HOW TO RIG AN ELECTION
Victoria Collier
Harper's Magazine, November 2012
https://www.electiondefense.org/how-to-rig-an-election
As the twentieth century came to a close, a brave new world of election rigging emerged, and two major events paved the way: the mass adoption of computerized voting technology, and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability.
This privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood crises in the history of American democracy: We have actually lost the ability to verify election results.
Old-school ballot-box fraud at its most egregious was localized and limited in scope. But new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a statewide or even national scale. And whereas once you could catch guilty parties in the act, even dredge ballot boxes out of the bayou, the virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy.
By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It’s the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.
No matter how cynical we may have become about our elections, doing nothing to secure an accurate vote count is not an option. It may be too late to completely prevent vote rigging in the 2012 election. But the spotlight of increased public scrutiny may deter the most brazen acts of fraud—and perhaps dissuade those who believe that shifting votes by minuscule percentages in the electronic dark will go unseen.
Where paper ballots still exist, we can demand that local election clerks allow them to be counted by hand before they leave the precinct. Organizing citizen volunteer groups to count them may be necessary. Sheila Parks, who founded the Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots, has also urged citizens with legal standing to file injunctions to impound ballots, memory cards, and even voting machines after the polls close. “This prevents tampering with any of these items after an election,” she told me, “and gives us access to them with a secure chain of custody.”
Staring at the outside of a black-box voting system and attempting to detect fraud, however, will not ultimately produce clean elections. It is an exercise in futility if we do not take the next steps now. In preparation for the 2014 election, we must demand that our representatives pass comprehensive election reform, including publicly financed races and a secure, transparent vote count.
A privatized, secret ballot count must be viewed as a violation of our civil rights. Once that principle is clear, as it is now in Germany and Ireland, the rest will naturally follow. If we the people do not feel the outrage, or lack the courage to fight for this most basic right of American self-governance, who will?