Counting Clouds

I’m worried about my vote. And your vote. I’m worried that this mad rush to a universal electronic voting system will mean that someone other than “us” will decide who gets how many votes, and who wins the contest. Already, Georgia relies solely upon electronic voting using a software program that is more than ten years out of date, no paper ballots whatsoever.  Several states utilize partial computer balloting systems at least ten years old and they too have no back-up paper ballots. Both Illinois and Arizona have had their systems breached by outsiders. Homeland Security warns more is coming.

Forty-two states use at least some computer voting and in every case either the machines or the software is outdated. Why worry? Because in electronic voting there is nothing to recount, no physical evidence that a vote was ever cast. And we know that in every election there are calls for re-counts. Always.   How does one count or recount an electronic byte that has been bleeped, hacked, deleted, or never passed through an electronic gate for storage and retrieval in the first place?

Now we hear that The Russians, or Chinese or the Tonton Macoutes are poised to hack the election and play all sorts of tomfoolery on the American voting public. At the same time we are reassured by vendors (like Spain’s SCYTL which controls much of the world’s elections) that all is well and casting your vote to the “Cloud” could not be safer. Oh, really? Tell that to the millions of customers who in effect recently cast their votes (and lost them) at Target Stores, or Chase Bank, or Home Depot or dozens of other huge players that have been data breached in recent months. Now you want me to throw my most valuable right as a citizen of the United States to the iCloud? Voter fraud is as old as the Republic; believe me, the fraudsters are three steps ahead of the safety czars in the voter hacking/tampering department. A recent posting on the internet:

“In October 2010, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics encouraged         outside parties to try to find security holes in their online balloting infrastructure            operated by SCYTL. A group of University of Michigan students successfully     hacked into the system, commandeered passwords, doctored ballots and        programmed audio of the school’s fight song to play whenever an e-ballot was        submitted.”

            In April, 2012 President Obama gave these guys the exclusive right to report election results in federal elections. That means that votes from everywhere first go to Spain to be examined and collated by “somebody” whom we don’t know and might not trust. Nine hundred voting jurisdictions in America are now under the thumb of SCYTL.

No sir! Give me a number two pencil, a paper ballot, let me bubble-in my choices, and stuff that thing in the ballot box. Or, if you must, give me one of those punch-out ballots, for President, school board, county supervisor, and all the rest. Then, if things go wrong there will be something physical for somebody to hold, examine, magnify, sniff, flick, and assess. Those hanging chads and erasure marks should still COUNT as a real vote.