Democracy? Paper Ballots

On Thursday the non-partisan Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, condemned Señor Trumpanzee’s latest statements promoting false claims of widespread vote fraud— but not the real widespread vote fraud Trump and the Kremlin engaged in. Instead of talking about what the Russians were up to, Trump-- at event in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia,  claimed that in many places, such as California, individuals cast multiple votes, once again claiming that there are "millions and millions of people" engaged in vote fraud. The committee’s response:

President Trump's false and baseless claims that millions of people vote fraudulently in our country not only damage the standing of our democracy across the globe, they incentivize officials to propose voter suppression policies intended to impair the rights of African American, Latino and other minority voters. These reckless claims also damage the integrity of our electoral process in the midst of a midterm election cycle now underway. As the midterm election cycle continues, we will remain vigilant in ensuring that officials do not use the President's false claims as a basis to suppress the rights of voters.

The committee is also pointed out that Señor T’s statements come more than 2 months after he was forced to sign an executive order dismantling his and Kobach’s failed Election Integrity Commission.

Is democracy a lost cause now that Russia has managed to put Trump into the Oval Office? Gee, I hope not. I bet you do too ("you" meaning DWT readers; I know lots of other people don’t care one way or the other; kakistocracy is just fine with them). I’m more certain than ever that paper ballots are the way to go to save our system of government. That video above was published by the New York Times-- Alex Halderman, University of Michigan Computer Science Professor and Verified Voting Technology Fellow, successfully demonstrating how vulnerable American voting machines are. Marian K. Schneider, president of Verified Voting explains the reason for the video: "We want people to understand in a visual way how something like this might happen. Although it is only a risk and not a certainty that something like this could occur, we need to be prepared and able to recover. These machines don’t allow us to do that. It’s time we prepare to monitor, detect, respond and recover from any potential attacks that undermine the democracy." If Haldermnan could do it, the Kremlin could do it too... and I have no doubt that they did.

As Halderman says in the clip, "All cyber security experts who have given electronic voting machines any thought agree, these machines have got to go. Paper plus audits; all elections should be done this way." The clip (above)-- which I urge you to watch and send to your friends and colleagues-- shows why using paper ballots or having a voter-verified paper trail and implementing widespread, statistically sound audits like RLA’s is needed to verify our vote. Maybe the Russians already have worse candidates in mind after Trump... well, not worse, but just as bad.

A caveat… there will always be determined crooks-- I mean it’s politics and look what kind of people that vocation tends to attract-- who will find ways to cheat. But there are few people, even in politics, as low as Russians. I bet if you sniff around her family tree, you find that Wasserman Schultz was Russian too. Tim Canova: "After our 2016 run against Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her corrupt political machine, a number of election integrity experts expressed serious concerns about the official results. Rather than ignoring their research, I decided to try to verify the vote by inspecting the ballots under Florida’s public records law.

"All too often, election frauds are swept under the rug, especially when it’s establishment Democrats cheating progressive and grassroots Democrats. We saw this happen in state after state where Bernie Sanders and his campaign were cheated. In New York City alone, more than 200,000 citizens were purged from the voting rolls in the days prior to New York’s 2016 presidential primary. The New York City Board of Elections admitted to all this, and yet there’s been no real punishment for the massive fraud.

"I was determined to shine a light on any corruption that may have rigged my own election results against Wasserman Schultz. I felt that I owed nothing less to the thousands of supporters who stepped up to make donations and volunteer their time to my campaign. So, when Dr. Brenda Snipes, the Broward Supervisor of Elections stonewalled our public records request, I filed a lawsuit last June to enforce our rights.

"Incredibly, while the lawsuit was pending, the Supervisor destroyed all of our paper ballots in violation of federal law!" Another video: