[Voterescue] Fitrakis & Wasserman solve major election problems!

[Vickie Karp]

I love it all - though 3 days for voting allows for chain of custody
issues.  Still, hands-down, great ideas! Bob and Harvey are contributors
to our book, "HACKED!  High Tech Election Theft in America" ~ Vickie
OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/
genera_bob_fitr_080116_bob__26_harvey_s_3_ste.htm


January 16, 2008

Bob & Harvey's 3-Step "Ohio Plan" for fair and reliable voting and
vote counts

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

January 16, 2008

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/2974

America is awash in suspect and stolen elections. Since January,
2001, the nation has been saddled with an unelected chief executive.
The consequences have been predictably horrific.

Along the way, three US Senate contests in 2002 and numerous other
Congressional and local elections have been subjected to partisan
disenfranchisement of qualified voters, and vote counts that smack of
theft and fraud.

Even now the primary in New Hampshire is rightly being challenged to
do an expensive but necessary recount procedure that could and should
have been avoided.

As has been shown in the Free Press and elsewhere through the stolen
2000 and 2004 presidential contests, there are scores of ways by
which elections can and have been rigged and ripped off in this new
century. And there are scores of cures that can be put forth.

But we believe they can boil down to a basic three:

1. AUTOMATIC VOTER REGISTRATION, WITH SIGNATURE VERIFICATION:

Since the beginning of the American republic, more than 200 years
ago, voters have signed their registration forms, then signed again
when they came to vote. Falsifying a signature is a felony. All
studies indicate that the number of people who vote fraudulently is
miniscule.

In recent years, Republican operatives have attempted to hype so-
called voter fraud into a major issue. The Bush Administration has
fired nine US Attorneys for their failure to find large numbers of
people committing this crime.

Nonetheless, the GOP and its minions in the media have hyped this non-
problem into a national crisis, whose "solution" is to demand photo
ID at the polling stations.

It's well-known that the impact of this demand would be to
disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of elderly, indigent, homeless
and other citizens, most of whom happen to vote Democratic. A lower
court has rightly labeled this requirement to be a "poll tax" which
is specifically barred by the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution.

But the US Supreme Court now has at least four members who will vote
for anything that serves the partisan interests of the Republican
Party. There is a widespread feeling the Court will approve this
requirement, with adoption in many states run by the GOP.

During Ohio 2004, and in New Mexico and other swing states, the GOP
also found ways to prevent many thousands of voters from registering
at all. The list of dirty tricks is too long and insidious to report
here. More are being unearthed every day.

The one most likely to surface in a big way in 2008 is the practice
of disqualifying voters if the spelling of their name or their middle
initial (or lack thereof) somehow varies from the one in the computer-
generated registration books. Since the voter rolls in some counties
and states have already been privatized, and are being run by
partisan for-profit vendors, we can expect widespread, systematic
disenfranchisement if this system remains in tact.

Our "Ohio Plan" solution is simple: everyone in the United States
should be automatically registered to vote upon turning 18 years old.
Forms addressed to election bureaus, with free postage, should be
made available in high schools and colleges, at motor vehicle
bureaus, social security offices, post offices, union halls, in
military recruiting offices and barracks and numerous other locales
throughout the nation.

All registration forms, and all polling places, can be festooned with
signs warning that fraudulent voting is a felony. No photo ID shall
be required at any voting place, only a signature that matches the
one on file, and a wide range of less intrusive ID. Innumerable
federal, state and government entities from school districts to the
IRS know when US citizens turn 18. Ohio allows some 17 different
documents to serve as suitable identification at the polls.

Voting is a basic American right. It should be the affirmative duty
of the state to promote universal registration and end the bizarre
practice of purging voters in a computer age. Short of a death
certificate, the few questionable voters can easily be moved to an
inactive status instead of purged from the computer database.

2. UNIVERSAL HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS:

It is by now a public article of faith that electronic voting
machines are perfectly designed to steal elections. A recent $1.9
million study for the Ohio Secretary of State has confirmed that an
electronic voting machine can be flipped with a magnet and a
Blackberry. After reports by the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan
Center, Princeton University, the Government Accountability Office,
the Conyers Committee and many more, even the come-lately New York
Times has now deemed touch-screen machines to be eminently hackable.

The country owes a huge debt of gratitude to the grassroots uprising
of independent researchers and bloggers that has campaigned so
bravely and effectively in the face of a mainstream media intent on
ignoring the issue.

Now the Times and others seem to want a "middle ground" with Optiscan
machines that run paper ballots through a reader, and even worse,
feed them into computerized central tabulators.

