THE GOLD STANDARD: Hand-Counted Paper Ballots. Brad waxes poetic on Supreme Court bombshell.

[Stevepol]

Hand-Marked, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots, Publicly Tabulated at Every Polling Place in America...

The biggest bombshell of this or any year: THE SUPREME COURT HAS OUTLAWED E-VOTING AS BEING INHERENTLY UN-DEMOCRATIC AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!!!

Only problem is it's the Supreme Court in Germany. Nevertheless, they're using the Constitution that we made them write after WWII, when we were actually a democracy, and it's good that at least one country in the world has some respect for the sane and rational.

Brad has a new article on CommonDreams.org about this whole thing.

Last March, the country's highest court found that secret, computerized vote counting was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the country was Germany, and the Constitution violated by e-voting systems was the one that the U.S. wrote and insisted Germans ratify as part of their terms of surrender following WWII.

Paul Lehto, a U.S. election attorney and Constitutional rights expert, summarized the German court's unambiguous, landmark finding:

•"No 'specialized technical knowledge' can be required of citizens to vote or to monitor vote counts."
•There is a "constitutional requirement of a publicly observed count."
•"he government substitution of its own check or what we’d probably call an 'audit' is no substitute at all for public observation."
•"A paper trail simply does not suffice to meet the above standards.
•"As a result of these principles,...'all independent observers' conclude that 'electronic voting machines are totally banned in Germany' because no conceivable computerized voting system can cast and count votes· that meet the twin requirements of...being both 'observable' and also not requiring specialized technical knowledge.

snip....

It was the fully public counting of hand-marked paper ballots that gave evidence that the unofficial, electronically-scanned election night results in Minnesota's recent U.S. Senate race were wrong. A hand-count settled the results of Washington State's Gubernatorial contest in 2004. And in the 2006 Republican Primary election in Pottawatomie County, Iowa, a hand-count found that seven races had been tallied incorrectly by the county's optical-scan system. Unfortunately, that sort of publicly observable counting has become the exception rather than the rule in this country, and it happens only rarely, in elections where the candidates can afford the extraordinarily high legal costs of a contest, or when the results are so so obviously twisted that officials are left with little choice but to count the ballots by hand.

Here's the rest. A really great article.

LINK: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7417

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

1. running behind today

this will have to go out in tomorrow's news.
:(

[BradBlog]

2. Thanks WYVBC! I'm...

...Suprised that more folks in ER don't seem to have an opinion -- one way or another -- on this piece so far. Hmmm...

[Wilms]

3. I'm sure everyone here is thrilled

for the people in Germany.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire and Massachusetts are losing the HCPB precincts they have even though they're likely an economic gold mine for rural, low-population jurisdictions.

Problem is we're getting what we asked for: Paper Ballots that can be Hand Counted, when what we need are Paper Ballots that are Hand Counted!

[Bill Bored]

4. It's important to note that posting results on election night can be done with any voting system.

The advantage of hand counting the paper is that the chance of errors WITHIN the precincts is greatly reduced.

Even with that benefit, you can still have aggregation problems that HCPB won't solve.

And there's still the problem of how to deal with convenience voting such as no-excuse absentee, early voting, etc., that can go on behind closed doors or for weeks on end in some cases.

There's more to election transparency than just hand counting at the precincts. But it does remove one of the biggest risks of e-vote counting (which is also NOT a risk with lever machines by the way) -- the risk of undetected vote switching at the precinct level. That's important because it's not only difficult to detect, but also difficult to correct.