It has been said that if election fraud is alleged, it must be presented along with evidence of fraud. On the contrary, the election department should prove that there is no fraud. Imagine if you went to your bank and told them there was a discrepancy between your account balance and what you expected to be in your account and they responded with “prove it”. Imagine if the said that even though they could demonstrate that the balance was correct, they would not allow you to see the information they had. Imagine if they had simply discarded information that might show various transactions.
These are among the issues that came to light that need to be corrected.
• Ballots that have no known origin.
• Tampering or interference with voting machines.
• Lack of observation of vote counting procedures.
• Lack of chain of custody of voting materials.
9 replies on “Prove Election Integrity”
Thank you for engaging on this, especially Michael Piz. I see that the initial post is not well written.
I should say something like:
The people should not have to go to court to stop election certification, it should occur as part of the process, there should be a mechanism in place to stop the process so that results are not certified if there is a problem.
In this election we have seen in Atlanta GA indication that there was a voting machine that was processing votes at a rate faster than the capacity of the vote counting machine. That doesn’t matter, they certified the results anyway? Such certification should not be allowed to happen.
A mandatory audit of the process should be put in place and the laws followed or there is no certification.
The media is playing with the word “evidence” that has plenty meanings, including proof before the court and just a good hint.
Oh, that damn “innocent until proven guilty” thing. Real pain in the ass.
Really, though, the accuser has to provide the evidence that a crime was committed, not the other way around. The accused should present their side, too, but the burden of proof is on the accuser, as it should be.
I get that, but in the case of the election department holding all the evidence and saying that someone else needs to prove there was a problem – that’s a problem. The election department should show proof of chain of custody of voting material, such as ballots and counting machines, etc. They should have a grater burden of proof than simply “we counted the votes and this is the result.”
In AZ, the secretary of state has has a website that says the voting machines are required to be air gapped. There was testimony presented before the state legislature that the machines were not only connected to the internet, but that they were exchanging information with a server that appeared to be in Frankfurt, Germany. Now the county board of supervisors is refusing to provide the voting machines for forensic audit per subpoena from the state legislature.
There are many laws in place that determine how elections are supposed to be handled. Proof is not supplied that the laws were followed.
I know it’s a problem because the bad guys will hide or destroy evidence but there’s a reason for it and a damn good one. I know that doesn’t help with the current situation but I’m sure we can come up with voting systems going forward that can be trusted, such as what Bill suggests: a single election day, paper ballots, absentee voting with only a justifiable reason, no mail-in voting, a lockdown on the voting apparatus tighter than a gnat’s arse, and observers out the wazoo from all sides.
Yes. I would clarify that I am not talking about changing the burden of proof in a court of law, rather changing the election process so that it is clear what happened in the election – locked down tighter than a gnats arse as you put it.
I have been working on outlining what we should have in order to bring about fairness and transparency in our elections, only to find that there are laws on the books that say that is what we should be doing. There seem to be no consequences for violation election law. Hopefully there are and I just haven’t found them.
I agree with Bill, but would add that we need more controls. I think it would be a good idea to put ballots in batches so that they could be tracked but still allow ballot secrecy.
Currently, it seems that once ballots are in the pool of ballots there is no way to identify where they originated. Once you get a ballot in the ballot box, you got away with it.
We should also have mandatory audits.
I would add…
I work in healthcare and we have databases of patient information. We are required to keep a log of who accesses the data. If we don’t it’s a violation of law.
We should have similar proof requirements for elections for what happened in the election.
Yep. See my other comment on this thread.
That’s in criminal law. In civil law there are various cases and the burden of proof may be on different parties. I.e within the warranty period if you report a broken ware it’s assumed to be as such and the seller has to proof that you broke it after the purchase.
In the current case the problem is mixing up the shit — claim of “fraud” belongs to the criminal law and you have to prove malicious intent and many other things. While the election result may be broken due to many other problems like simple counting mistakes.
There is a process of certifying the results. Normally that is supposed to be self-enforcing, i.e. all the involved parties has a say in it. But if you use human trash who just signs off anything, guess what happens. Also there is procedure where you can claim the election and/or the certification process was not run correctly. That would work too, if the judges were not included in the fraud too, along with the organizers from *both* parties as we see.
In the particular case of the election also the congress is supposed to weigh in as they set the rules and supposed to know if they were executed as ordered. They all stood silent, so practically approving everything the other branches did without authority. The laws are not mandate from heaven they only work if the involved people enforce them as written.