[EL] American elect

Fri Nov 11 19:32:00 PST 2011

If you combine secrecy/non-transparency like AE has, with a Pollyanna
attitude that says outlandish conspiracies are laughable (which they are)
the paradox is that outlandish conspiracies have a free hand to flourish,
because all the sensible people will laugh at the allegations, and the
secrecy/non-transparency will hide things from being plain-as-day.

Conspiracies flourish under secrecy.  They seek it out.  Conspiracy is one
of the most commonly proven criminal charges in court, not an improbable
oddity.  All "conspiracies" constitute are agreements to do something
illegal or (outside law) to do something socially undesirable.

The same spirit that laughs off the risks of secrecy with its facilitation
of conspiracy that goes with it, would laugh every time US fighter jets
were scrambled because there MIGHT have been a Soviet or other attack, but
really it was a flock of birds on the radar - or whatever....

If people really care about something, and if they think it through, they
will act to overprotect somewhat.  Sentinels of democracy, so to speak,
people who want to protect democracy, will err on the side of safety like a
sentinel.  Just get up off their butts and check out the noise they heard,
even if they're pretty sure it was just a cat or dog.

I understand, fully, the humor behind outlandish combinations of folks
imagined as a conspiracy - part of humor is surprise and the unexpected.

But when it comes to AE Rick Hasen's points are exactly correct.  If the
Board of Directors can overrule the voters, that alone makes it
undemocratic.  Then add the secret, non-transparent vote counts and secret
donors, and you have the conditions for problems including but not limited
to conspiracy, and they have triply redundant facilitation:  the secrecy
alone is sufficiently fatal, add the directors over-ruling the voters and
that alone is also fatal.  How many deaths must respect for democracy die
before its election-law defenders ALL see the problem?

Paul Lehto, J.D.

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 5:31 PM, Larry Levine <larrylevine at earthlink.net>wrote:

> I am reminded here of the comment I made a few minutes ago about reforms
> and
> reformers who become wedded to the notion that they are about to save the
> world only to find out later that the world doesn't really want to be
> saved.
> This whole American Elect thing may be the wackiest one yet. It adds up, in
> my estimation, to "I don't like the way things are now so I'm going to come
> up with something that pushes the boundaries of the law and turns the
> electoral process on its head no matter what the outcome." I start with an
> innate distrust of anyone who thinks they know better than everyone else.
> And listening to the advocates of AE, that's what I am feeling. One thing
> is
> certain: it will help either the Dems, the Reps, or neither. Oh, yeah,
> there's another certainty - some people will be attracted to it because
> they
> just love sticking sticks in the spokes. If it wasn't this it would be
> something else.
> Larry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
> [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Bev
> Harris
> Sent: Friday, November 11, 2011 11:04 AM
> To: Smith, Brad
> Cc: law-election at UCI.EDU
> Subject: Re: [EL] American elect
>
> I've recently read that Americans are more concerned about protecting their
> hubcaps than protecting their vote. Perhaps that goes for election
> attorneys
> as well.
>
> While election lawyers on this list are ridiculing critics of
> AmericanSelect.org, you ignore the point Rick Hasen made about the complete
> lack of transparency and questionable (read: "impossible") security
> problems
> of its Internet voting scheme.
>
> A quick aside to Rick Hasen - I was glad to see your article, but the issue
> is not "security", it's "transparency". You can never secure a computer
> against its own administrator, so that's actually a moot point. The
> insoluble problem of Internet voting is that it can never be publicly
> authenticated. It conceals who voted, chain of custody of the votes, and
> the
> count from the public, rendering the election nonpublic and controllable by
> whoever controls the server.
>
> Whether Peter Ackerman is well intentioned or not is irrelevant. If
> guessing
> about people's intentions was relevant, banks could just stop videotaping
> teller transactions. Instead, they could just focus on hiring employees who
> are "well intentioned."
>
> Regardless of whether Peter Ackerman is well intentioned, he appears to be
> scarily clueless about how Internet voting actually works. He's not the
> only
> one -- I met with Senator Mike Gravel, who is pushing for direct democracy
> using Internet voting.
>
> Also at this meeting was M.I.T. computer security expert Ron Rivest. Rivest
> explained to Gravel that Internet voting cannot be secured. In a side
> conversation with me, Rivest also admitted that it is not and never will be
> possible to secure a computerized voting system from its own administrator.
>
> I'm sure that ridiculing imaginary conspiracy theories is more fun than
> discussing how the mechanism used by AmericanSelect to control the choosing
> process actually alters public ability to self-govern.
>
> Bev Harris
> Founder - Black Box Voting
> http://www.blackboxvoting.org
>
> * * * * *
>
> 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 insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over
> the instruments of government we have created.
>
>
>
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-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box 1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-4026 (cell)
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