A Censored Headline and why it Matters:
German High Court Outlaws Electronic Voting
Justices of the German Federal Constitutional Court. Image
The justices above are clearly the most rational group of high level functionaries in the industrialized world. They did what no other court would do in Europe or the United States. They effectively outlawed electronic voting. On March 3, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared that the electronic voting machines used in the 2005 Bundestag elections for the German national parliament were outside of the bounds of the German Constitution.
They reasoned that electronic voting is not verifiable because citizen votes are counted in secret. It obscured a technology inaccessible to all but a very few initiates. Most importantly, the German high court noted, electronic voting machines don’t allow citizens to “reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner” Mar. 3, 2009.
The written opinion effectively bars electronic voting in future elections based on the complexity of voting machines and the inability of voters to watch their vote being counted. This raises the bar of acceptability well above the meaningless solutions offered by “paper trails” for touch screen votIing or the so-called “paper ballots” for computerized optical scan voting machines, the most popular form of voting in the United States.
Germany’s 2009 Bundestag elections were conducted with hand counted paper ballots.
Have you heard that one of the world’s leading economic powers, the fourth largest economy in the world, banned electronic voting; said it was undemocratic? Given the multitude of problems encountered in the U.S. and the number of questionable election results, wouldn’t it make sense that when Germany banned electronic voting and replaced it with paper ballots, there would be at least a days worth of national coverage in the United States?
Nothing like that occurred. The Associated Press (Times of India) story on the verdict danced around the periphery of the world media market with coverage in Turkey, India, Australia, and Ireland. But there were no major media takers for the AP story in the United States.
There was every reason to carry the story. In a 2006 Zogby poll, 92% of the 1028 registered voters surveyed said they agreed with this statement:
Citizens have the right to view and obtain information about how election officials count votes – 92% agree. New Zogby Poll On Electronic Voting Attitudes Aug. 21, 2006
That’s exactly the proposition that the German court upheld. Surely there was an audience for the German decision but there was hardly a word from corporate media.
Why did this happen?
There are certain vital stories that the U.S. corporate media won’t touch. The most prominent censored headline is “Over One Million Iraqi Civilians Dead in Conflict.” This figure has been known since 2007 while a previous survey showing 650,000 dead was spiked in 2006. The Iraqi civilians died as a result of internal conflict unleashed by the U.S. invasion in 2003. Had Bush-Cheney not invaded with the approval of a sleep walking Congress, these people would not have died as they did.
Another vital story that isn’t covered is election fraud, fixing an entire election. The corporate media simply can’t raise the possibility that election fraud exists. The preliminary steps enabling election fraud through computerized voting are outsourcing elections to private vendors; the lack of any verifiable connection between your vote and the voting machines processes; and, security risks.
However, corporate media are more than happy to cover the nearly nonexistent “voter fraud” stories about masses of illegal voters showing up at the polls. The Bush administration was only able to produced 24 convictions of citizens and non citizens combined over a three year period.
The media will discuss electronic voting malfunctions but they simply won’t connect the dots. Computers function as programmed, by definition. “Malfunctions” during vote counting are part of any given program. When the errors benefit one side of the political equation, it is highly relevant to raise questions about intentional “errors.” However, the treatment of these stories is always within the context of computer problems instead of a broad inquiry into why elections are outsourced to private vendors and the resulting risks and problems and. U.S. elections will be virtually dominated by one private firm out of Omaha, Nebraska, ES&S.
German Citizens Prevail
A recent article by elections activist Kathleen Wynne, former Associate Director of BlackBoxVoting.org, told the story of the story of the landmark German case with a link to an extensive radio interview with litigant Dr. Ulrich Wiesner (Electronic Voting Declared Unconstitutional in Germany).
Physicist Ulrich Wiesner, PhD and Prof. Joachim Wiesner, PhD, an eminent German political scientist, brought suit against the use of electronic voting machines in the 2005 Bundestag elections. The evidence gathered supported the findings of the court described above. While both Wiesner’s on the suit have PhD’s and distinguished careers, they brought the landmark case on their own as citizens. Undeterred by the odds and the dismissal of German politicians, they stood by their cause and won.
