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(Image: Crushed binary via Shutterstock; Edited: JR/TO)
Our article in Truthout last week, Top Ten Epic Reasons Why You Should Give a Sh*t About Voting, elicited quite a few comments from readers voicing concern that ballots may not be correctly or honestly counted by our “black box” computer voting systems – and we would never know.
The Internet is already roaring with stories of
visible attacks on democracy so far in the 2014 elections: 40,000 mostly minority voters purged from Georgia’s voter roles and thousands more in 26 other states, up to 600,000 Texas voters disenfranchised due to new Voter ID laws, and the attempts to override the electoral college in gerrymandered blue states like Michigan.
We can fight this fraud because
we can see it, like the part of the iceberg that is above the water. But yes, there is more below.
Exactly two years ago Harper’s Magazine published a cover story “How to Rig an Election,” (written by this author) detailing the hidden threat to democracy posed by our electronic vote counting systems. Easily rigged and hacked, these computers are controlled by a handful of shady corporations, some with criminal records, who fight to keep their vote-counting software a “trade secret.”
Computerized Voting Today Ensures That Americans Cannot Oversee or Verify Their Own Elections.
Elections are held in a vast patchwork of electoral fiefdoms where laws, procedures and private-vendor technology change from state to state; even from county to county. It’s difficult for one hand to know what the other is doing, particularly when legal public record requests on electronic voting systems are routinely denied.
Little-known grassroots Election Integrity (EI) organizations have been fighting an unrecognized war to reclaim and secure our vote count; groups like Election Defense Alliance, Michigan Election Reform Alliance, Voter PA, Voter GA, Wisconsin Citizens for Election Protection, California Election Protection Network, and many others, including social media sites like Occupy Rigged Elections.
These activists have been holding the line in the democracy trenches for years now, even decades. Almost always underfunded or totally unpaid, they are our friends and neighbors, working people –
they need increased support now, as we head toward the pivotal 2016 elections.
Unlike other issue groups, EI activists span the political spectrum, recognizing that protecting our ballots is not a partisan issue. Republican voters have every reason to cry foul when in recent days they’ve seen electronic Touchscreen votes “flipping” to Democratic candidates, However, Democrats and progressives have long documented an anomalous “red shift” from expected results based on polls of about 6 percent of votes to the conservative right wherever secretly-programmed electronic voting machines are used.