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| (FL) 6/10 - ELECTION REFORM WORKERS M... |
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Nancy Tobi
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ntobi
Post Number: 486
Registered: 1-2006
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2010 - 8:02 am: | 
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Election-reform workers meet in DeLand
DO ELECTRONIC ELECTIONS PASS THE TEST?
by Pat Hatfield
BEACON STAFF WRITER
Without elections, we aren't free people. And if election results can't be verified by the public, we don't know if we are free.
That was the message delivered by Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris, when she visited DeLand to address election activists.
Harris has gained national fame, crisscrossing the United States many times since 2002 to investigate election fraud and failures of electronic voting systems.
Electronic machines, including computers and scanners, count more than 80 percent of the votes cast in the United States in county, state and federal elections.
But computers no longer count votes in Germany.
Harris told the DeLand audience that, in 2009, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled citizens must be able to verify election results, reliably, and without any specialized knowledge about voting machines.
Because that standard can't be achieved with electronic voting, Germany elected to revert to paper ballots. Germany joined Ireland, the Netherlands, India and even Nigeria — all of which have returned to paper ballots and hand counts.
In the United States, however, computerized elections are the norm. Paper ballots are scanned and the results tabulated by computers. Touch-screen computers that don't produce paper ballots are in use, and Internet voting is being discussed.
The trend is worrisome for Harris and others like her, who have uncovered computerized elections across the country skewered by fraud, machine malfunction and carelessness.
"Democracy has never been tested before by electronics," Harris said.
After a decade of work, Harris said, she has boiled down the essentials of a good election, to four answers citizens must be able to obtain and independently verify:
• Who was eligible to vote?
• Who actually voted?
• Was the vote cast the same vote that was actually counted?
• Was the vote-counting accurate?
With vote-counting done by computers that operate on secret software, answers to the four questions are impossible to obtain and verify, Harris pointed out.
Even when there are paper ballots, information is routinely concealed from the public, she said. Voters are told information is unavailable, or proprietary. They are denied the right to observe poll-closings and ballot-handling. Chain-of-custody procedures for ballots are sometimes not followed. In some cases, ballots and poll-tapes produced by the ballot-counting machines have been destroyed.
After the 2004 election, Harris went Dumpster-diving outside the Volusia County Elections Office, where she — along with voting activists Susan Pynchon and Ellen Brodsky — found signed poll tapes from the election that had been discarded. The reported results differed from the results on the signed tapes.
Their investigation into the 2004 election was detailed in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy.
Pynchon, who lives in DeLeon Springs, went on to found Florida Fair Elections Coalition, which hosted Harris' visit in May to DeLand. The work of the nonprofit organization, based in DeLand, has been recognized in many states, and was recently used by Wisconsin to guide the certification of voting machines for use in that state.
Brodsky, who lives in Broward County, founded Broward Election Reform. Brodsky recently won a court victory in Broward after she was arrested for trying to attend a canvassing-board meeting.
Both Brodsky and Pynchon ran for the office of elections supervisor in their respective counties, promising greater accountability and public access to elections processes. Both women lost.
http://www.beacononlinenews.com/news/daily/2731 |
Nancy Tobi
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Ntobi
Post Number: 487
Registered: 1-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2010 - 8:13 am: |
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And Bev - you look FAAABULOUS! Healthy living is radiating from you! Great to see
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Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 11112
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Saturday, June 19, 2010 - 11:13 am: |
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Thanks, Nancy!
The pic didn't make it into the blog item, here it is thanks to the Beacon photographer:
BEACON PHOTO/PAT HATFIELD
Watchdogs dine in DeLand — Election-reform workers, from left, Kitty Garber and Susan Pynchon of Volusia County, and Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, gather at a May dinner in DeLand for elections activists from across Florida.
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