A possible campaign for verifiable elections?

[Stevepol]

There are many of us around DU who are aware of the enormous cost of using voting machines to count votes in the US. Many of us are aware, as Jonathan Simon points out in his recent book CODE RED: COMPUTERIZED ELECTION THEFT AND THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY, that the vote in almost every state is either entirely unverifiable or almost never verified no matter how suspicious the results. At the same time, there is overwhelming statistical evidence that the malicious programming and hacking of voting machines has skewed the results of elections steadily to the right. Here in Kansas, for example, Kris Kobach is doing all he can to prevent Beth Clarkson, a statistician at Wichita State, from counting the (supposed) paper trail of the last election. She is convinced on the basis of her calculations (published in both American Statistical Assn and the Royal Statistical Society) that "some voting systems were being sabotaged." I doubt she will be able to move the powers that be. They are too entrenched right now, but there is always the possibility.

I have often just thrown my hands up in frustration and decided that there's no help for it. Nobody seems willing to do anything about it. But maybe there is something that we can do together. Simon in the book mentioned above says that a number of statisticians have proposed and come to a kind of agreement about a "risk-limiting audit," (an RLA) as a very useful solution to the problem of unverifiable elections (p. 81ff in the above book). What I might suggest is that some of us might join together in a campaign to fight for "verifiable vote counting" in US elections. If we could form a group centered on that ONE IDEA, verifiable elections, and repeat that mantra over and over and over ad infinitum, we might eventually begin to gain some traction. It's an easily provable fact that the elections are not verified. Generally, the attitude is that what takes place inside the machine remains in the machine.

What we would be fighting for is the use of opti-scans (or where that is impossible, touch screens that print out a voting result that can be counted) and the auditing of a percentage of paper ballots from each election to make sure the election has not been rigged or stolen. The statisticians Simon mentions have developed a simple procedure that would be easy for election officials to follow in the verification process. The only thing holding it up is the opposition of those in charge of the counting, and that's where our campaign would be aimed: at Kobach and others like him across the country who refuse to permit the vote to be verified statistically while they demand voter suppression through voter ID's etc. in order to meet a non-existent threat of voter fraud.

I can see a strong organization like those that have formed in the past to deal with segregation or women's suffrage or whatnot, bumper stickers ("VERIFY THE VOTE!&quot , letters to the editor all over the country on one theme, etc. I'd be willing to help fund such an effort and I think eventually enough people could be convinced to join the campaign that it could succeed. We need it now more than ever with Bernie running and other candidates beginning to be moved in his direction. But it won't make any difference if the vote continues to be essentially rigged, especially in certain, usually lower level or local elections.

Does anybody else agree with me? Let me know. I personally cannot take a leading role in any such organization to carry out the campaign, but I would be more than willing to help out and I suspect that there are many like me, maybe a very large number.