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Three days after the Andy Stephenson Memorial in Seattle, another activist is arrested for "investigation" of charges that go to "honesty" and "credibility". This article explains reasons why such wild reactions are being experienced by activists in the elections fairness area, and establishes in clear terms through historical explanation why in American elections the vote counting emperor not only has no clothes, he has no wardrobe and lives in a glass house. When it comes to elections, it is the government that has to prove the results it keeps data (ballots and exit poll data) secret on, not the public that has to prove an irregularity in the process specifically made secret or unavailable to the public. The final stages now being implemented of the elimination of checks and balances in elections through the massive replacement of paper ballots with invisible electronic ballots means that elections officials can never provide a basis for a rational confidence in election results, just as a court would never accept an expert opinion that refused to disclose data or methods of analysis to cross examination. AT THIS HISTORICAL JUNCTURE WE MUST ALWAYS REMIND EVERYONE THAT THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR CONFIDENCE IN ELECTION RESULTS BECAUSE BOTH THE DATA (BALLOTS AND EXIT POLL DATA) AS WELL AS THE METHOD OF ANALYSIS (COUNTING) ARE NOT DISCLOSED, CONSEQUENTLY ONLY THROUGH IRRATIONAL OR TRUST-BASED INFERENCES CAN WE CONCLUDE THAT CONFIDENCE IS APPROPRIATE FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE. THE BALLOT DATA AND ANALYSIS OF VOTES METHODOLOGY WILL REMAIN SECRET INTO THE INDEFINITE FUTURE WITHOUT A REVERSAL OF POLICY, THUS WE CAN NOT AND ARE NOT ALLOWED TO VERIFY THE EXISTENCE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES AS AN EMPIRICAL MATTER. {NO DATA DISCLOSURE} + {NO ANALYSIS/COUNTING DISCLOSURE} = NO BASIS FOR CONFIDENCE IN RESULTS. Now for how this ties in with bizarre crackdowns on activists recently: ================================================== Recent coverage of the life and controversial death of politically progressive paper-ballot activist Andy Stephenson has focused both on how Stephenson tried to keep democracy real by advocating paper ballots, (in opposition to the recent federally funded slide into virtual reality through mass purchases of e-voting machines), and on how a vicious smear campaign was waged against Stephenson’s “credibility” while he was dying and desperately seeking treatment. I’d like to address factors more fundamental than the extensive disinformation campaign against Andy that consisted of entire websites, hate mail to friends and campaigns dedicated to claiming that the anti-election fraud activist was himself a “fraud”, because friends were raising money for his cancer surgery when he was allegedly not even ill with cancer or anything else. See, e.g., < http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0529/050720_news_mossback.php> Whatever the motives might be for the continuation of this campaign to discredit Stephenson even after Stephenson’s well documented death at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, critics seemed to delight in saying that someone who had warned us about fraudulent American elections was himself a fraud. This certainly undermines trust in the active citizen community working on these issues. After trust issues always comes fear. Within three days of Stephenson’s July 16, 2005 memorial service in Seattle, a whistle blowing or “perjuring” former Elections Director present at Andy’s memorial and who the media never tires of reminding us was fired in 2002 (two days after a Seattle Times editorial critical of the elections department) was arrested. But the arrest and press releases or leaks were only for “investigation” of various possible charges allegedly constituting a “pattern of dishonesty”, including allegedly adding pages to a public disclosure file she was inspecting apparently as an activist (called “forgery”), allegedly sending an email to a current elections official under a different identity (called “impersonation”), stopping payment on a check for public documents, and “tried to hit” a police officer by allegedly driving away after being shown a badge in such a manner as to force the officer to step aside to avoid being hit. This “investigation” not only merits arrest short of charges, but also apparently merits a story on the AP Wire, printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the Seattle Weekly, and supervised by the State Attorney General’s office. < http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0530/050720_news_kempf.php> < http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/233447_kempf21.html> All major details of crimes she has not been charged with are dutifully printed, together with very old news of her firing controversy.
