Over at a Kleinheider Joint I’m being compared to a “birther” (see: Lou Dobbs) because I don’t like the way in which no one from Secretary of State Tre Hargett to State Election Coordinator Mark Goins to any poll worker or machine manufacturer can offer evidence that any vote ever cast during any election using the 100% unverifiable electronic voting machines we use now in 93 out of 95 counties in Tennessee, has ever been recorded accurately, as per the voters’ intent.
In other words, our votes are being cast in secret, as they should be. But they are also, because of the secret software being used by the machines, being counted in secret – which so violates the most basic rule of a free and fair election.
The people who can’t admit we have a problem with elections in Tennessee are the same ones who invoke the author Jim Squires and his book, “Secrets of the Hopewell Box: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City’s Coming of Age,” to demonize the use of paper ballots.
“Elections using paper ballots can be stolen!” they say.
When we interviewed Squires on Monday, we asked him if he intended his book to be a cautionary tale against the use of paper ballots:
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[02:35]
“My feeling about that is, no matter what system you have there will be people trying to shortcut it and manipulate it and corrupt it. And…one seems to me about as vulnerable to corruption and manipulation as the other. Certainly in the electronic world can be impacted by shrewd computer wizards even more easily than my grandfather could stuff a box full of ballots and drive them around in the back of his car. So I would…as an old print guy who spent most of his life with newspapers and reading, I kind of like paper ballots better than I like electronic voting. But at the same time I want to be for a system that makes the ability to vote and to get your vote counted the most efficient and so you have pros and cons on both sides. Certainly the mobile voter registration and the more easily you can register to vote and vote is in the best interest in democracy and the system. So I don’t know if one system is better than the other…I think I’d like a system that has backup. Where you might do both things…”
Hrm…a system that has a backup…where you might do both things…where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, it’s the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act that was passed almost unanimously in 2008 by both the state House and Senate and would allow us to vote on paper ballots that would then get counted by a machine but that maintains the paper ballot as the ballot of record in case of necessary recounts and is now the law that Secretary of State Hargett refuses to implement.
I knew it sounded familiar.
Also relevant to the “paper ballot” v. “100% unverifiable electronic voting machine” discussion is what Squires writes happened at the Hopewell voting precinct during the election after the infamous ballot box “went missing” during the Democratic primary of 1945. During the general, “independent poll monitors” at the Hopewell precinct, “nearly outnumbered voters.”
The lesson we should take away from Squires’ book is not to refrain from using paper ballots. Instead, it’s to realize that when we do finally get paper ballots we still need to be vigilant about the independent monitoring of each and every election.
But if Secretary of State continues to refuse to follow the law and implement the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act and we still don’t have paper ballots during the next election, then you’ll have nothing to do as citizens except sit at home and hope that the margin of victory for your candidate is so large that it overcompensates for any errors made by the secret counting software installed on each machine.
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