[EL] Hypothetical ballot privacy issues vs actual rights

[Bev Harris]

Joe Hall and friends recommend not releasing images for public examination. In
private communications, that cadre of techies has gone further, indicating that
they don't buy into the idea that the public has a right to see and
authenticate the crucial processes in public elections.

But regarding ballot privacy, let's just say that the chocolate smudge theory
now has a pair of academic glasses. (In litigation against the public right to
examine ballots, one Colorado official claimed that voter privacy could be
stolen if a poll worker placed a chocolate smudge on a ballot.)

The plain truth is, you cannot replace right to self government with an
absolutist interpretation of a right to ballot privacy. This is not to say that
ballot privacy is not important. But if it is a "right" it is a lower-level
right to the right to public self-governance, which is a highest level right.

Hall and his team (who have received grant monies to develop their encryption
project), seem unduly concerned about a tiny hypothetical number of potentially
violated privacies, but only in the context of their own efforts to insert
their cryptography between the public and the ballots.

But I call bullshit. Within the context of their own grant, they are concerned
about a hypothetical situation, while at the same time they have not uttered a
peep about a non-theoretical, large-scale, and very real problem with ballot
privacy. The current practice of placing unique bar codes on mail-in ballots,
unique to each voter, represents a massive threat and perhaps may be the real
reason vendors and county clerks are afraid to let the public examine the
ballots. Were we allowed to look, it would be easy to prove that unique
identifiers have been placed on the ballots by the vendor Hart Intercivic 
widely used in Colorado and Washington), and in an earlier case, in a
mail-voting product made by VoteHere.

If you doubt me, check your mail-in ballot. If you live in either Colorado or
Washington, and you live in the same household as another voter, examine your
own ballots when you receive them in the mail. You will now see a unique bar
code printed right on each ballot.

Now, add another raspberry. Hall and his team, while using the infinitesimal
possibility of a tiny quantity of ballots being discerned by others, are also
part of the crowd who shrug off voter fraud because of the supposedly small
quantity of improper votes. This seems incongruent. On the one hand, they have
a theory that a mathematician armed with a small wheelbarrow of data and
several months to examine it might extract voter privacy information on one or
two voters. Why would a small number of voter privacy violations be worse than
a small number of fraudulent votes? I can't understand why an intangible threat
which requires a second step (someone has to actually USE the voter privacy
theft for coercion or bribery) would be worse than an actual false vote counted
in the tallies.

Now, as to the claim that double or ineligible votes are not counted in the
tallies, I have spent four months examining the voter lists from various
states, and I can tell you this: The number of people who vote twice is small
(in one location I found three out of 100,000 votes; in a second, two out of
8800 votes.) This small number does exist, though, and I would contend that in 
terms of weighting, an actually counted wrongfully cast vote would outweigh a
potentially exploited privacy theft. Both are bad, but I don't see how you can
be against the second and not even more worried about the first.

So here's the simple solution: Ban the unique, individualized bar codes on
mail-in ballots. That takes a meaningful step to protect the most wholesale and
dangerous threat to voter privacy. Allow the public to examine who can vote,
who did vote, chain of custody and the count, which can be done in a number of
ways. Get out in the field and see what's really happening, as I have, look at
the real data, and stop dithering about how many dancers can fit on the head of
a pin.

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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