We oppose this hackable non-solution. At least two Optiscan scams
come quickly to mind. In Toledo, Ohio, inner city wards, Optiscan
ballots were improperly calibrated causing a higher rate than normal
to be rejected by the reader. Scores of them remain uncounted from
the 2004 Ohio presidential election. In fact, most of the 93,000 or
so uncounted ballots in Ohio fell under the label “machine rejected.”

In Miami County, Ohio, an Optiscan machine produced phantom votes
that couldn't be explained in the final tabulation. See the Free
Press article: http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2209.

Yet Ohio's Secretary of State is poised to order Cuyahoga County
(Cleveland)---which overrode citizen objections against spending $20
million on touchscreen voting machines---to now spend an additional
$11 million on Optiscan machines to replace them. How long will it
take before those Optiscan machines are, in turn, rejected?

The real solution is obvious: use paper ballots, and count them by
hand. This is not, of course, fool proof. But it works beautifully in
places like Germany and Switzerland, where official vote counts
regularly conform to within 0.1% of exit polls.

Hand counted paper ballots could and should work here. In particular,
we should reach out to high school and college students in the
tradition of democratic public service to facilitate the vote count
process.

The "revolutionary concept" of all of us voting on ballots that have
the actual name of the candidates on them, with the opportunity to
put a visual, tangible "X" next to those we choose, has the merit of
obvious simplicity. These ballots can be counted and recounted, with
high reliability and no dependence on source codes or
incomprehensible computer glitches.

To be sure, ballots can be stolen and manipulated. But there is every
indicator the possibility of fraud is still far less than with
electronic machines. One can stuff ballots one at a time, so to
speak, at the retail level. But computerized voting and tabulation
allow for the far more dangerous wholesale shifting of votes and the
deadly pre-programming of election results.

It should also be noted that federal law now requires that all
election records be retained for 22 months after a federal vote. In
Ohio, 56 of 88 county election boards ignored federal law---and a
court injunction---and destroyed all or some of their records from
the 2004 election, making a meaningful recount essentially
impossible. Thus far, no state or federal official has indicated any
willingness to do anything about this blatant abuse of federal law.

So meaningful reform will require that federal election laws actually
be enforced.

As part of the King-Lincoln civil rights lawsuit (in which we are
attorney and plaintiff) extensive research into Ohio 2004 makes it
clear that nearly all the electronic records were virtually worthless
anyway, and could have been easily manipulated had they been retained.

That would not have been the case had the election been conducted
entirely on paper ballots. They are thus the worst alternative we
have---except for all the other ones.

3) A THREE-DAY NATIONAL VOTING HOLIDAY, WITH BALLOTS HAND-COUNTED BY
STUDENTS:

The current practice of voting on Tuesday was adopted in the 1700s
because that was when Americans came to market. We are no longer a
farm society, and we need not vote on the first Tuesday following a
Monday after final harvest. Today this practice discriminates against
working people and is nothing more than an inappropriate, anti-
democratic anachronism.

Ohio's Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has proposed a two-week
window for voting. We think three days should suffice. They should be
the Friday, Saturday and Sunday nearest to November 11, Veteran's
Day. The polls should be staffed by high school and college students,
who will then be given that Monday off to count the paper ballots.

The current demand for electronic tabulating has no basis other than
the demand by the media for quick results and the demand for great
profits (at public expense) by the companies who make these easily
hackable machines.

We believe the American public can wait for election results to be
accurate and reliable. We also see in this a great civics lesson for
our young people. And a reliable way to get a true, democratic
outcome from our most critical means of keeping the government
accountable and under public control.

Universal voter registration, a ban on electronic voting machines and
the requirement for hand-counting of paper ballots can all be done
with simple legislation. The three-day voting process is more
complex. The requirement that we vote the first Tuesday after
November's first Monday is embedded in the Constitution. Changing
that would require a Constitutional Amendment. (Voting on Saturday
through Tuesday, with vote counting on Wednesday---a five-day
process---would not).

Overall, simple as they are, these three simple, practical steps
could revolutionize our democratic process and restore control of our
government to the people. Which is precisely why we expect the
mainstream media, voting machine manufacturers and major parties to
heap scorn on them.

We have not addressed the problem of money in politics, proportional
voting, or of the corporate media's undemocratic domination of the
campaign process.

But this administration has certainly taught us the consequences of
having an unelected executive. We must start somewhere.

These three steps will help us at least regain control of the voting
process. From there, anything is possible.

Let's vote on it!

--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE
AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at
www.freepress.org, of which Bob is publisher and Harvey is Senior
Editor. Their WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, with Steve Rosenfeld, is from
the New Press.

Authors Website: http://www.bobforohio.com

Authors Bio: http://www.freepress.org http://www.bobforohio.com
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