DFNH weighs in on the recount: We need to eliminate secret vote counting, not a recount.

DEMOCRACY FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE (DFNH): A Blog

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Political pundits in the corporate media and citizen journalists in the Blogosphere alike are all asking the same question: What happened in New Hampshire?

It's pretty easy to see what happened in New Hampshire: We had an election in which 81% of our ballots were counted in secret by a private corporation, and this resulted in an outcome that is called into question.

That's what happened.

No recount is going to change this. What will change this is to get rid of corporate controlled secret vote counting in our elections.

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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandates observable vote counting.

But despite this long history of grassroots activism in support of free and open elections, New Hampshire has turned the majority of our elections into privatized affairs with no citizen oversight whatsoever.

Now activists around the nation are calling for a recount. In New Hampshire the manual recount has always been held as justification for holding elections in which more than 80% of our ballots are counted in secret by private corporations.

Does this logic hold up? Will a recount rectify the problem before us?

I say no. The problem before us is that we have outsourced the most precious thing in our democracy: the counting of our votes. And in New Hampshire, we have outsourced more than 80% of our votes to a private corporation counting those votes in secret, and, as it turns out, that private corporation has a convicted drug trafficker on its executive team to boot. A recount does not solve this problem.

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Open and honest elections require citizen oversight. This is a simple thing to accomplish in a hand count Election Night count. But in a recount it is impossible.

In a recount, citizens have no control over the ballot chain of custody. Unless citizens have stood guard over every ballot box from the moment that it was sealed and signed by our local election officials, the recount provides no more assurance than the machine counts. A recount of a secret computerized vote count is just another weak link in the chain of publicly observable ballot custody required for honest and open elections.

In 2004, on request from citizen activists, candidate Ralph Nader had a New Hampshire recount. Only 11 districts, chosen by a mysterious out of state activist, claiming to be a statistician who had found anomalies in the results, were recounted. New Hampshire officials at the time disagreed with her interpretation but the recount occurred as she directed. To nobody’s surprise, the recounts uncovered no significant discrepancies, and New Hampshire’s system of corporate controlled secret vote counting got a big stamp of approval.

And here we are again. Another corporate controlled New Hampshire election. Another questionable outcome. Did the Nader recount change things for the better? Did it resolve the problem?

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Read more of this powerful essay at the link:

http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/5324

Ignoring it won't.

Will the corporate media that benefits from the secret counting take up any story that might lead to trustworthy elections?

Will they let Kucinich speak about why he requested the recount?

Will Gore, Kerry, Obama, Hillary and Edwards etc. speak up and make it a central issue?

KICK N RECOMMENDED!!!!

Having worked many years as a programmer, I am well aware how a misplaced comma, or an improperly placed set of parentheses can significantly alter the output of a program from what the desired results should be.

Moreover, when a program consists of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of code (many programs are this long or longer), it can take days to find and fix "bugs" in a program, even when reasonably good programming practices are followed.

Having worked on both business programming and engineering programming projects in a variety of languages, I would estimate that 75 percent of the code in existence is "spaghetti" code. That doesn't include the large amount of code that was written and then abandoned because it was "unfixable".

Some very large programs I worked on were on their third or fourth generation of programmers, the original programmers having long gone from the scene. These programs often contained bugs that no one could find and the users were just resigned to putting up with them. The larger the program and the more features you add, the more the program can screw up, and the more difficult it is to find and fix a problem, even when you have good intentions.

If a programmer's intentions are not so nice, say she wants to include a secret "back door" into the code to pull some dirty tricks, say rig the results, then if the program is large enough, it could be almost impossible to find where the "dirty" code is hidden. If the code is proprietary and no one is even allowed to look at it, then you have a perfect set up for fraud and abuse.

Computer crime has been around for a long time. Back in 1980, when I was taking computer courses, in the days before PC's, viruses, worms, trojan horses, etc., I wrote a paper on computer crime for a class. I was surprised to learn that computer crime was wide spread, more easily committed than one would think, many times performed by insiders in a company, and the great efforts that the victims expended in order to cover up the crimes.

My reason for mentioning this is to disabuse nongeeks who believe it would be too difficult to rig an election using computers. On the contrary, it would be much more difficult to commit election fraud without computers.

The only way you could make it difficult (not necessarily impossible) to rig a vote count using computers is to use open source software (nonproprietary software that anyone can look at) and burn the executable code into nonerasable ROM chips (Read Only Memory) and hardwire it into the computers used in voting systems. Then before each election, have a technically savvy group run a test sequence on each machine before it is used.

This would make it more difficult to cheat, although not impossible. However, the system being used now is ripe for abuse. The changes I have suggested here can only be an improvement.

I don't see how anyone, even with flawed logic or partisan device, could argue with this.

Repeating because it deserves to be repeated: Open and honest elections require citizen oversight. This is a simple thing to accomplish in a hand count Election Night count. But in a recount it is impossible.In a recount, citizens have no control over the ballot chain of custody. Unless citizens have stood guard over every ballot box from the moment that it was sealed and signed by our local election officials, the recount provides no more assurance than the machine counts. A recount of a secret computerized vote count is just another weak link in the chain of publicly observable ballot custody required for honest and open elections.

It is encouraging to see that the good citizens of New Hampshire have been fighting this fight, for all the right reasons, for so many years. They don't want the machines, either. It is hard to understand how forces at the state and corporate level have been able to override the will of the people of NH. "Live Free or Die".. not just a slogan.

Entrenched? Indeed.

K&R

:)