It’s a great story, father and son team prevail against huge odds to ensure that all Germans get their vote counted. But none of the majors here bit.
These articles constitute most of the serious coverage of this story in the United States. Paul Lehto wrote two articles for OpEdNews.com on March 3 and 19, 2009: Germany Bans Computerized Voting, Will Hand Count in 2009 and German high court honors US democratic principles. Activist Bev Harris wrote a commentary on 3-19-09: Let’s get off the hamster wh…, BlackBoxVoting.org. Newsweek ran an insightful column in its education section on June, 2009, We do not trust machines. While AP ran the story, it wasn’t picked up and featured by any major media outlet in the United States. The International Herald Tribune also covered the decision but its sister paper, The New York Times, dropped the ball.
The Wynne article told the story of the citizens who made the decision happen, the Wiesner father and son team. Deadline Live with Jack Blood, the radio show, carried a comprehensive interview of German litigant, Dr. Ulrich Wiesner and follow up discussions with Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris
But that’s it. The highest court in the nation with the world’s fourth largest economy makes law that bans electronic voting after determining that computerized elections are fundamentally opposed to democratic principles. The decision applies directly to the electronic voting systems used in the United States. What do we hear from the U.S. corporate media? Just about nothing.
In this case, when a tree falls in the forest and just a few people hear it, it’s no big deal. But it should be.
END
For more information on hand counted paper ballots and evidence for this case, see:
Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots
VoteRescue.org
Hacking the Electoral Law, Ulrich Wiesner, PhD, 23rd Chaos Communications Conference (PDF)
This article may be reproduced in whole or in part with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.
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“…computerized elections are fundamentally opposed to democratic principles.”
Um, come to think of it, isn’t having an unelected, unaccountable body like our Supreme Court whose decisions cannot be appealed, also fundamentally opposed to democratic principles?
The justices of the German Constitutional Court are elected by their Parliament, subject to term limits, and have to have more qualifications than just being a crony of some bigwigs in a sitting President’s political party.
After our Supreme Court stopped the vote count, nullified the 2000 election, and arbitrarily selected the President of their choice, I think it was Al Gore who noted that once our Supreme Court rules, nothing short of armed revolution can alter their decision. That’s gotta be “fundamentally opposed to democratic principles.” And it doesn’t bode well for the possibility of a ruling similar to Germany’s here, so I can see why our media would keep us in the dark.
Great work, Michael Collins. Follow the links, people. If we are to have an informed electorate, this is the information that every American has a need to know.
Mark, you’re right about the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Easily one of the worst decisions since Dred Scott, the court failed to recognize what had always been — state regulation of vote counting. Election 2000 was an attack on the nation through varieties of election fraud. The funding disparity was there from the start creating an uneven playing field. The exclusion of all but two voices from the public debate skewed the dialog to the center. Ever present racism in the creation and operation of precincts was documented clearly in Florida and present around the country (see this remarkable study http://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/). The corporate media was like a Bush support team. Election day was unmonitored but the national exit poll adjusted it’s final poll to conform to the results, ratifying a dreadful display of respect for citizens. All that happened before the purges in Florida and other outrages were well documented. What did the Supreme Court do — made sure that the rigged game stayed in place. All in all, we’d have been better off with the German court at that turning point.
Great work, Michael. The German justices and the German people remember the horrors which resulted from their loss of the power to control their government in the 1930s, and they took a stand for liberty and justice and against fascism with this decision.
Everyone should write their newspaper and threaten to cancel their subscription if an article about the German court’s decision is not published within 1 week, and then when their newspaper continues to censor this most important news, they should cancel their subscription, publish their letters on Scribd, and picket the propaganda rags.
In case anyone is wondering, the American “news” cartel also refuses to mention that computers count votes in secret, that secret vote counting is unconstitutional, and that there is evidence showing that American elections have been stolen. For more on that, see Why Does the Government Ignore Our Wishes? at http://dailycensored.com/2009/09/11/why-does-the-government-ignore-our-wishes/ and don’t miss my 18 minute speech.
