members of Congress, or anyone cheating on behalf of the same, because a Congressperson cheating their way to re-election won’t get caught, either.
But even if there is no cheating going on, Congress informs democracy activists opposed to bills like HR 550 that continue electronic voting that any proposal to re-assert full public supervision of Congressional re-elections such as was much more common prior to the $4billion in federal funding for e-voting that came along in 2002 with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is simply not “realistic” any more. Apparently, lack of oversight, non-accountability, and lack of public supervision of elections are now so popular with Congress that they try to bluff their way into keeping secret vote counting. But the fact is, according to a Zogby poll in August 2006, fully 92% of the American public support a right to witness vote counting and obtain information about it, a key right totally denied by e-voting systems.
The threat and likelihood of major crimes to democracy could not be more stark or disturbing, especially when two things are considered side by side:
(1) A recent report by NIST at the request of the Election Assistance Commission states baldly that touch screen DRE voting systems “cannot be made secure” and that even with all the engineering and technical expertise of NIST, they “do not know how to write testable requirements” for DREs that could really detect whether something had gone wrong with the computerized voting equipment, and that it is “very difficult” to detect if anything went wrong. The report concludes that only “strongly software independent” solutions that ultimately do not at all rest upon computerization for the veracity of the vote count should be used. See Washington Post, December 1, 2006,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001637.html , and
http://vote.nist.gov/DraftWhitePaperOnSIinVVSG2007-20061120.pdf (2) In addition to the December 1, 2006 article in the Washington Post above, consider also that any persons committing crimes against democracy would be very unlikely to get caught, since even large conspiracies (something not actually needed to steal an election) pretty much have a free hand to run amok in our elections, so long as they have any kind of insider connection. This second point is explained in the rest of this essay.
THE BEST PLACE TO FIND AN ELECTION CRIMINAL IS IN ELECTIVE OFFICE. As in Paul Lehto’s previously published piece called Elections and Jesse James, the very most likely place to find an election criminal is in office. This is undeniably true because elective office is where successful election criminals end up as a prize for their cheating (or the criminals' friend ends up in that office). Thus, given the long history of election shenanigans in this country throughout its history, criminal access to the insides of voting systems is pretty much guaranteed. (Election criminals think of the cheating as doing justice, to make sure some really stupid electoral result, in their minds, doesn’t happen, or to make sure that the candidate that will send them valuable contracts is elected).
The list of these “insiders” is broad and also includes everyone working at the private vendor that sells and services e-voting machines, and all who handle the machines, often including temp workers and random members of the public volunteering as poll-workers who then have machines on “sleepovers” for days prior to the election, allegedly the easiest method to get these computers to the polls on election day.
CONSPIRACIES ARE NOT REALLY NEEDED IN ELECTIONS BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW WHAT TO STEAL AND WHEN, WITHOUT ORDERS FROM ON HIGH. Conspiracies are not particularly needed to control electronic elections. It is now well established through many university and other reports such as the two “Hursti Hacks” demonstrated by Black Box Voting that it takes only one person about one minute with one disk from one voting machine in one county to alter an election result. So, the requirement of a conspiracy is itself a bit of a red herring. See “A Single Person Could Swing an Election”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701451.html Nevertheless, a more ambitious large scale conspiracy, while totally unneeded in most cases, would also have a completely free hand. Based on this incredible “free hand” opportunity for crime, we have ever reason to believe criminals would take full advantage:
THE FIVE FACTORS GIVING CONSPIRACIES AND ELECTION FRAUD A FREE HAND Why do we say "free hand"? Free Hand Factor #1. First, I know of no jurisdiction in the country that is looking for smoking guns of e-voting fraud. They don't know what they are, so they certainly will not find them.
Free hand Factor #2: The high numbers of people who are otherwise unconnected to the conspiracy who in effect help cover it up by pooh-poohing any "conspiracy" theorist that comes along to attempt to expose it. These include pundits, editorial writers, the entire political party that won, plus a host of others longing to make this "conspiracy theorist" attack because it seems like a winning move and we all like to win.
