Secret Vote Counting and the Lost Art of Democratic Elections

In February 2009 Allison Kilkenny reported that "The Obama administration on Friday told a federal judge it would not deviate from the Bush administration's position that detainees held at a U.S. air base in Afghanistan have no right to sue in U.S. courts."

In early May 2009 the Wall Street Journal issued another troubling report from the "change we can believe in" administration:"The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Why is the Obama administration continuing to erode civil liberties in the manner so cynically embodied in contemporary governmental acts like the Patriot Act?

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"God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it." -Daniel Webster

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We the People no longer guard and defend liberty. Without blinking an eye we have given away the single most important defense we have against tyranny: our public elections. In the course of our history, Americans have always understood the connection between liberty and the secure right to vote and to have that vote properly counted.

Until today.

In the past, Americans have risked life and limb to protect this foundation of liberty. Where is the voting rights movement of today?

The American right to vote has been systematically eroded through a maze of legal and illegal disenfranchisement strategies. In today's privatized computerized elections, eligible voters are routinely "purged" from state voter registration databases. Insufficient numbers of voting machines ensure that those who succeed in getting past the questionable registration software can't succeed in casting their vote. Government sponsored reports of "voter fraud" have released dishonest and exaggerated findings to facilitate passage of voter ID laws and other tactics targeting undesirable voters (the poor, the illiterate, the elderly, the immigrant).

The American right to fair and open elections has been systematically nullified by the privatization of our elections. When Americans do succeed in casting their vote, 90% of those votes are counted in secret by private corporations, many of which still use the same vote counting software that was developed by a convicted embezzler whose specialty was alteration of computer records.

Not only have We the People abdicated our constitutional sovereignty by giving away the mechanism of democracy - our elections - to private corporations with no patriotic allegiance, we have paid billions of dollars to do so.

We allowed Congress to launder $4 billion tax dollars to the computerized voting industry through the "Help America Vote Act". Each year of computerized elections incurs astronomic costs to municipal, county, state, and federal coffers. The financial hit from computerized elections in and of itself moots democracy as just too damn expensive to maintain.

Additionally, because the computerized elections are outside the technical understanding of most public officials, the privatized election industry routinely "services" the computers counting America's votes smack dab in the middle of the election itself. Computer "patches" (aka "fixes" - a particularly appropriate term for this practice) that alter previously approved or certified software, are implemented in the midst of an election when no state oversight is practical or possible.

And just who are those guys in this privatized election industry? As it turns out, that's for them to knowand for us not to find out.

Nationwide, private corporations, like LHS Associates in New England, use unnamed employees to program the computers counting, and sometimes casting, American voters' ballots. There are no universally applied requirements for conducting background checks on the employees of these private corporations programming and "servicing" America's elections.

In New Hampshire, for instance, despite the revelation by Black Box Voting, a citizen watchdog organization, that LHS Vice President Ken Hajar is a a convicted felon (cocaine trafficking), Mr. Hajar remains gainfully employed by New England's sole e-voting vendor with no apparent concern from the NH Secretary of State or anyone else, for that matter. We know nothing about the other LHS Associates employees servicing NH's elections, because LHS President John Silvestro, when requested by the NH Secretary of State, refused to divulge their names.

The American right to public oversight has been systematically eroded by the nation's public election officials. After handing off 90% of the nation's vote count to private corporations counting our votes in secret, the nation's election officials are bringing secret vote counting to its final logical end: they are literally closing the doors and barring citizen oversight from the vote count.

May 2009: Oysterponds School District, New York, election officials bar the media and the public from observing the School District election vote count. The Suffolk Times reports:

"According to John Conklin, a spokesman for the state Board of Elections, it's perfectly legal to exclude the public and the press from the room when votes are being tallied. But Bev Harris, founder and director of the Seattle-based nonprofit BlackBoxVoting.org, said a public counting process is fundamental to our system of government, based on the Declaration of Independence. 'You can't have liberty without self-government. You can't have self-government if you count votes in secret. Liberty and self-government are considered by the Declaration to be inalienable rights, endowed by our creator. You can't pass a law that takes away these freedoms,' she said. 'Having government insiders count votes in secret effectively transfers power from the people to the government.' "

November 2008: In violation of the state constitution's mandate to "sort and count" the vote in public meeting, NH's Secretary of State bars citizens from the area where votes are being tallied in the presidential election. New Hampshire election officials are quick to point out that every voter in the state still uses paper ballots, but they fail to explain that nearly 90% of those ballots are routinely fed through computerized scanners to be counted in secret by Diebold Corporation, a private corporation with a criminal history and partisan ties.

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Samuel Adams in 1781 remarked: "Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual - or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country."

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As citizens in the last standing world power, American voters are given the solemn trust of the global community to do everything in our power to guard and defend liberty.

We have let down our guard. We have stood idly by while unnamed and unaccountable entities with no sworn oath of national allegiance have subverted our elections and the American Republic. We have betrayed a trust that has implications far greater today than Founder Adams could have possibly envisioned.

If you are wondering why an Obama administration is mulling policies of tyranny, look no further than your local polling station.

If you see anything other than a public vote count conducted by sworn public officials under the watchful eye of partisan-neutral citizens, if you have not stepped forward to demand public, open vote counting, then you are looking squarely at the answer to your question.

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Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. - Thomas Paine, 1776

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