If you take a look, you’ll learn why the government gets away with horrible crimes and how to take action to restore our ability to make sure that our votes are counted accurately. My article on torture includes a link to the U.S. Supreme Court case which explains how one of our stolen rights makes the difference between justice and injustice, between freedom and slavery.
Remember, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Take action by forwarding a link to this article to everyone on your contact list.
Great observations, Michael.
This is another result of the profit-focused media ownership. The remaining traditional media in the U.S. just doesn’t view what goes on “over there” as very important or marketable. Look at the stories that have been getting major play: Sarah Palin’s latest Facebook entry and the “Balloon Boy” hoax.
Telling the Truth, and Why it Matters
Mr. Collins has written a huge distortion of the German Supreme Court’s opinion in this case. Because I often agree with him, I will be charitable, and chalk it up to ignorance rather than a deliberate intent to deceive his readers. Apparently, Mr. Collins is unable to distinguish between “obiter dicta,” and an opinion’s actual ruling. If he could do that, then he would know that the court upheld the challenged paperless electronic election, and denied the plaintiff’s request for a scrutiny of the election.
Mr. Collins is bewildered by the lack of coverage in the US press of the opinion, as he portrays it. Its easy, Mike. Their legal departments know how to read legal opinions, so they did not reach your ill-informed conclusions.
Op Ed has an accurate summary of the opinion, at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/PAPERLESS-ELECTRONIC-ELECT-by-William-J-Kellehe-090907-39.html
Truth matters because you can’t have Justice without it.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
InternetVoting@gmail.com
http://ssrn.com/author=1053589
“Interior Ministry official Hans-Heinrich von Knobloch said that officials would work to satisfy the court’s requirements, but he did not expect it would be possible to use machines in this year’s election.” Associated Press (from the Taiwan News, 2009-03-03 http://tinyurl.com/yglf3am )
This is from the Interior Minister, the German entity responsible for conducting the 2009 election. (http://tinyurl.com/ygqf4k6)
This is the inevitable outcome of the truth about the German decision which essentially banned electronic voting since it didn’t meet two critical criteria: 1) that the systems not be so obtuse as to bar citizens from understanding how they worked and 2) that citizens be able “reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner” Mar. 3, 2009.(from the article above). The voting systems used in 2005 failed to meet those criteria.
That’s why the Ministry of the Interior made the comment that opened this reply.
The article is a media criticism for ignoring a momentous judicial act in the midst of technical domination of elections around the world which alienate citizens from the franchise. “We pretend to vote, they pretend to get elected.”
The media criticism wasn’t about the 2005 election being upheld. The summary linked in the article clearly explains that the court didn’t overturn the election. It’s a non issue.
The criticism was about banning the very type of electronic voting inflicted on the public here and elsewhere in an advanced democracy.
That’s what happened. It’s a major story and I have to quote from an AP release published in Taiwan to bring the conclusion of the German Interior Minister to bear.
Directly from the German Federal Constitutional Court – Clarity on Electronic Voting
Federal Constitutional Court
http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/en/press/bvg09-019en.html
Federal Constitutional Court – Press office
Press release no. 19/2009 of 3 March 2009
Judgment of 3 March 2009 – 2 BvC 3/07 and 2 BvC 4/07 –
Use of voting computers in 2005 Bundestag election unconstitutional
“II. The principle of the public nature of elections, which results from the fundamental decisions of constitutional law in favour of democracy, the republic and the rule of law prescribes that all essential steps of an election are subject to the possibility of public scrutiny unless other constitutional interests justify an exception. Here, the examination of the voting and of the ascertainment of the election result attains special significance.
‘The use of voting machines which electronically record the voters’ votes and electronically ascertain the election result only meets the constitutional requirements if the essential steps of the voting and of the ascertainment of the result can be examined reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject. While in a conventional election with ballot papers, manipulations or acts of electoral fraud are, under the framework conditions of the applicable provisions, at any rate only possible with considerable effort and with a very high risk of detection, which has a preventive effect, programming errors in the software or deliberate electoral fraud committed by manipulating the software of electronic voting machines can be recognised only with difficulty. The very wide-reaching effect of possible errors of the voting machines or of deliberate electoral fraud make special precautions necessary in order to safeguard the principle of the public nature
of elections.”
