This Fall, up to one third of the voting population will cast their ballots on electronic machines. One third.
Machines notorious for their security flaws. Machines that many counties and precincts across the nation allow election workers to take home up to weeks before election day, with no ability to ensure the integrity of those machines. Machines whose counts cannot be verified independently through a paper trail. Machines that, in the past have lost votes or counted too many votes, and have been known to mysteriously cast votes for Republican candidates even if the voter has selected a Democrat.
Even Republicans don’t trust these machines when it might impact their internal party elections.
While a few brave souls are taking steps to prevent another election debacle this November, they are few in number, and vastly underfunded in relation to the companies who make these questionable evoting machines, and their supporters in and out of government.
(cont.)
This year already has seen news reports that at least seventeen (17) states are at high risk of compromised elections due to their use of electronic voting machines without a verifiable paper trail. Among those seventeen states are Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Another twenty-three (23) states are at a mid-level risk of their elections being compromised, because, even though they use evoting machines which have a verifiable paper trail, they do not conduct manual audits of those machines. In these 40 states, 40% of the votes will be tallied by evoting machines.
Add to this the massive GOP effort to suppress the vote among Democrats generally, and in the Hispanic and African American communities in states like Ohio, and one can easily envisage elections which return Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. In short, we are poised to repeat the same mistakes that led to questionable elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004.
I wish I had an easy answer to these concerns. A sure fired solution to what I believe will be another attempt by the Republican Party and their conservative supporters this Fall to hijack our elections. I do not.
I applaud those who are working to prevent this looming catastrophe, or at least to limit its scope, such as VerifiedVoting.org, New Yorkers for Verified Voting, Virginia Verified Voting, Verified Voting New Mexico, North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting, Georgians for Verified Voting, Unitarian Universalists for Verified Voting, Defenders of Democracy, PA-VerifiedVoting.org, VoteTrustUSA, National Committee for Voting Integrity, Citizens for Voting Integrity, National Ballot Integrity Project , CountTheVote.org and so many others.
I urge you to join one of these fine organizations, or contribute financially to their cause if you are able. Yet, the sheer number of them speaks volumes, does it not?
