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

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

(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.”

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.

Let’s debate this on a radio show. I’ll send you an email about it.

Mark A. Adams, M.B.A., J.D.

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.”

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