“Limitations of the possibility for the citizens to examine the voting cannot be compensated by an official institution testing sample machines in the context of their engineering type licensing procedure, or the very voting machines which will be used in the elections before their being used, for their compliance with specific security requirements and for their technical integrity.”
“III. While the authorisation to issue an ordinance, which is granted by § 35 BWG, does not meet with any overriding constitutional reservations, the Federal Voting Machines Ordinance is unconstitutional because it infringes the principle of the public nature of elections.”
” IV. Also the use of the above-mentioned electronic voting machines in the election to the 16th German Bundestag infringes the public nature of the election. The voting machines did not make an effective examination of the voting possible because due to the fact that the votes were exclusively recorded electronically on a vote recording module, neither voters nor electoral boards nor citizens who were present at the polling station were able to verify the unadulterated recording of the votes cast. Also the essential steps of the ascertainment of the result could not be retraced by the public. It was not sufficient that the result of the calculation process carried out in the voting machine could be taken note of by means of a summarising printout or an electronic display.”
Copyright © 2009 BVerfG
The Court said, “the Federal Voting Machines Ordinance is unconstitutional because it infringes the principle of the public nature of elections.” ORDINANCE, Mike. Not the machines. Not the election. Only one little ordinance improperly written and issued.
If you only read the Press Release subtitle, you will be misled: “Use of voting computers in 2005 Bundestag election unconstitutional.” You have to read the actual opinion. Every lawyer knows its a deadly mistake to rely on Headnotes and press releases.
Read my Op Ed piece to know what the Court said.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
InternetVoting@gmail.com
http://ssrn.com/author=1053589
The court had no intention to mislead anyone. The very clear summary, is consistent with the full opinion. People should read both if they doubt the court’s competence to summarize its own work.
Ireland got rid of electronic voting and returned to paper ballots through a different route. A commission report finding the process unacceptable and political decision by the government eliminated any need to refer to the courts.. http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0423/evoting.html
I read the summary, the title, the subtitle and the decision. More importantly, to you specific point, the German court is competent enough to avoid providing misleading information. The official summary is an accurate reflection of the the full case. People should read your OpEd piece and compare it to this and the other writing on the court ruling. Electronic voting, as it occurred in 2005 was fished by this decision. The criteria are sufficiently stringent to eliminate all but a few trials, in state elections I believe, of alternative electronic voting.
Courts rarely overturn elections (exception below) and never that I’ve seen four years after the fact. The story is the act of the court and the logic in eliminating electronic voting in Germany.
In case of Bush v. Gore regarding Florida, it is most accurate to say that our high court disgraced every member voting in favor of “turning” the Florida election; better yet, “overturning” the vote counting process. That enshrined the voter suppression throughout the state, the voter purges, the fake riots to stop vote counting, etc. It’s an appropriate counter point to the positive act of the German high court.
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Obviously, Dr. Kelleher did not listen to the interview with Dr. Wiesner and is speaking without knowing the facts!
Based on prior experience of being attacked for the work we did at Black Box Voting when we brought Harri Hursti to America to prove what the experts claimed was not possible, and changed the vote count using only a memory card. To make certain we would be able to counter the expected attacks by our “experts” regarding the court’s decision, I specifically asked Dr. Wiesner during this interview to clarify whether our understanding of the court’s decision was correct. My question was, “were the machines to be banned until the voting machine manufacturers can develop a system that an average citizen could “see” their votes being counted throughout the counting process of that machine and be able to do so without a specialized technical expertise being required — and he said YES.
Dr. Kelleher should first listen to the interview before making a totally erronenous comment. I find his absolute confidence that his response to Michael’s article is correct to be yet another reason why we must expel “experts” from the elections process. They assume because they are “experts” that the average citizen should simply accept whatever they say without question.
