A Voter Protection Act

What sort of bill might provide necessary voter protections?  I recommend something along the following lines, addressing three issues: 1. voter eligibility, 2. gerrymandering, and 3. vote counting.   In my view, all citizens should be registered and eligible to vote.  Rules should be liberally construed to ensure that no such right to vote is denied.  Redistricting laws should expressly prohibit gerrymandering.  Vote counting must preserve a paper trail.  Any electronic counting machine must be certified as secure from manipulation.

 An Act Protecting the Right to  Vote

Section 1.  Concerning the right of all citizens to vote.  Every citizen of the United States eighteen years of age or older shall be eligible to vote in all state and national elections, including elections for President, and elections for each state and federal Senator and Representative in the electoral district of domicile.  Each state shall promulgate laws and regulations to ensure the registration of all such citizens, including automatic registration on attaining one’s eighteenth year, and provisions to enroll any unregistered citizen by cross-checking registration records with state licensing laws and federal social security records.  An eligible voter whose identity as a citizen is known to polling personnel, or who shows a state license or other indicia of identity at a poll, may not be denied the vote.  No citizen may be deprived of the right to vote unless that person has been adjudicated incompetent in a court of law.

Section 2.  Prohibiting Gerrymandering.  The practice known as gerrymandering is hereby expressly forbidden in the drawing of  state and Congressional district boundaries and no such district may be drawn for the purpose of conveying a political advantage.

Section 3.   Concerning security of vote counts.  All votes in state and national elections must be cast pursuant to a paper ballot, which ballot must be retained to allow such recount or audit as may be deemed necessary.   Paper ballots may be counted by machine, provided such machine has been certified by the Justice Department of the United States as secure against electronic manipulation of reported results and as secure from interference through electronic media.  In the event that electronically reported results are challenged due to anomaly or are challenged in a contest in which the winning margin is 10 percent of the votes or less, the paper ballots shall be recorded by hand and that result shall be binding.

Section 4.  The Justice Department of the United States shall take such actions as may be necessary to protect and enforce the voting rights set out herein.

Section 5.  Any law of the United States that conflicts with the provisions of this act shall be reconciled therewith.

 

Issues for consideration:  Voting rights have been addressed numerous times since the formation of the Republic.  Understanding where that law is now is a necessary prerequisite to further legislating.  The Wikipedia entry on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 contains much of the relevant information,  The Voting Rights Act remains in force today, but has proven ineffective in recent years since the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder struck down what was known as the section 5 “coverage formula” that required certain states with a history of discrimination to “pre-approve” changes in election laws.  Since Shelby, numerous states have enacted or are considering provisions that have the practical effect of suppressing voter turnout.  Section one of my proposed bill makes voter eligibility automatic for all citizens and places a duty on states to ascertain those citizens domiciled in their state.  My bill assumes continued enforcement of existing prohibitions on discrimination.

Gerrymandering is also an issue subject to considerable ongoing litigation.  Current law, for example, under Thornburg v. Gingles sets out tests for weighing whether a redistricting plan inappropriately discriminates against a racial or ethnic minority.  My judgment is that recent gerrymandering has been used by parties for partisan advantage, wholly apart from racial or minority concerns, and in those cases inappropriately predetermines electoral outcomes.  I suggest a simple ban on gerrymander for political purposes, period.

Finally, with the Russian cyber-operatives meddling in the 2016 election, it has become clear that existing voting machines in many jurisdictions are not secure from hacking and that, in some of those jurisdictions, the lack of a paper trail makes an audit of the results impossible.  It’s time that the security of electoral results be directly addressed.

This bill is intended as a draft only, for discussion purposes.  I welcome input, including research as to existing laws or proposals in these areas.  I also recognize that like Universal Healthcare, the current establishment may not consider itself ready for Universal Registration.   Nonetheless, universal registration is also the global norm and has been enacted in some states.  If we care about a true democracy, the appropriateness of universal registration seems self-evident.  See for example, this article by Seth McElwee in the Huffpost, “Why Universal Voter Registration Matters“, and this article in The Los Angeles Times, “The merits of universal voter registration“.

 

Steve Friess on Alex Halderman and Vote Hacking

Steve Friess in a Playboy article “Technology Will Destroy Democracy Unless This Man Stops It” provides insight into the world of computer hacking and security – an ongoing competition between computer experts seeking to ensure security and those demonstrating that any such security is an illusion.  As I have blogged elsewhere, the power of the hackers means that absolute security in a computer world is unattainable.  See On the Death of Privacy..  It is also apparent that computer technology was adapted by Robert Mercer and the Alt-Right for the 2016 election to “weaponize” social media information to target potential voters for misinformation or voter suppression.  See Compute This.  But most startling to me in following this inquiry is the realization that the modern technology employed in state and national elections is directly vulnerable to hacking.  A motivated hacker need not bother with the voters themselves because the results of the machines can be directly hacked and manipulated.  I  noted this possibility in Hacking Voting Machines and Computer Programmer.

Steve Friess has explored the dangers of voter hacking in depth with Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor and computer expert, for the above-noted Playboy piece.  Halderman has worked on all sides of the security issue, demonstrating how best to slow down the hackers of the NSA , how to work around government censorship,  and, perhaps, most importantly, the vulnerability of state electioneering to direct manipulation.  Halderman demonstrated that “hack proof” machines used in India were easily manipulated.  He similarly weighed in on the vulnerability of a recent New Jersey election allowing voting by email.  In 2006 he was part of the team showing how the Florida Diebold voting machines could be easily hacked.  In 2010, he, with a team of grad students,  manipulated the results in a Washington, D.C. trial internet election.

