Election fraud has been with us for a very long time. A hundred fifty years ago, a Democrat organization called Tammany Hall ran New York City with graft, fixed elections, and street power.  For almost a century, Tammany hand-picked the political leaders, with elections a mere formality.

In Georgia in 1962, Jimmy Carter struggled against widespread election fraud and the entrenched political machine. He proved his case in court and won a re-election.

The tricks for fixing elections are many: Artificial migration, disenfranchising voters through such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests, division of opposition support, intimidating voters, disinformation, vote buying and coercion, misleading or confusing ballot papers, ballot box stuffing, misrecording the votes, misuse of proxy votes, destruction or invalidation of ballots, electronic systems fraud, voter impersonation, ballot harvesting, registration of fake voters, ballot box stuffing--each a separate technique tuned to the times.

Many of those methods depend on a corrupt county organization: When the election staff is part of the government, anything can happen.

My wife and I spent some hours observing the County staff processing ballots during this election. We were lucky to be on a shift when temporary workers were being briefed and trained, so we could be trained in parallel.

This County usually receives more than a third of a million ballots by mail. That is a staggering number, easily said but difficult to comprehend. 333,000 inches is longer than five miles. 333,000 miles is the distance to the moon and halfway back. If one person tabulated that many ballots, one per minute, eight hours per day, he would finish the count in about two years.

How was ballot counting done before the age of computers?

The solution was borrowed from our friends, the ants. No single ant tries to dig a nest and build an anthill by herself. If the colony contains a million ants, half a million will undertake the project, one grain of sand at a time. The nest must be large to house many ants, but the size of the colony defines the workforce. The problem of providing for a large ant colony leads directly to the solution with a large supply of ant-power.

Similarly, before we had computers, no single person attempted to count all the ballots. The counties were divided into precincts, and each precinct had one or more polling stations. Each polling station was staffed with volunteers to manage the voting and count the ballots. The impossible anthill was manageable when undertaken by hundreds of willing hands, often producing an election result (in those distant times) within 12 hours.

I have observed a manual recount of ballots for selected precincts by a team of twelve workers with parity for opposing parties. On that scale, manual ballot counting for each position was 90 minutes of work.

The poll workers of old were comparable to jury members, drawn from the ordinary population, rather than government employees or teams of workers supervised by government employees. They were members of the community who came forward to enact the will of the community, where the majority of good will (hopefully) suppressed the minority of ill intent. The workers were paired from opposing parties so that no single individual need be trusted.

The station was set up in a public hall or a church. On entry, the voter was checked off on the voting list and issued a ballot. The voter went into a privacy stall, marked the ballot, dropped it in the sealed box, and left. Workers were stationed around the room to discourage funny business. In many localities, the pubs were closed to keep the voters sober. And as of 2014, seven states (Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia) still banned the sale of alcohol on election day.

When we say "secret ballot," we mean that no one knew how any particular voter marked his ballot. If a mobster attempted to bribe or intimidate a voter, the mobster could not verify that the voter followed through—because the voting was always done in the private booth (Secret A). And if a poll worker attempted to identify a ballot with a particular voter for later punishment or reward, identification was not possible because the ballots in the box were anonymous (Secret B).

With the small precinct and local workers, many of the voters were personally known to the workers and the chance of a voter registering to multiple precincts was reduced. It wasn't eliminated, but neither was any other form of secret double-dealing, such as bigamy.

Having hundreds of years of experience to draw on, the architects of our system knew that governments could not be trusted to conduct honest elections. When the mayor counts the ballots for the mayoral election, he enjoys a long and comfortable term of office and is rarely voted out.

In modern day, computers and "trust your government" propaganda have changed many things, and not all for the better. The mountains of ballots for all the precincts in the County are dumped into one office. They are zipped through high-speed sorting and computing machines operating on invisible instructions. Like a man at the carnival running a super pea-in-shell game, the size and speed of the operation defy meaningful observation.

The voter registration lists, though maintained by computer, are demonstrably error-prone. In one informal study conducted recently in Oregon, 26% to 30% of the households polled had "phantom" voters--names that were registered to those addresses even though no such persons were living there. An address within the County would enable a person to vote on a County ballot, but the voter may be out of state or even out of the country, as determined by a second address field in the registration. "One person, one vote" has become "One database entry, one vote." The integrity of that list is totally under the control of the government.

The voter completes the ballot at any time, anywhere. Sitting in the company of a mobster, the voter marks his only ballot, signs the envelope, and hands it over to be mailed by the mobster. Conversely, a group of workers meet their union boss in the pub with their ballots in hand, mark their ballots in company, sign the envelopes, and leave them with the boss to mail. Thus, Secrecy of the Ballot (Secret A) is lost.

At the other end of the process, we now trust the government to count our votes. The ballot contains the votes, and only the envelope contains the voter identification with the signature. Allegedly, once the ballot is removed from the envelope, the relationship is severed and the ballot becomes as anonymous as one dropped in the ballot box of an old-time voting station.

But the devil is in the details. Every ballot in our County has a unique number and bar code. The County Clerk explained to me that the number is generated by the Verity database and no one can map the number back to voter identity once the ballot is removed from the envelope. And even if that were true, I wonder. What prevents the County computer from recording the ballot number with the addressee when the envelope is originally assembled for mailing? We don't know.

Even more alarming, when the signature on the unopened envelope is verified by the elections worker, every state and County record going back decades is displayed for reference, from property records to political party affiliation and social credit score. At that point, a corrupt system could discard the voter's ballot and replace it with a pre-marked dummy to satisfy the audit. Who would know?

Thus, Secrecy of the Ballot (Secret B) is lost in the counting-house. Take note here that I do not accuse anyone of impropriety. But with all these "improvements," the people are obligated to trust the government, and that has rarely turned out well.

However, by maintaining the myth of the secret ballot, the processing is obscured beyond all tracking. Once the ballot is separated from the envelope, all hope of confirming that one's vote was correctly tabulated is also lost. The end-to-end process is concealed from the workers by highly specialized tasks. Observers are baffled by its complexity. The security of the bushels of ballots is guarded only by the lock on the office door—to which the County workers have weekend and midnight keys over the two weeks of processing and producing the election result. The internal operation of the computers is known only to the engineers, who are sworn to secrecy by non-disclosure agreements. The settings on the computers are known only by the technical staff. And the security on the computers is guarded only by the promise that they are not equipped with WiFi.

In Oregon, the whole process is so complex, the descriptive manual is 90 pages long (https://sos.oregon.gov/elections/documents/vbm_manual.pdf).

In simple terms, mail-in ballot elections rest on a fundamental contradiction: If we have the Secret Ballot because we don't trust the government, why do we trust the government to count our Secret Ballots?

--Mark DeCoursey

Post Date: 2022-12-21 06:29:46

Last Update: 2022-12-21 11:17:08