I have always contended that “the only experts in our elections process should be the citizens themselves.” The German high court obviously agrees with me.
My question to Dr. Kelleher is what expert, court or representative could possibly be against citizens being able to see their votes counted at every phase of that process in a totally transparent counting process?
Dear Ms. Wynne and Mr. Collins:
I’m sure we agree that US elections are not as democratic as they should be or can be. Nobody wants Big Money out of elections more than I do. Check out my essays on SSRN to see my analysis and Rx. At first you probably won’t agree with me that Internet voting is the best way to democratize US elections.
But what kind of a debate or discussion about election reform can we have if some of the basic facts being tossed around are wrong?
I haven’t read that interview, although I will. But that’s a separate matter than reading and understanding what the German High Court said about the paperless electronic election in its judicial opinion. One “amicus curiae” brief was filed by “The Chaos Computer Club.” They said the exact things that Black Box Voting has said against DREs in the US. The opinion carefully considers every point. Then it agrees and disagrees, and gives its reasoning. But it upholds the election.
So, the plaintiffs did not get what they wanted – to have the election overturned. But the Court did give them something. It agreed with a lot of the criticisms of the machines, and it held that one of the regulations issued by the elections agency was unconstitutional (primarily for vagueness). The opinion calls it an “ordinance,” but over here it’s called “an agency regulation” (because in our parlance, ordinances are made by cities).
For as long as the US has had the secret ballot, 98%+ of the voters have not seen their vote counted. The problems of trust and transparency are difficult, especially in countries with large populations. But in a representative democracy, it is possible to have representatives of the people count the votes in a trustworthy process. (The German Court said that, too.)
The path to election reform must go forward. Romanticizing the virtuous good old days of paper ballots and hand counting is only a distraction. Internet voting can be used to fulfill every democrat’s dream. Lets get behind that, and make it happen.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
InternetVoting@gmail.com
http://ssrn.com/author=1053589
Who would want to count votes in secret? It seems that only someone who doesn’t understand the danger which follows a loss of power to peacefully remove bad leaders from office or one who wants absolute power.
By the way, secret vote counting is also unconstitutional right here in the good old U.S.A. even though the rulers and their minions never talk of it. Read these articles and the cases cited in them:
Virginia’s Elections Are UNCONSTITUTIONAL?!?! at
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_mark_ada_080212_virginia_s_elections.htm
South Carolina Elections Are UNCONSTITUTIONAL!?! at http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_mark_a___080114_south_carolina_elect.htm
If you have wondered why the government passes laws that virtually everyone opposes, like the bank bailout, and why the government refuses to investigate and prosecute obvious crimes, like torture and murder, check out Why Does the Government Ignore Our Wishes? at http://dailycensored.com/2009/09/11/why-does-the-government-ignore-our-wishes/ and don’t miss my 18 minute speech.
If you take a look, you’ll learn why they get away with horrible crimes. My article on torture includes a link to the U.S. Supreme Court case which explains how one of our stolen rights makes the difference between justice and injustice, between freedom and slavery.
Don’t pay any attention if you want to keep begging your masters for justice, and like another Adams said long ago, “May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”
Dr. Kelleher:
Let’s debate this on a radio show. I’ll send you an email about it.
Mark A. Adams, M.B.A., J.D.
Dr. Kelleher:
Who gives a darn about some system a bunch of experts designed if the owners of the system — the citizens — can’t oversee it? Hidden in the arguments that focus everything on security is the assumption that citizen oversight is irrelevant. Those responsible for putting together the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) never intended, much less, wanted a citizen’s debate on the pros and cons of machines counting our votes.
HAVA was built on a foundation based solely on experts, special interests and insiders. They were so focused on their own little kingdoms that they never stepped back to look at the most fundamental question of all: What are elections supposed to DO for the citizenry? Who actually OWNS the government?
Those who did the genetic engineering on HAVA really had very little trust in the original concept of the founders of this country, that the oversight of the citizenry is essential for the government to operate responsibly. That mindset, IMO, will ensure that a government of, by and for the people will surely perish from this earth.
