Election Machines Are Immoral
An Op-Ed by the EDA
Since Nov 2020, many of us have been immersed in data about elections: voter rolls, CVRs, network diagrams, machine manuals, databases, etc. I would surmise there is an endless amount of analysis that could be done and will need to be done in the future as election technology evolves.
I for one believe that many of us (myself included) have transitioned from doing useful research to chasing our tail with respect to analyzing data. It is a trap and we need to extract ourselves from it or at least recognize there are limits to this approach.
I would suggest we need to focus on the immorality of using voting machines. The Election Defense Alliance of NH summarized it this way back in 2007.
“The introduction of cold, computerized, machines into this arrangement is intuitively unsettling. We have no “relationship” with these things. They take no oaths of allegiance to us. They can’t sit in a jail cell if they defraud us. These computers, with their complexities, their secret vote counts, their private allegiance to their programmers, their potential for insidious tricks, come between us and our community.”
The machines destroy our community……….this is immoral.
My own take from a moral perspective is that We The People not only have the right to Vote but we also have the right to understand the PROCESS of how votes are counted. This is my moral position and I know it is not unique to me alone. Many people believe this and many more intuitively understand the concept.
Nobody, not even the clerks who run our elections, understand the PROCESS of how votes are counted. They simply follow a procedure defined by a private company who sold them the voting machine.
Understanding that process does NOT mean we have access to laws, procedures, training and manuals used to run our elections using voting machines. Rather it means we have the right to understand how the votes are actually TALLIED at the transactional level.
This is not possible with a black box computer.
Looking at the question differently, I would propose that even if all the computer code were 100% open source and available for inspection and the entire network of technology used to record and transmit the vote tallies was hardened to meet the highest standards in a way that was 100% transparent (a pipe dream), we still would be using an immoral voting system.
Why?
Because 99.9% of the voting population will never UNDERSTAND the open source code or anything else related to this hypothetical election system hierarchy. It is simply too complex and unnecessarily so. We The People would need to rely on an expert to tell us everything is OK, the most secure election ever.
Using an analogy…..if you follow baseball, how many times have you looked at the team standings during the course of a season and said to yourself, “Gee, I don’t believe the team they have listed as being in 1st place is actually in 1st place.” I am quite sure….Never. Why do you implicitly trust baseball team standings?
Because the PROCESS for tallying the score is available for everyone to see and follow along with. You can even buy a program and keep score of the game yourself with a pencil. You can attend it in person. You can also watch the score being tallied remotely or on DVR at anytime. And they have instant replay for those scenarios that require extra scrutiny. There are real people (umpires) who make the calls and everyone can see what the umpires see.
This produces 100% TRUST in what is reported even if you didn’t watch the game.
A second example.
Let’s say you opened an account with a new bank and after a month, the statement arrives. The beginning balance is listed and the ending balance is listed. But to your surprise, the transactional information is missing. No deposits or debits are listed. Therefore if you wanted to check the math on the statement it would be nearly impossible.
I suspect you would immediately drop that bank and find another that provided access to every transaction so you could TRUST that institution, even though you might not check your ledger every month. The knowledge that you COULD check every transaction creates a feeling of TRUST.
What would a moral election system look like?
Simple, something that was WORTHY of TRUST by WE THE PEOPLE.
TRUSTWORTHINESS.
That system would afford any citizen the right to inspect in real time the votes being tallied. This would involve in person and remote access to the tallying or counting process itself done manually by people.
Sound insane? Actually, many countries have come to this same conclusion that hand counting is the only trustworthy system for counting votes. They, I suspect, look at our system of using election machines as being INSANE.
Imagine that, you live in New Zealand or Canada and quite literally, the idea of using voting machines is generally accepted to be INSANE. Imagine being at a family dinner and start advocating the use of election machines over hand counts. People would look at you as being INSANE. How different it is in this country when simply discussing the topic brings the gaslighting of being an election denier.
In fact Germany’s Supreme Court banned voting machines for the the reasons outlined here, voting machines do not afford citizens with the ability to understand the PROCESS of counting votes. The understanding of the PROCESS could not be left to a few technologists. This is not Democracy.
Instead these countries rely on human beings, their neighbors, to count and the report the votes. No machines.
The naysayers who don’t agree that removing election machines is realistic will point to the fact that hand counting in the US would be too complex, difficult, expensive or time consuming. I would counter that with several points.
Being a moral person is a choice TO DO the difficult, to purposely not take the expedient route.
Other countries hand count so it is not impossible. If the format of the ballot makes it more difficult to hand count than the ballot itself should be changed. Our current ballots are designed for machine counting, not human counting. What would a ballot designed for a human count look like?
99% of the precincts use 1 (or a very small number) of ballot styles (here I mean one set of candidates and issues to vote on) unlike a voting convenience center which has to handle many sets of ballot styles. Neighbors counting votes with other neighbors in a precinct would have to deal with only one set of ballot styles.
Hand counting the federal races using a new federal only ballot would be consistent across many precincts and could be an initial foray into implementing hand counting.
Using election machine software to count votes is like having a judge render a decision on your case who does not have jurisdiction over your precinct. Where does the person who wrote the software live? Serbia? Venezuela? Some other foreign country? Would we invite a foreign national person to be the lead vote counter in our precinct? Or is it better to rely on our community?
Clerks, it YOUR job to figure out how to run a precinct level hand count election, don’t expect ME to figure it out. We are the people who want this type of system, so figure it out, figure out the cost and then let’s start spending money on local people instead of sending to say I don’t know UKRAINE? We are specifying the REQUIREMENT, please figure out how to do it.
For the naysayers, I have below linked some countries that have hand counting procedures in place. This is probably not an exhaustive list, but enough examples to prove that our system can certainly be questioned on MORAL GROUNDS ALONE without having to spend anymore time being consumed by data analysis and PROVING anything technical.
Expect to be gaslight by the naysayers and the so called experts, like the Brennan Center for Justice for example. When has being a moral person ever been easy?
One final note…hand counts are but one piece of the overall puzzle: mail in ballots are a topic that deserves it’s own discussion on moral grounds. Cleaning voter rolls is another. Ballot harvesting another. I think we understand that.
New Zealand
Australia
Germany
Canada
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ask-paper-voter-lists-hand-counting-ballots-election-1.6167809
England
Ireland
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/54m-voting-machines-scrapped-for-9-each/26870212.html
Netherlands
https://edri.org/our-work/edrigramnumber5-20e-voting-machines-netherlands/
France
Phenomenal analysis. Thank you because this can be used to speak to pastors. And perhaps they will in turn stand up against the tyranny.
This was very well written and provided helpful examples. I look forward to sharing the content with people who don’t understand the danger of little black boxes that may or may not properly count. It’s interesting how many naysayers to these adding machines computer boxes actually believe that without them, we’d be counting for weeks. I always ask how is it that we were able to accomplish counting in the past? Smaller precincts, for one! The coldest and hardest truth about machines (I love how you describe them) is that many US citizen voters don’t want to believe We the People have been lied to and duped on so many levels for decades. Thanks again for great writing.