More Honest Elections

As Diane’s post earlier today pointed out, the Commission supposed to improve voting certitude concluded that it was too expensive to do its job yesterday, in Maryland. Since authorization legislation that creates commissions to study any problem does not contain any directive to make sure that they save the public’s money, this is not just obstructionism, it’s a failure to do a job they’re hired, and paid, to do. Even the Do-Nothing Congress in authorizing a fence to keep out illegal immigrants for the few hundred miles they decided would be enough, included the authorization of monies to do it. (Of course, the DNC advised the cretin in chief that he could use the money in any other way he chose.)

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the present executive branch has no interest in even the semblance of honest voting machinery. Of course, with a background in hijacking elections, that would be pretty self-destructive of it. It’s taken six years of outright criminality for the voters to get savvy enough to throw out the GOP from enough of the representatives’ seats so that we can get some functioning congresspeople into offices where they can do some good, or at least prevent much further harm, to the country.

In the Dallas Morning News Viewpoints section there is a really good call for renewed integrity in our elections system which advises, among other things;

Although significant efforts have been made in recent years to improve elections, serious questions remain.

The 2002 Help America Vote Act was supposed to be the answer. Congress passed the law to modernize the process and provide much-needed federal funds to state and local governments. With at least one recent national exit poll showing high voter confidence in the accuracy of election results, officials should be praised for making improvements. But, as the evidence suggests, the difficulties that continue require immediate attention.

Four important steps should be taken.

One: The time has come for Congress to fully fund the new law. Unanticipated costs associated with implementing this important act have caused a severe financial burden for state and local jurisdictions. And maintenance and trouble-shooting costs associated with electronic voting systems have come at a steep price – a cost often paid by state and local tax dollars.

Seems that authors Martinez (former vice chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission) and Rubin (author of "Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting.") are in sync with Diane today, and start off with the premise that if you’re going to fix our broken elections system, it’s going to require more than friendly suggestions to achieve it.

From Black Box voting, a site that has been promoting awareness of the irregularities of any numbers of U.S. elections, there is an interesting coverage of some shadey results from several places, including Florida and Texas, which is being vigorously shielded from scrutiny.

Because This is the fourth time Black Box Voting and/or its founder, Bev Harris, have received legal threats from voting machine vendors who believe they have the right to sell secret software that miscounts elections.

Attached below is a copy of a peculiar cease and desist order from ES&S, which asks Black Box Voting to remove links that don't exist on its Web site. Black Box Voting does not even have access to the information ES&S is demanding.

ES&S machines have demonstrated proven miscounts in Texas, Florida and Arkansas in the Nov. 2006 election, but exactly how the software miscounted is supposed to be a secret, knowable only to people who work for this privately held company.

Even the county officials, who in some cases have been crying out for assistance -- and are unhappy with the level of service they've received from ES&S and its contractors -- are not permitted to look at the ES&S software that miscounted their votes.

Details on those stories follow, after some additional records are received from Freedom of Information and public records requests to further document those situations. In the mean time, some of the ES&S miscounts can be found through news searches.

Here is a link to the latest ES&S threat letter, which is full of factual inaccuracies:

ES_S_Slashdot-45351.pdf

It’s sad but timely, that voters are waking up to the machinations, rather than working machinery, that are being employed in electing the officials present officeholders want to see at the public trough. In Texas, of course, it took the Supremes to declare one election district invalid because it violates racial distribution standards. That same bunch of Supremes concluded, though, that there are no legal restrictions on when or how often any state can redistrict to keep its elected officials in office. And they did nothing to counter such redistricting practices as running a long tongue of a district from Dallas to Waco, to lap up the voters Texas GOP’ers thought would give them another seat at the trough.
I am greatly looking forward to a Congress dominated by public interest to right some of the great wrongs that the Do-Nothing 109th has perpetrated.

Back to the Dallas Morning News, which has taken this cause seriously today;
It’s encouraging that the incoming Congress doesn't want to stop there and will push for paper verification. And measures have been introduced for consideration by the 2007 Texas Legislature; they would require the state to join the two dozen others that now use paper trails.
Further improvements won't come cheap for enhancing or replacing today's machines. But then, no one ever said democracy was easy.

Democracy is not going to be easy, ever, but when the present bunch of cretins is thrown out of the executive branch, it’s going to be attainable again. And I say, bring it on.