A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

HAVA (Help America Vote Act) has been the single, solitary most destructive event in terms of Election Integrity that I can think of. It was a disaster of a bill and has made our system far worse than it was in 2000.

-- Brad Friedman, Election integrity citizen/journalist and blogger at BradBlog.com

BuzzFlash: You are perhaps the top blog specialist doing first-hand reporting almost solely on what we call the GOP war to keep all eligible voters from voting, which is to say the Republican effort to keep Democratic votes from being cast or counted. Are we correct in saying that this is primarily a Republican strategy?

Brad Friedman: It's entirely a Republican strategy. And a long-term, well-funded and systematic one at that.

I've seen absolutely no evidence that Democrats are doing the same. I have seen extraordinary incompetence and utter denial from Dems, including the Barack Obama campaign's "election protection" effort when it comes to concerns about voting machines, and even about voter suppression and voter roll purging. But I've seen no evidence that Dems are interested in purposely keeping anybody's vote from being cast or counted.

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Brad Friedman:

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The elections on the other hand, and their integrity, are another matter entirely.

Voter suppression and concerns about wholly unverifiable, wholly un-transparent, outsourced and privatized control of our public elections are two sides of the same coin. You can't worry about one without worrying about the other. That there remains an extraordinarily self-defeating rift between some of the camps concerned about front-end voter suppression, and back-end concerns about electronic results has always been troubling to me. That gap must be bridged if we want to see real election reform.

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Brad Friedman: If you can't oversee it, you can't trust it. If the citizens can't look at the voter's intent for themselves, they shouldn't ever trust it. The insane move to fully un-transparent and completely unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines -- even those with fully unverifiable "paper trails -- has caused a tsunami of damage to our democracy.

The reliance on private companies to completely control and oversee our elections has become nothing short of a national security crisis. And that concern is true across the use of DREs, optically-scanned paper ballots (counted by no human beings, only greatly flawed, hackable, and unreliable secret software), and even in the voting roll and absentee ballot processes which have been similarly outsourced to private companies, held accountable by no one.

BuzzFlash: If I recall, as two examples of that threat, in 2006 we saw a race for Katherine Harris's former congressional district be determined by 18,000 electronic voting machine recorded votes that "went missing" on election eve and the Republican, Vern Buchanan, "won" by less than 400 votes. Also, there was the infamous Don Siegelman defeat in 2002 when he was declared the re-elected Governor of Alabama, only to have an electronic voting machine "error corrected" in the middle of the morning, and then he suddenly was the loser. Needless to say, the beneficiaries in both elections were Republicans. What do these two examples illustrate about the dangers of electronic voting machines?

Brad Friedman: That they are destroying the most basic American value we hold: The right to have your vote counted, counted accurately, and in such a way that society can have confidence in the determination of elections -- the right that protects all others.

BuzzFlash: What are provisional ballots and why are they dangerous to democracy?

Brad Friedman: Provisional ballots are infrequently counted. A huge percentage of them are thrown out entirely, and voters are given little or no recourse.

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In general, whoever is announced the "winner" on election night, gets to be the winner, whether they've actually won or not. That's why we've got to get it right on Election Night. Period.

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Brad Friedman: If I were King of Democracy? (I realize that's a bit of an oxymoron.) I would decree that every vote shall be cast on a hand-marked paper ballot (allowable exceptions for disabled voters, as needed); that it shall be placed in a clear box on a table in full public view until the polls are closed, that the box shall be opened and every ballot shall be counted in full public view by all parties and all members of the community who wish to participate right then and there at the end of Election Day; that results from those precinct-counted ballots shall be posted publicly before those ballots are moved anywhere.

That's an incredibly simple system, very inexpensive, fully transparent, easily re-counted again and again as needed, and very difficult to game in such a way that an election can be maliciously affected without the bad guys conspirators getting caught in the process.

hee hee hee

t'weren't no problems

'we' won ! ! !

ho ho ho

nevermind the pre-election election frauds already perpetrated

'we' won ! ! !

ha ha ha

nevermind the system is fraught with fundamental problems and will NEVER allow a third party movement to gain traction

'we' won ! ! !

ak ak ak

congratulations, you've chosen Korporate Money Party Approved Candidate "B", your regularly scheduled Kapitalist Imperialism Agenda shall continue unabated...

seriously, what *did* happen to obama's coattails ? where was the big swing ? i think it happened all right, it was just trimmed down to size...

and now, the reward to all the li'l peeps: ramen manual as the consigliere to power elite flunky obama...

thus proving the new amerikan motto: one dollar one vote...

$ $ $

art guerrilla

aka ann archy

eof