Whatever the motives of these “critics” to examine so harshly the “credibility” of certain election activists, anyone else who dismisses concerns about (or mentions the lack of confidence in) the accuracy of American elections as the work of “distrusting” “conspiracy theorists”, seems to misunderstand something extremely fundamental about the American system of democracy: it’s not about the need for trust and acceptance, it’s about checks and balances. Which is to say NOT trusting BIG power at all, in a way.
But the all-important checks and balances of elections have been destroyed over the last century or more. The ship of elections is listing badly, and the hard-working and largely faithful crew of election volunteers and officials is too often ready to take offense at anyone who points out the system is poorly designed or malfunctioning, yet all the good intentions in the world by the crew can not save a ship designed or fated to sink. It’s not about being “distrustful” of the technology Andy Stephenson personally happened to know a lot about. Rather, the more one knows about technology, the more one realizes that the utter change-ability of computer electrons is not a solid foundation upon which to continue to build democracy.
When it comes to elections, the checks and balances can not be provided by the government itself, and can only be provided by the public and/or by activist members of the public, because the government itself (which obtains or loses its power and tax money from elections), does not have the ability to check and balance itself from that position of conflict of interest. Only a tyrant counts the votes for his own “election”, so the government can never administer elections all by itself, and call it good. In fact, the very definition of tyranny is when a political enemy counts the votes unchecked, and a definition of corruption is when you and your own friends count the votes unchecked.
But the process of destabilizing elections and eliminating their checks and balances started long ago and with the best of intentions. For example, in the New England town hall around the time of our Constitution, voting would often be by a show of hands, with each voter able to count total votes for themselves if they wished. The advent of the so-called Australian ballot in the late 1800s (which included the innovative secret ballot) was a welcome protection against possible retaliation based on one’s votes, but ballot secrecy is equivalent to putting blindfolds on each voter in the town hall so that they can not see the raised hands of neighbors, with the votes counted by un-blindfolded government officials. Because an audit trail can never connect a particular ballot to a voter without violating ballot secrecy, and because the government both operates the elections and gains and loses its tax money and power via elections, it is a wonder that the public professes any basis for confidence in election results at all, especially when you consider that no one is ever allowed anymore to count the ballots for themselves, or even to see them.
Given the foundation of elections is so open to fraud unless there are serious checks and balances provided by public observation of the vote counting, taking the additional step as our nation is now of adding vastly more computers into the voting mix acts to replace paper ballots with electrons, thereby making the process of vote counting literally invisible, and consequently extremely wide open to alteration without leaving any significant evidence.
Given these structural problems and lack of checks and balances anymore in elections, one can only accept computerized voting or scanning of ballots based on pure faith, because no data is disclosed (the ballots) nor are the precise methods of analysis either disclosed, observable or repeatable.
While paper ballots are also imperfect and subject to ballot box stuffing and other risks, at least they tend to create witnesses and evidence and typically yield only single vote rewards for the unscrupulous, while computerization of the vote allows a single motivated individual to alter an entire election without leaving any substantial evidence. Thus, it is not a valid objection to say "paper ballots have problems too" because the problems are smaller, they don't spread, and they leave evidence....
With defense budgets in the trillions, government contracts in the billions, and campaign costs in the millions, many seem to think it inconceivable that anyone would mess with a US election. This is inexplicable, but apparently due to an irrational assumption that there is a lack of anything substantial at stake in American elections, or perhaps the irrational assumption that the apparent lack of any really important issues in American elections like war, abortion, or a worldwide permanent war on terror would minimize any actual tampering risk, though if these political risks were to be assumed to exist, someone on one side or the other of any of these issues could easily believe that allowing such a critical issue as a worldwide battle between Christianity and Islam to be decided or defeated by the vagaries of 30-second addled voters combined with the lies of the folks on the other "wrong" side of the issue would be a profound travesty of justice, thus completely justifying the nonviolent offense of election rigging instead of the more traditional political assassination or neutralization campaign against political enemies. In fact, rigging such an important election would become a joyous occasion for such a zealot, not a badge of shame as people seem to assume would be the case. Besides, there were at least 50 million people in the continental USA alone on each side of the REPUBLICAN/DEMOCRAT divide, each of whom had motive, and knew
WHO TO FAVOR (their candidate for president)
WHAT they needed (votes)
WHEN they needed them (on Election Day, November 2, 2004)
WHERE they needed them (swing states, particularly Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Iowa)
WHY they needed them (the Electoral College)
and many knew HOW to do it: change tabulator results, etc.