Free Hand Factor #3: Most importantly: the high numbers of unconnected, unpaid folks who will denounce ANY evidence combined with educated theory as "conspiracy theory" number in the millions and constitute an army of folks who are de facto protectors of secrecy. This "conspiracy theory attack" however, is a direct protection of any REAL conspiracy or secretive activity should it actually exist.
Free Hand Factor #4: Then there is the difficulty of getting media attention on this, or a prosecutor's attention, when all but the bravest election officials (Ion Sancho from Florida, Bruce Funk from Utah) are going to tell the media that all's fine, it coulda just been..... (blah blah blah PLAUSIBLE EXCUSE), Of course, a criminal with insider status doesn't need to spend any energy penetrating the system, and can instead spend all of his or her energy on making the crime look plausibly innocent and keeping things secret. Thus, a plausibly innocent excuse is just camouflage or an alibi of sorts that should not terminate the investigation, but does so terminate it. (A Chicago Trib political reporter admitted to me that if he came to a fork in the investigative road where a plausible reason existed for the irregularity in addition to a fraudulent explanation, his editors would not let him go any further into "tinfoil land" and yet this is exactly the kind of camouflage defense a criminal worth his salt is going to erect in the first place!.
Free hand Factor #5: Generally low budgets and staffing for white collar crime and election fraud crime in most state and federal offices, in fact the election criminals, if incumbents, may have substantial influence over the budgets and or investigations of these units.
THE FIVE FREE HAND FACTORS MEAN ANY PLAUSIBLE EXCUSE WILL DO JUST FINE TO TERMINATE AN ATTEMPT TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY. So, based on these five general factors, if someone were of the mind to do something brazen in elections, with or without a conspiracy of support, they'd be fairly likely to get away with it, because there are so many pundits, officials, and the entire winning political party and its supporters who are all looking for any conceivable reasons to support the result as is. Any plausible reason will do to stop an investigation, and plausible reasons exist to support a very wide range of elections results including a wide range of fraudulent results, because it is just as believable that Candidate X won 51-49 as it is that Candidate Y won 51-49, but only one of these many potential results is the true result, the rest are inaccurate and fraudulent.
THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE DESIRE TO CHEAT IN ELECTIONS When we think about the fact that we all tend to alert only our likeminded friends to online polls, effectively stuffing the online ballot box in our favor, we realize the urge to cheat in elections is pretty much universal, even though online polls are nonscientific, urging only our friends to vote is the moral equivalent of stuffing the ballot box and leads to distorted results compared to random surveys. If we up the stakes only "slightly", to say, control of the world's largest economy and sole military superpower, do you think a bunch of folks just MIGHT have an incentive to cheat in the elections like we do in the online polls? For trillions of dollars, might they?
OUR COUNTRY HAS BECOME A LAND OF FORCED NAIVETE’ The truth is, this is not the land of unlikely conspiracy, this is the land of some sort of forced naiveté, enforced by "conspiracy theorist" attacks, in which we are all urged in effect to ignore any defense of democracy's integrity when in fact reason tells us that democracy is greatly at risk, pretty much at all times and at all history periods. It would seem most obvious that we should all defend democracy or be sentinels of democracy, but this seems to be in conflict with being a "conspiracy theorist."
MEDIA, PROSECUTORS AND ELECTION OFFICIALS EXPECT CITIZENS TO HAVE SMOKING GUN PROOF BEFORE THEY EVEN START AN INVESTIGATION INTO AN ELECTION. If a death occurs, citizens need only call the police, and they can automatically expect it will be investigated in virtually every case to some extent, based on a possibility of foul play. If there’s a possibility of foul play, they can expect a thorough investigation.
Not so in elections, where citizen reports are blown off until they themselves have done all the gumshoe work and present a “smoking gun.” But with a potential murder, citizens are not expected to put their shoes on, jump in the car, chase the potential murderer, apprehend him or her, compare fingerprints, do the ballistics, interview witnesses, and then present the murderer and body to police for booking. Yet, with election theft, citizens are expected to present slam-dunk evidence, even though they have no powers of subpoena, nor can they even get a copy of the computer program that counts the counts because it is claimed as a trade secret and the government is contractually obligated to gang up with its vendor to defeat the citizens of the government who want this information.
