Flickr: Creative Commons by John Morton

Forgive my exasperation but I am stunned that main stream media is doing such a poor job investigating the security (or exposing the lack thereof) of the American elections. I have worked in the technology and networking industry long enough to know that NO electronic vote is safe.

Even voter-verified electronic votes with a paper receipt are subject to electronic theft. Think of this: The country votes on November 4th. Barring any massive errors, we know the name of the newly elected (or selected) President on November 5th. There’s no time for audits, no time for recounts, no time for security checks. The number that the electronic boxes report is the number CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC will report. Changing the results of an election after calling the winner would be catastrophic for the country. Riots galore. Therefore it is vitally important that we have—and are counting—the ACTUAL results on November 4th.

There is no way to do this using electronic machines. Technologists can tack all the safeguards they like onto an electronic voting machine (paper trail, voter verification, locks, glass cases, beeps, whistles, etc.), but it is still—pardon the expression—putting lipstick on a horrendously ugly, vomit-spewing, farty pig. Once the vote is digitized it can be changed with zero evidence. One million anonymous votes can be changed in three seconds. That’s simply the nature of digital data. (Try changing one million paper ballots! I’ll give you … six seconds! Betcha can’t.)

Precautionary back-up measures like paper trails and random machine audits are useless. They’re feel-good decoration. By 11:59 PM on November 4th, the hacking has been done, evidence has been erased, and the election has been called by all the major news outlets based on the digital results. And even though exit polling in the last two elections has terrifyingly different in places from the actual election results, we have—for whatever reason—taken to the view that exit polls in this country are an unreliable indicator of how people voted…even though it is the metric by which we measure the integrity of foreign elections. (Does the act of voting turn “the good people of America’s Main Streets” into a bunch of over-protective, suspicious liars when they exit the polling location? Enough so that exit polls are wrong by orders of magnitude? No. It’s sheer insanity.)

The only answer is to use 100% paper ballots, in 100% of districts, and count 100% of them by hand. Logistically, yes, this will be a challenge. You might be asking, “How can we count California’s millions of voters in one evening?” I argue that we don’t need to count them all in one evening. Why not have a national election week? People vote at their polling station, or by mail, during this week and the votes are counted publicly in an ongoing transparent process. Early voting already successfully exists in many states, why not expand it to the nation?

Or, if we need to collect and count the votes in one night for security and chain of custody reasons, why not double or triple the number of polling places?

The collected paper ballots should be counted three times with open public supervision. The whole process—from collection to counting to reporting—needs to be absolutely public and transparent. It is shocking to me that this is not the case today. The instant that the votes are hidden from view or in private hands, the reported results are no longer valid. Currently, however, we trust private companies with political interests to ENTIRELY run our public elections. It is a mess. And it is not democracy. Shame on the main stream media for being too timid to investigate this essential piece of our democracy. You heard me CNN.

Here’s how easy it is to rig an electronic voting machine:

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Here’s the private company that runs New Hampshire’s elections:

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I suggest that all people in districts that use electronic voting machines (or even electronic ballot readers) request an absentee ballot and vote through the mail. At least then—if we have an election in November—there will be a paper record should a recount (which is actually the first “count”) be conducted.

Good luck.

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