In fact, given the above numbers with motive and knowldge, the idea that it is "conspiracy theory" to think that someone, even someone in a foreign country or for fun, might want to affect the election for control of the world's richest country and sole military superpower is ludicrous assuming even a rudimentary knowledge of world history. Attacks on such hypotheses reflect either a fundamental failure to think, an intentional plan to discourage independent thought in the area, or a plain indication that one lacks the freedom in the USA to make educated guesses based on partial information, which itself raises grave concerns about the ability of America to compete in the world of science, since science involves the formation of "conspiratorial" hypotheses that things might work together this way or that way, based on analysis of known fact combined with intuition, followed by the testing of those hypotheses and the explanation of methods to others to see if they can repeat the same experiment with the same results.
In any event, whether correct or incorrect, there is no substantial scientific or political basis to have confidence in American elections as presently constituted, and it is IMPOSSIBLE for elections officials to PROVE them reliable without reinstituting the checks and balances they claim have been safely discarded and replaced by misleading government or secretary of state “certification” of voting machines and the "testing" of the same as to its ability to handle an election day of almost 200 votes by casting 1 or 2 test votes, just like test drives ensure the lifetime performance of an automobile.
The complete obviousness that government certification of lawyers or doctors or any other professional together with their testing is not even remotely close to a guarantee of proper behavior or performance does not stop elections officials from regularly and confidently reciting that the emperor's certification and this limited testing is a modern day improvement rendering our Constitutionally based systems of checks and balances utterly obsolete.
But Andy Stephenson, after spending the last years of his life asking for information about elections and not being able to find any basis for confidence in the reported and “certified” results, was still typically a luminous and optimistic person, determined to overcome the massive weakness in our country's democratic election defenses by making the government "show its work" like anyone else in court, in school, or on the job. One can't convict a speeder with a radar gun without showing (if challenged) that the gun is properly calibrated and how it works, and having that process be subject to cross examination. Every court case in which expert witnesses appear will require those expert witnesses to show their work, both the data they used and the methods of analysis chosen.
But in democracy, the government regularly re-elects itself with Wizard of Oz machinations that they will never disclose to regular citizens, using ballot data they never show, “confirmed” (or not at all confirmed) by exit poll data for which conclusions are published and then changed to match election "results", but the data for which is “proprietary” and therefore also never disclosed. Unfortunately, the very gullibility of the American public in accepting this process is aided by a love of country and a reticence to criticize it, yet the one most faithful to his automobile is the one who spots the problems and goes about fixing them before all is lost.
With $6 billion in new federal funding for e-voting machines under HAVA which passed Congress in 2002 to be spent by January 1, 2006, corporations now increasingly claim the heart of our elections (vote counting) and over 2/3 of the total vote in this country, as a computerized software private property interest and as a corporate trade secret that the government is obliged to help them keep secret. This state of election affairs is completely beyond concerns about corporate "influence" or corporate "power"; this is literally corporate ownership of the heart of democracy itself, made the private profit slave of a corporation, instead of serving the public interest which occasionally calls for something other than profit as a motive.
Given the private property now claimed at the heart of democracy itself and the focus on profitability, one would think the government would have the sense to auction off the right to count votes in secret to the highest bidding corporation, in order to maximize the return to the taxpayer for the literal sellout of our democracy.
