Grassroots Assault on Blackbox Voting (An Idea)

[sharman]

Here's an idea. If we could convince some huge percentage of our voters to vote absentee, could we bring down blackbox voting?

Ideally, the cost of processing absentee ballots would convince local governments to insist on paper trail machines. Do I correctly recall one of the lame excuses for not doing so in the first place was the expense of adding printers to each polling station? Let's take that excuse away. Let's make it so painful to use Diebold that something finally gives.

While usually absentee ballots are ignored if the election results from the machines are otherwise determinative of the result (true?), I also seem to recall reading that they must be processed if they reach a certain percentage.

Second best, if we really can turn out our voters on paper ballots, that might be enough to counteract the (i) unfortunate albeit inadvertent errors to which computer ballots seem prone especially with liberal votes/(ii) dirty tricks and voter suppression efforts/(iii) outright fraud .

Now, if we're going to try this, let's please please please start with Arnold's special election in California this fall.

Whaddya think? Could it work? And where should we start?

[Jane Austin]

1. I'd like to know if this would work, too.

Kick.

[Cleita]

2. I thought it would be better, but I found out that they

run the absentee ballots through the scanning machines just like they do in the precincts. There are glitches with the scanners too. The big problem seems to be to force them to count all the absentee ballots manually. They don't want to do that. It's the only way to get an accurate count to compare to the machine total. It seems it would be a good job for volunteers from both parties.

On edit: I forgot to say that we use scanners in my county. With the BBV I don't know how it would work.

[sharman]

4. Aimed at other things

If you are in a county that uses paper ballots already, whether scanner or other, then that's not the target of this exercise. The tabulation of the votes may be subject to manipulation, but there is at least the paper trail--may have to fight for it, but the evidence of the real votes is available.

The other point is to make the process so onerous for the blackbox counties that you get real pressure to provide machines with paper receipts. You make a good point here, that the absentee ballots can probably be machined scanned, rather than manually tabulated. But, they still require manual processing (checking for sigs, etc).

[helderheid]

3. That's what I proposed locally when Utah decided to go diebold

This was posted in the Salt Lake Tribune:

"Utahn Clarity Sanderson's skepticism is more broadly focused. She tried the new voting booths at a mock election in March, and while she agrees they are "very easy to use and extremely user friendly," she distrusts the technology.
"I think it is wrong to have our elections being run by a corporation," she said. "It takes away all transparency in our elections."
Sanderson, who is the co-vice chairwoman of the Utah Democratic Progressive Caucus, will continue to vote, but by absentee paper ballot."