Read Friess for a fascinating tour of the brave new world of computer technology.  Then work to ensure that our future elections are not vulnerable to malicious manipulation.  And urge our election officials to engage computer experts to examine the results of the 2016 election for vote rigging by computer.  Trump was insistent that the results were rigged.  He’s been know to project a bit.  Maybe we should listen to him.

Computer Programmer Created Software in 2000 to Rig Elections by Voting Machine Hacking

On April 7 and 8, in two blogs, Hacking Voting Machines, and Going all the Way, I speculated that the 2016 election may have been flipped by direct hacking of voting machines.  I came to that conclusion based on the known Russian cyber warfare conducted on Trump’s behalf by Russian cyber experts and the fact that direct hacking of election computers was a known possibility.  See also the Palmer Report article noting that the surprise swing states were suspiciously won by almost identical margins.  The possibility of election hacking throws doubt on the legitimacy of the vote count in the 2016 presidential election and under the circumstances requires Congressional action to review the election and to consider laws to ensure the integrity of future elections.

These concerns were emphasized yesterday when I learned that on December 13, 2004, a computer programmer, Clinton Curtis, testified before a Congressional Committee that he designed software for Florida Speaker of the House Tom Feeny to  rig elections in Florida in 2000.  This is the YouTube link.  A second link from Twitter is here.   Here’s the accompanying blurb to the YouTube link:

“Published on Feb 19, 2016

Clinton Eugene Curtis, a computer programmer from Florida, testified before a congressional panel that there are computer programs that can be used to secretly fix elections. He explains how he created a prototype for Florida Congressman Tom Feeny that would flip the vote 51%-49% in favor of a specified candidate.

This happened all the way back in 2001 but you might not have heard anything about this claim unless you searched for it. I’ve seen a Wired News report on this topic and a few local Florida newspaper stories but otherwise, no real media coverage has been provided. You’d think claims of election rigging software would be splattered all over the News yet as it turns out, our news media prefers to point out voting fraud in other nations but not here in THE UNITED STATES.

Mr Curtis a Software programmer who worked for NASA, Exxon Mobil & the US Department of Transportation in a sworn-oath deposition testifies that US elections are rigged by inserting software into the voting system. The timing of this deposition was just after George W Bush being re-elected president of the United States. We are not surprised that this never made it into the main stream media.

Mr Curtis goes on to name US Representatives who attempted to pay him to rig their election vote counts.

Transcript of sworn testimony by computer programmer Clint Curtis, before the U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Democrats of the Judiciary Committee, December 13, 2004, as seen on video above follows at the link below.

http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=9437 “

The bottom line is this.  The election of the current President, Donald Trump, occurred in the face of election eve polling that predicted his defeat.   He won the election based on anomalous results in several large swing states that defied the pollsters, and notwithstanding that Trump lost the popular count by almost three million votes.  Those results alone should raise suspicion.  We now also know that Russian operatives were active in the election, quite possibly with the cooperation of Trump and American computer analytics.  In short, it is reasonable to question whether the US election was stolen.  We can’t investigate sooner.  Congressional action must begin now.

 

Hacking Voting Machines – Reforms – Trump the Usurper

Former CIA Director James Woolsey warns that 25% of American voting machines can be hacked and leave no paper trail to allow a recount.  See this link.  See also this article by Ben Wofford in Politico, “How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes.”  Here’s a quote from Wofford’s article: “’This isn’t a crazy hypothetical anymore,’ says Dan Wallach, … a computer science professor at Rice. ‘Once you bring nation states’ cyber activity into the game?’ He snorts with pity. ‘These machines, they barely work in a friendly environment.'”

No electronic information is totally secure.  See my blog “Compute This“.  American intelligence services tell us there was a major Russian effort involving hacking and disinformation to flip the American election – an effort that, given the narrow 70,000 vote margin of the Trump victory, determined Trump’s win.  There is also voluminous evidence that Trump and his operatives colluded with that Russian effort and that agents allied to Trump engaged in massive disinformation campaigns.  See yesterday’s blog “Hi Ho, Hi Ho”.

In short, our electoral process was compromised and Trump’s election was illegitimate, stolen, undeserved.  Let’s call him Trump the Usurper.  He should be investigated, impeached, and sent to jail.   Furthermore, a federal election law is necessary to require that election machines are secure from hacking and provide a verifiable paper trail.

More broadly, the election was a wake-up call for electoral reform.  The following reforms are necessary:

1.  Secure voting machines with verifiable paper trails must be acquired for all voting centers.

2.  Campaign finance reform must be enacted to remove money from politics.  See my blog  “Getting Money Out of Politics”.

3.  Independent bi-partisan commissions must be established to end gerrymandering.  Computer models using established computer algorithms should ensure that electoral district boundaries are not drawn for partisan advantage.

4.  The Electoral College must be abolished and all national elections determined by popular vote.

5.  Strong national voting laws must prohibit voter suppression.

The facts are out there.  Our country is no longer a democracy.  Our most recent election was stolen.  We will have to act forcefully if we want our country back.