If insiders perpetrate the election crime, the evidence will likely be behind doors very much slammed shut. For just one example, Ohio citizens found that the FBI did not do a real investigation in 2004, even when presented with evidence that it needed to investigate. It is questionable, since e-voting is so new and presents not only computer forensics issues but also sophisticated interlocking issues regarding election law, whether any enforcement agency has a strong capability to investigate and prosecution electronic crimes against democracy.
THE SOLUTION IS FULL TRANSPARENCY AND PUBLIC SUPERVISION For the above reasons, the only solution for elections is radical transparency and full public supervision of elections. In other words, we get so many different and opposed eyeballs watching the physical ballots that it becomes very hard to get away with anything.
Without that, electronic vote counting's trade secrecy gives bad guys and conspiracies fairly free hand to do what they will, and they story of their calumny would almost never get off the ground in the media. Certainly, any such story would at a minimum come in weeks after the election to give time for a full investigation, when the story of the election is already old news, and self-serving and very short statutes of limitation passed by incumbent legislators have long since passed.
"CONSPIRACY THEORY” ATTACKS FUNCTION AS DEFENSES OF SECRECY Jefferson strong believed that all public issues had to be solved “at the bar of Public Reason” but election fraud can not be discussed without many attempting to shut down the discussion with “I’m not listening any more” charges of “conspiracy theory.” Conspiracy theory charges in elections operate directly to protect the inappropriate secrecy in elections, in the following way.
In a nutshell, e-voting sets up a wall of computerized secrecy that never existed before in elections, and the government cooperates with its chosen vendors to crush citizen requests for information. In response, citizens then use the limited available facts to hypothesize about what's going on behind that new wall of secrecy in order to figure out if vote counting is fair any more. However, by using scientific hypotheses they are also necessarily engaging in “theory”, and thus they are then subject to "conspiracy theorist" attacks. Experience shows that this charge is trotted out almost every single time an election result is questioned, despite the huge motives and stakes encouraging everyone to cheat in an election, and the secrecy in elections that facilitates this cheating.
This shows that the direct rhetorical function of such ridicule as a "conspiracy theorist" (whether intended this way or not) is TO SILENCE PUBLIC INQUIRY INTO ELECTION MATTERS. And generally, “Conspiracy theory” attacks effectively silence any one who inquires into something made secret and is therefore, based on limited information, forced to theorize about the secret matter.
But there's simply no justification for this vote counting secrecy in elections! Elections are supposed to be and traditionally have been the most public areas possible! There’s simply no justification for giving a free hand to crimes against democracy and then being so resistant to any kind of legitimate investigation into such important matters.
THE BIG PICTURE: CITIZENS NOT ALLOWED TO “CONNECT THE DOTS” It is, in effect, an impermissible citizen “crime” of sorts to "connect the dots" concerning secret vote counting in elections, even though voting is the right that protects all other rights, and of paramount importance to freedom itself.
However, if you're the government and the matter is terrorism, your obligation is to "connect the dots" and then see a terrorist conspiracy to bomb someone in every jar of hair gel, padded bra, or bottle or water ,or else you're not doing your job and failing to “connect the dots.” In that case, the terrorists hiding in the caves are always up to unlimited no good and can do anything, and their conspiracies are all powerful and all dangerous. Apparently, it would never occur to Al Qaeda to attack an election, so they remain utterly undefended. The elections are, in any case, indefensible so long as they are computerized. As NIST put it, computerized elections “cannot be made secure.”
I guess for purposes of this double standard on whether one can engage in "connecting the dots" or not it just depends on whether you're exposing government abuse, or furthering it. Citizens should ask why crimes against democracy are not taken seriously when so much is at stake, and why election officials and prosecutors continually fail to act as sentinels of democracy to investigate elections as they would other serious crimes. Certainly, a decent respect for defending democracy demands at least that, not a free hand for fraud.
Paul Lehto
December 3, 2006
Permission is granted to email, blog or otherwise publish this piece with full attribution to the authors above, provided it is published in full and without editing. For edited versions or other inquiries, please contact the authors.
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