Certainly, a “modest proposal” by a foreign nation to abstain from attacking our cities, factories and taking our mineral resources in exchange for the minor favor of merely counting our votes in secret would be met by immediate recognition of what this really means, rejection of the "offer" and repulsion by force as needed, yet in our day and age taxpayers are handsomely paying tax dollars to private corporations to assume this extraordinary privilege and immunity of secret vote counting, with the government allying with these private corporations to defeat the public’s right to know what’s going on in its elections, and to operate as a check and balance on the counting of the vote. It is a "conquest by contract" in which mere purchases of voting equipment purport to vitiate our history, constitution, democracy, and checks and balances without so much as a poor debate by a legislature ignorant of the Constitution. The Founders were SO distrustful to think that congress might do something unconstitutional!
COnsider now the radical secrecy in which the government is now attempting to operate elections as a strong contrast with the openness and friendliness of Andy Stephenson, who maintained his style and spirit to the end, despite having every reason in the world to call bullshit on the real democracy he loved, and swore would never die on HIS watch.
We should be much more concerned with the credibility of the side of the debate that is saying “trust me” with wealth or power than the activist side of the debate that asks for public debate on election security and insists on checks and balances, a central term in which power was delegated from the people to the government in the first place.
Until the media re-learns these things and ceases ignoring the concerns of active citizens and being inexplicably crippled as a check and balance to big government and big corporations, the media and our elections will continue to receive a grade of “F” for Fear and Favor. Like Soviet "journalists", they now seem to fancy themselves “responsible” for not making “irresponsible” public questions.
The loss of freedom, the loss of the meaningful right to vote, and the loss of checks and balances may all happen on our watch, not because many truly wish them dead, but because they are *being called something else*, or made fun of, and then dismissed or killed, like when checks and balances are renamed “distrust”, and when exercising right of any citizen to inquire and/or exercise the freedom to theorize (defined as the reconciliation of available facts into an educated probabilistic judgment) about what has deliberately been made secret is laughed off as “conspiracy theory” by journalists eager to triangulate themselves into some centrist credentials in a craven form of self-protection or proof to their employers that they will not question corporate or governmental secrecy, but will instead ridicule those would would think or inquire. All of this comes at the expense of the dynamic of active and voluntary association to solve problems that de Tocqueville considered essential to the unique American character and so prevalent among americans, because one is ridiculed for venturing off into the unknown territory instead of achieving a form of respect at least as a pioneer, even if dead wrong, as many a pioneer's fate.
Whether the two activists of Mr. Stephenson and Ms. Klempf are perfect or instead a work in progress on the moral level, they are two active folks I’ve seen or heard about who “got it”, and were trying to live these American ideals of voluntary problem-solving association in order to protect and improve their country’s democracy. One ended up cruelly dead, the other publicly jailed for an "investigation" and labeled dishonest.
In no way do the humiliating punishments meted out to these activists fit the “crimes” even if all the allegations had been true, but there are compensations. These compensations are (1) we got the NEWS (defined by Bill Moyers I think as something somebody in power wants to keep hidden) and all they got is the rest, which is just PR.
When the PR is failing as badly as it is now, the powers that be tend to feel threatened and lash out. But in the end nothing can stop the common sense argument that secret corporate vote counting is wrong, nor can anything stop the desire of an awakened American public to rid itself of anything and anyone that would claim the treasonous right to own as private PROPERTY for profit and without regard to the public interest, our democracy itself, and furthermore without any right of supervision or control by the public.
The only thing worse than selling your soul or your democracy, is allowing it to be possessed or owned for purely selfish purposes in the first place.
P. Lehto
Attorney at Law
paul@lehtopenfield.com
(the only way my "credibility" is at issue in the above essay is to the extent you fail or refuse to exercise your God-given right as an American to think for yourself)
Plaintiff, Lehto & Wells v. Sequoia Voting Systems, et al.
Pleadings at:
<www.votersunite.org/info/lehtolawsuit.asp>
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