[EL] American elect: the truly "balanced ticket"

[Bev Harris]

Excellent point. Agreed.

> Americans Elect wouldn't be needed if the U.S. had lenient and
> equal ballot access laws. 

 By the way, an article in the Charlotte Observer further identified some of the
players in AmericanElect.org:

..."The group's board of advisers includes Mark Erwin of Charlotte, an investor
and former U.S. ambassador, former FBI Director William Webster and Mark
McKinnon, a former adviser to President George W. Bush.

...The effort is funded with $21 million raised from undisclosed seed donors,
reported to be mostly wealthy hedge-fund executives. "

But its not just these guys. Soros, a fan of direct democracy, has been another
one behind Internet voting, according to my sources. (Maybe he's one of those
unnamed hedge fund guys? Dunno, that might be strange bedfellows...) Another
guy who's been connected with Internet voting companies is Robert Gates, who
was at one time on the Advisory board for VoteHere during its Internet voting
days.

We also see some high-risk exploitation of the military vote to push in Internet
voting. It isn't the military vote these Internet voting proponents are
concerned about. What they are attempting to do is use the military voting
issue to push in Internet voting for ALL of us. For example, exploiting the
concept of military voting, Washington state recently pushed an Internet voting
bill into place, immediately followed by requiring ALL King County citizens to
vote by Internet on a local election.

Hawaii has now tried it too, and of course there was the ill-fated Washington
D.C. effort. Not only is Internet voting completely unaccountable to the
public, but:

- It reduced voter participation by 75% in its Hawaii implementation
- According to a source of mine with a national security background, Internet
voting for the military creates a national security problem, because it can
reveal the geographic position of "strategic assets" -- the term referring to
people with sensitive strategic skills. The first thing you do when you
Internet-vote is identify who you are. Internet votes from sensitive locations
-- ie, the middle east -- go through networks which traverse foreign nations,
and the data can be retrieved as it passes through as to who is where,
geographically.

We are also seeing efforts to target youth, floating the idea that it will be
cool and fun to vote using their cell phones.

The common denominator to all of these efforts are that they exploit socially
desired values -- helping the military vote, helping get third parties on the
ballot, enhanced participating through direct democracy; making it fun and easy
to vote by phone -- while removing the very backbone of our democratic system,
the public election, which relies on public accounting.

The only real defense is public awareness, not of "security" problems which
create bickering experts and cause the public's eyes to glaze over, but of the
need for public transparency in the accounting of the big four things: Who can
vote, who did vote, chain of custody and the count.

Internet voting conceals three of the four essential areas of public
accountability from the public, and cannot be constructed to do otherwise.

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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