Avoid Corporate Crime - Hand Count The Paper Ballots

[kster]

by Wayne Stinson
April 14, 2008



SNIP...When the State BOE met in the third week of January they were struggling to
retain some semblance of their bureaucratic identity while complying with the Federal District Court’s directives. Impeded by an absolute partisan split, Judge Sharpe’s corrupting time schedule, and a limited offering of Ballot Marking Devices to choose from, the board was initially able to approve only one BMD for purchase by the county Boards of Elections.

SNIP...Hart InterCivic has a partner company which provides the software side of their package: SOE Software of Tampa FL. A brief visit to their web page www.soesoftware.com reveals that two of their top management team have previous business relationships with Mobil, Sperry Univac, General Dynamic, IBM, Raytheon, AT&T, MCI and Motorola. This does not give me hope for tamper free elections should Hart have any access to our votes.

SNIP...Most election integrity activists considered the ImageCast BMD/scanner choice a victory in that it practically and fiscally guaranteed we would be voting on paper ballots in 2009. Not having to cast our ballots using a direct recording electronic voting machine and instead having the inherently verifiable paper ballot is a win, but only a partial win. Our remaining problem is reliance on a software controlled scanner and election management computer programs, all susceptible to manipulation by a variety of untrustworthy corporate actors, election insiders and technocrats, to count our votes.

Unable to rely on state bureaucracies, the Justice Department or Federal Courts to protect us from the threats to voting integrity privatization and lack of transparency represents, the task falls to us. As citizens we have to assume responsibility for the vote count. The verifiable paper ballot is of no service to election integrity unless they are counted by the voters themselves. A scanner using open source software and maintained by municipal workers might be used to confirm the count but the official count has to be the one performed by citizens, at the polling place upon closing of the polls.

I do like to end on a positive note with an action suggestion. We should slaughter the golden goose and disappoint all the wolves that are circling us. We can ban the scanners and decide to hand count the paper ballots. If we did that the wolves would quickly lose interest. Then we will need only to concern ourselves with dealing with each other instead of the corporations.


http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_wayne_st_080414_avoid_corporate_crim.htm