SOURCE: OpEdNews

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February 4, 2010, BlackBoxVoting's Bev Harris Tackles the Holt Bill, Part Two, By Joan Brunwasser

Welcome back for the second half of my interview with BlackBoxVoting's Bev Harris. If people in the EI Election Integrity movement have serious reservations about the Holt Bill, Bev, why don't you just talk with Rep. Holt and give him your input? Who knows more about this than the actual people who have been in the trenches all these years?

Mr. Holt doesn't have the slightest interest in anything I have to say -- or anyone else advocating for restoration of public right to see and authenticate all steps in our own elections. What we are looking for won't line the pockets of the e-voting industry (and all the related little support industries that have developed). In fact, the kinds of solutions that will move us towards restoration of public elections:

1) Can be done without a federal bill

2) Don't involve an investment of a few billion more dollars, and therefore are unattractive to corporate lobbyists who feed the pigs at the trough.

3) Don't involve expensive ongoing maintenance fees and never-ending ancillary costs, so will not appeal to the "elections industry."

All good points for taxpayers, but decidedly not selling points for many in the US Congress.

Boy, are you cynical! We don't have to reinvent the wheel here. We're not the first country to struggle with juggling electronic voting and democracy. How have other countries dealt with this?

So glad you mentioned that! Yes, other countries have struggled with electronic voting. And they've dumped their e-voting. Germany, for example, flat out got rid of its electronic voting system in 2009, after the German high court ruled that concealing any essential election process from the public is unconstitutional.

Ireland has also dumped its evoting machines, and the Netherlands as well.

Citizens in India have begun to have a lively rights-oriented debate as well, though (like the USA), India has a vast and diverse infrastructure and mega-profit potential for evoting, and (like the USA), India has a corruption problem. A difference is that Indian citizens do actually talk about the corruption of government insiders, whereas in the USA -- despite literally hundreds of news articles from all over the country which document corruption and fraud by public officials -- many activists feel it is taboo to bring up the subject of insiders tampering with elections.

We have to get over that hurdle. Democracy was conceived of BECAUSE our founders understood full well that power corrupts, and that the people must at all times remain sovereign over, and vigilant towards, those who serve us as public servants. If we become inattentive, they warned us, our governors will become wolves.

Our form of government is based on DISTRUST of government insiders. It seems particularly insidious to call this election reform bill the "Voter Confidence Act," since bestowing "confidence" and "trust" in our public officials is exactly the opposite approach as that envisioned by our founders.

You raise an interesting question, Bev. Exactly how do we educate the public that it's in our best interest to be suspicious in order to safeguard what is left of our democracy?

I don't think this is the key message we need to be educating the public about. We need to focus on educating the public about our fundamental RIGHTS as they apply to elections. Just as the public now understands the concept that a "public meeting" means that any person can show up to watch, videotape etc. to authenticate what went on in the meeting, the concept of a "public election" means that any person has the right to watch and authenticate any essential step.

When people express concern about the legitimacy of the voting process, we need to teach them to articulate what's really wrong with it. If we can't see and authenticate every essential step in our elections, we have ceded all power over to government insiders. And if the people cede power to the government, we cease to have a democracy.

You know, people often express frustration to me because their election officials just won't listen to them when they express concerns about the voting machines.

But when they see that the real issue is the public right to see and authenticate, they find a whole new set of strategies for applying public pressure. When you use the RIGHTS argumentation -- the right to see and authenticate every essential step of the election without need for special expertise -- it forces the election official to jump on one side of the fence or the other: They either support public elections or they are fighting for concealment.

Not many public officials want to be seen publicly fighting for concealment of election processes. Once American citizens understand what their rights really are, and learn to argue effectively, we will discover more leverage to open up elections to the public.

We have to learn to use very specific words. You may notice that I have used the term "public right to see and authenticate every essential step of the election, without need for special expertise" many times. THAT is what we want, not some nebulous term like "transparency". The term "transparency" is actually just a metaphor anyway -- it doesn't even mean anything specific. We need to learn to specify what we want!

And when people say "what system do you recommend?" the answer is "any system that meets the test of public right to see and authenticate every essential step of the election, without need for special expertise."

How can people who want to understand what's so bad about electronic voting be brought up to speed?

It's much simpler than we thought. If you can't see it, it is concealed from you. And if a process is concealed from the public, it is not public. You can't see electrons.

Our immediate task starts with public awareness -- the public isn't even aware that they HAVE these crucial rights, and therefore there is no public pressure for rights protection to underpin political, legal, or administrative decision making. So we get legislation and administrative decisions that consistently violate our rights. The first step is to get people to understand what the rights are and learn to articulate them.

When I spoke with the plaintiff in the German case, he told me that a lot of public awareness efforts were done BEFORE the court decision in Germany, which was key. We should note that the USA is much bigger and more diverse, so our challenge is greater in the public awareness area.

Proponents of the Holt Bill say that it is unrealistic nowadays to have truly public elections. Really? Democracy is "unrealistic"?

Let me tell you how we can go about making sure democracy is realistic: Learn and practice the argumentation for the human rights aspect of elections. Feel free to cut and paste and roll these arguments and issues around on your own tongue. Or word processor. Get out there and develop public awareness of how these rights are obstructed when you conceal the counting of the vote. This builds the foundation for real, meaningful, lasting change.

Get off that frigging treadmill, always worrying about the next election, and hunker down on this. (It's only freedom.)

Document what's going on, for posterity if that's what it takes. Hats off to patriots like Nancy Tobi, and Pokey Anderson, and Susan Pynchon, for pinning down which organizations and people have been doing what to strip the public out of our own public elections.

One of the most brilliant minds for democracy today is election law scholar Paul Lehto, whose concept "Roll Call for Democracy" really does involve getting people to commit to a position on the rights issue in elections. Who will state for the record that they do NOT believe we have the right to see and authenticate every step of our own elections? What is your position?

At some point, every leader, every election reform advocate, every citizen should and will need to decide which side of the fence they want to land on. In the end, there will be two lines.

Educate. Cut the herd. Take roll.

This one is simpler than you think.

Thank you for talking with me and for clarifying the issues here, Bev. I don't know much that is more critical to the state of our country than putting the public back into public elections.

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Part One of my interview with Bev

BlackBoxVoting.org website

Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris (free online version)

Author's Bio: Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. We aim to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Electronic (computerized) voting systems are simply antithetical to democratic principles.

CER set up a lending library to achieve the widespread distribution of the DVD Invisible Ballots: A temptation for electronic vote fraud. Within eighteen months, the project had distributed over 3200 copies across the country and beyond. CER now concentrates on group showings, OpEd pieces, articles, reviews, interviews, discussion sessions, networking, conferences, anything that promotes awareness of this critical problem. Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.