Reply #41: Faith-Based Voting - Robert Koehler [View All]

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Faith-Based Voting
by Robert Koehler

Oh, those glitches!

For some reason we tolerate them a lot more in an election -- that is to say, in the mechanics of democracy, something we affect to believe in so fervently we're willing to go to war to make sure other countries have it -- than we would in, let's say, our banking system.



One person who insists we talk about this -- about what happens to our ballots once they are surrendered to the proprietary software programs of the voting machine companies -- is Paul Lehto, a lawyer from Snohomish County, Wash., which adopted Sequoia's voting system in 2002. Lehto is suing Snohomish County to invalidate its contract with Sequoia on the grounds that the company's ballot-counting software is not public knowledge.

Do you get this? Sequoia, like the other companies peddling electronic voting systems to local and state election officials, insists it has the right not to make its source codes, or any other information about its equipment, public. Nor, as Ion Sancho, election supervisor of Leon County, Fla., learned, do the companies even tolerate having their equipment tested. (Sancho demonstrated that you can modify an election without leaving evidence, which Lehto called "the nuclear bomb of election fraud.")

"In the suit, I'm saying if you hide the ball from the public, the contract is void," Lehto said. The suit is a direct challenge to a quiet outrage that we, or our elected representatives, seem to be too befuddled and enervated by to oppose: the loss of a public, open counting of our votes.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-koehler/faithbased-voting_b_18132.html