SOURCE: BlackBoxVoting.ORG

Below you will find the transcript of a video -- and a link, so you can see for yourself. This video pertains to perhaps THE most important issue in election protection today, the RIGHT TO KNOW.

We will continue to run down pointless rabbit holes seeking election reform if we don't focus on the core issues. The truth is, it doesn't matter how secure or how accurate a voting system is, if the public does not have the right to know; every change in election procedures or legislation must be examined through the lens of whether it helps or hurts our right to know.

The right to know is built into the founding documents of our nation. It is especially important in the area of elections, because it is through elections that we exercise control over our government. The argumentation for right to know can be framed as follows:

- Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them.

- The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.

- We must remain informed so that we may retain control over the instruments of government we have created.

- When we lose the ability to control, we lose our sovereignty over our own government and we no longer have a democratic form of government.

If "right to know" is not honored in our elections, we do not have democratic elections -- fundamentally altering our form of government, creating a different form of government without our consent.

HOW NEW HAMPSHIRE IS BLOCKING RIGHT TO KNOW

In New Hampshire, the first thing a new legislature does is cast a SECRET vote for who will be secretary of state. The New Hampshire Secretary of State's office controls elections.

Control of elections should not be decided by a secret legislative vote kept hidden from the public. And in each election, the counting (which includes adding up the votes) must not be done secretly.

TRANSCRIPT: New Hampshire hiding vote counting processes from the public

VIDEO:

After the 2008 general election citizens tried to observe the central tabulation of election results. The New Hampshire Secretary of State's office told them they could not enter the "nonpublic" rooms where the tally was occurring and gave them a "warning" about videotaping events where the central tabulation was taking place.

CAPTION: Protecting the Count - On Nov. 4-5 2008, American citizens fanned out across the nation to witness, document, and defend the vote count. For the 90% of America's ballots that are "counted" in secret by corporate-owned and programmed computers, citizens documented precinct level results to defend against "middle man" vote count manipulation and central tabulation fraud. They also attempted to witness and document central tabulation.

CAPTION: Democratic elections require 100% citizen oversight to be fair, open, and to ensure the integrity of election results. In a fraud-friendly election system, election officials obstructing citizen oversight are the worst offenders.

CAPTION: So in 2008, fed up with secret vote counting, disputed elections, and corporate control of the vote count, We the People answered the call to Protect the Count.

These are our stories.

AQUENE FREECHILD, Co-Coordinator, Protect the Count New Hampshire: I'm Aquene Freechild. We're here in Concord New Hampshire at the Secretary of State's office, Room 204 for the final tallying of the votes in the state of New Hampshire in the Nov. 4, 2008 election.

CAPTION: The Secretary of State is preparing to tally all of the election results from New Hampshire cities and towns. This is supposed to be publicly observable.

DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE DAVE SCANLAN: Well this is the, you know, the public part of the office so you can watch what goes on. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

SCOTT KRAVITZ: Would you mind describing what's going on for us?

SCANLAN: These are the official returns that the state police have delivered from the towns this morning so they're opening the envelopes, they returned the envelopes that contain the Return of Votes, and they're just sorting out the papers so that we can start the process of tabulating the returns.

(People are sitting at a table, accepting stacks of envelopes from state troopers, opening them and stacking the papers.)

KRAVITZ: What are the papers that they're sorting out?

SCANLAN: Well you have the Return of Votes, you have the Moderator's Certificates. The Return of Votes are actually the votes cast for the candidates. The Moderator's Certificate has the ballots cast. And the Moderator's Worksheet, which is an optional document, where they reconcile the various numbers that we were dealing with last night.

KRAVITZ: And then what happens after that?

SCANLAN: Then the people in this office will start tallying the result, we'll take the information from the Return of Votes and we'll compile them on spreadsheets so we can put the totals together for each of the districts and candidates running for in the state. And it's going to be a several day process. We should finish up sometime Friday.

FREECHILD to PAULA PENNEY: Which other people are doing the tallying?

PENNEY: You need to speak to Dave, all questions need to be routed to Dave Scanlan. So if you need him I'll get him for you.

FREECHILD, to SCANLAN: So we're just wondering where the votes are being tallied, which computers, and which people are doing the tallying.

(Freechild is a young graduate student-aged woman, with quiet, polite, and calm demeanor throughout.)

SCANLAN: All the people in this office are going to be doing it but again, this is the public part of the office, feel free to film whatever happens from here. We don't want any audio taken at people's office desks (gestures to another office behind him) because the nature of some of the conversations that we have. That's private, secretary of state business.

FREECHILD: So you're going to count--

SCANLAN: Well we do a lot of other things besides just the count, we're doing other business in the office. People are working on, you know, doing the tallies, we don't expect to have people over our shoulder.

FREECHILD: Are you certain that in the constitution, the count itself rather than the tallies?

CAPTION: "In open meeting?a moderator...shall sort and count the votes." -- New Hampshire Constitution, Article 32

CAPTION: "The public's right of access to governmental proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted." -- New Hampshire Constitution, Article 8

FREECHILD: So we understand that there may be a process where people are correcting things--

SCANLAN: --They're not correcting, they're, they're taking information on the forms and they're turning the thing onto a spreadsheet so what's on those forms is what's going to be entered into our database. Now if towns find that they might have made a mistake and they sent us another form, that information might be on there, but we don't change anything.

FREECHILD: That's not what I was intending to say, what I was trying to say was that we're not trying to breathe down your neck in the sense that we want to accuse you of doing something, but we also want to be observers of the WHOLE count, not part of the count that's in the public part of the office because it's in the Constitution--

SCANLAN: Well those are the counts. We have people that are going to take those numbers, they're going to put them in the database, they're going to take those forms, we're going to prepare the document, at the end of the day the numbers should match, if they don't then raise the issue. But these are, you know, what we are working on are working documents, they are not subject to the right to know law until they are the final documents. If you disagree with that you can go to court and see what they have to say about that. That's our understanding of the statute.

CAPTION: Are vote tally sheets REALLY just "working documents not subject to the right to know law"? We asked a leading civil rights attorney for an opinion: "The Secretary of State can not legally shield these tally sheets from the public by claiming that they are 'working documents' and that therefore the tally sheets are 'not subject' to the right to know law. Draft agency documents, exempted from the right to know law, are very different from vote tallies coming from different towns, where the Secretary of State's job is not to rewrite them or edit them, but to add them up, and maybe create a merged document in addition to the individual tallies.

SCANLAN: So, like I said, you know, this is the public part of the office so feel free to observe or take video, but again, we don't want to hear on the Internet or some other place, private conversations, because that's not part of the public office. And you have a warning right now.

CAPTION: The New Hampshire Secretary of State conducted the central tabulation of the 2008 election results in what they called the "nonpublic part of the office" and "warned" citizen observers not to videotape the tally.

How is that even Constitutional?

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WHAT TO DO ABOUT THIS

1. Prohibit secret selection of the state's top election policymaker by requiring the selection process to be in full public view

2. Place all phases of vote counting and tallying in public areas so the public can view the process.

3. Work for compliance and consequences, to deter violations of the right to know principle in all phases of elections.