Reply #191: I think you're all fooling yourselves - you need to make it happen

[sunshinekathy]

Everyone in America could know that our elections are being rigged and the vast majority of them could be against it happening

and

our elections will still be rigged again.

You are fooling yourself if you think embarassment or public knowledge will stop it when election systems in a vast majority of states give carte blanche to tamper with elections without leaving a trace of evidence and without any routine independent audits to detect or correct errors introduced by insiders.

Its the same pollyanna view that made Common Cause make our election systems a hundred times worse by formulating and passing the biggest boondoggle for election tamperers ever - the HAVA act.

If you WANT to stop election rigging you have to commit money and time and commit it FAST before its too late to a project that actually has a hope of ensuring that accurately elected candidates are sworn into office after the Nov 2006 election.

http://electionarchive.org

If you folks naively allow another election to be rigged and you aren't awake enough to realize that US house and senate and state house and senate and governor's races have also been rigged for a decade now, and you haven't realized that the Common Cause solution HAVA has now made many many more entire states and counties easily riggable with Diebolds and Sequoia and a myriad of other ways, and you let the November 2006 election be rigged because you don't get up off your duff and do something EFFECTIVE - then the courts will also become packed and it may be too late to fix afterwards. Are you not aware that the US is in so much debt now that our entire government is getting closer to collapse?

This pollyanna view will not help anything. Stop doing pot or get your brain straight!

We must raise the funds to build a national election data archive to instantly collect and analyze election data and we must fight legal battles this year prior to that. It will take a big system:

Not one state in America collects the data at the state level, so it has to be collected from over 33,000 separate county and township offices, most of which do not currently release it in the detail that we need it.

Please see this:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/election_officials/ElectionArchive_advice.pdf

See this:

http://uscountvotes.org/ucvData/US/How2CollectData.pdf

In addition, we must have high-speed Internet servers that are very huge and all the data comes in different file formats and different file types and different arrangements within each file from every county. The high-speed servers must be very big to hold all the data, and they must be redundant, backed up and very secure. The monthly cost simply for server co-location is $250/month and then we need to pay a mininum of $500/month just for sysadmin, but probably $2,000 would be more like it.

Then we have to develop systems that are secure for volunteers to upload the data to the server and systems to index and display the original files. Then the most complex part is the systems to program to parse all the myriad of file types from the numerous original files and get it into the database, then programs to display it.

Just to design the database took many months, because another complexity is that every state has different ways of conducting elections, election procedures, etc. We spent many months doing that with volunteer programmers, but we cannot develop it now without staff: staff both to program it, and also staff to work with volunteers and election officials, and that is before we even consider the programming of statistical analyses.

You might think that writing the over a dozen papers with computer scientists and mathematicians was easy and did not take much time, but just this last history paper took me over 5 weeks day and night working constantly.
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Presidential-Election-2004.pdf

If no one wants to fund the development of the national election data archive then that is really pitiful that no one cares about democracy to implement this project - the only project that has any hope of ensuring that the right candidates are sworn into office by January 2007.

Even IF you other election activists succeed in ensuring that VVPBs are used and even IF you succeed in ensuring that independent audits are always performed - that will not catch all errors that could change election outcome.

If you guys don't start contributing money or time to this effort, you can kiss your democracy goodbye, maybe forever.

I'm sure that a lot of folks in Hitler's time couln't imagine that he could take over from the German Republic either - (with the help of Bush's grandfather).

Please wake up and help restore American democracy by doing something that has a real chance to do that.

Kathy
http://electionarchive.org