It really doesn’t require a debate that, as a citizen, I simply do not want to depend on any expert to tell me my vote was counted correctly! I want to see for myself that it did. Experts do not own our elections, citizens do.
America has become a nation hiding behind its latest invention and in the process, has totally lost what defines a truly representative government. Any invention that undermines a citizen’s fundamental right to “see” their votes counted, without the need for any specialized technical expertise in order to do so, simply has no place in our elections.
Kathleen, I agree with you. Here’s something I posted a long time ago, a reply so to speak. http://tinyurl.com/3ye6rl
(Originally appeared at BBV.Forums) I’ve been watching the discussion and debate about voting systems evolve. I pared it down to get the essentials, which I think are profound in their implications.
1) Without public participation and scrutiny of the election systems and processes, elections lack true meaning.
2) The use of computerized voting of any type effectively eliminates public participation and scrutiny of elections for the following reasons:
a) The vast majority of the public are not in a position to undertake such specialized scrutiny.
b) The process is handed over to ‘experts’ hired by those in power. and
c) There is simply no reason to trust the experts and certainly no way to monitor them.
3) As a result of the previous point, by definition, any computerized elections remove the public from the election process thus supplanting citizens with a privileged class who are in the employ of either those in power or those contending for power.
The public is cast aside.
The elections lose meaning because they cannot be verified or the verification process cannot be understood except as an act of faith.
The public loses faith in the actual election of its leaders and finds no reason to recognize election results and the authority those results confer on candidates.
Point 2 above is critical. It shows both the source of public alienation and also the rise of a new expert class that hands down judgments that are incomprehensible to almost all involved.
This is not a criticism of the experts, rather it’s a call for elections that actually have meaning and are run by the people. Michael Collins — Election Fraud News As Ross Perot used to say: “IT’S JUST THAT SIMPLE.”
Hi dear Mke,
Great article, as usual.
I have said for a long time that our entire election process must be so simple that a third grade student can totally understand it.
I want to mention here too that I disagree with what Mark Adams says in a comment of hisposted here: “….The German justices and the German people remember the horrors which resulted from their loss of the power to control their government in the 1930s, and they took a stand for liberty and justice and against fascism with this decision…”.
Many of the Germans acted as “good Germans” and did not protest what Hitler was doing. And some even today want to forget that part of their history. And some do not even know about their past. So, there was no loss of power in those cases.
Like some of the “good Americans” who do not protest what our government is doing now – re electronic voting, and the many other atrocities the USA government does not do in my name. I resist, as do many of us, including Mark Adams, of course. But, true even those of us who resist have lost our power to a great extent and we are struggling to get it back – if we ever had it in any true sense.
I am always saying the USA was never a democracy. First we came and killed all the Native Americans, then we enslaved people of African descent, and on and on and on and on…..
I do agree, though, and think that the turn away from e-voting by the Court probably does have to do with the Nazi past of Germany. And a way to be sure they are being democratic now, because of their past. I would need to know what each of the Justices did during WWII, before, during and after, to say that they had lost power then. Resistance is NEVER a total loss of power, no matter what the outcome. Not doing anything and/or going along with the powers that be one might look at as a loss of power. But I don’t think it is. Silence is consent. Certainly, the American people – all of us – lost power when the Supremes appointed Bush president. But the many of us who are continuing to resist that appointment and all electronic voting machines – have not lost all our power as we long as we continue the resistance.
Sheila Parks, Ed.D.
Founder
http://www.centerforhandcountedpaperballots.org
OOPS
The link at the end of my post here should be
http://www.handcountedpaperballots.org
I am very tired and need to go to sleep
Thanks again, Mike, Mark, others who have posted here and Kathleen, of course.
Sheila
[...] German High Court effectively outlawed Electronic Voting based on the complexity of voting machines and the inability of voters to watch their vote being counted. Germany’s 2009 Bundestag elections were conducted with hand counted paper ballots. http://dailycensored.com/2009/10/19/a-censored-headline-and-why-it-matters/ [...]