I’m not from Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, or Nevada. However, I’m sick of feeling helpless while watching those with sacred duties of trust either be passive, lukewarm, or appearing to be complicit in the subversion of the American Experiment. I don’t like how the choices being given to Georgians appears to be, one, hope that the leaders or judges do right be the people to audit things, two, turn out like mad for the Senate runoff elections and somehow hope that it will be enough to overcome possible cheating, or, three, boycott the elections. If I were a Georgian I would hate those choices. They all suck in their own special way.
So, here is a hair-brained idea. Audit the elections ourselves.
One of the things that this sort of apparent cheating depends on is the inability of people at large to know what the tally should look like, some plausibility that enough of their neighbors real did vote that way, or at least a fig leaf for those that like the outcome to hide behind. That is dependent on having a secret vote(a good thing; lists or reprisal for a vote would be awful). What if we bypass the secret vote, at least in part? What if we could poll ourselves after a vote, in such a way as to put the lie to the cheating? Think of it like exit polling data, but where you get a much larger chunk of the populace? You could even do it for the presidential election that just happened. Would it be possible to get every Republican that voted(and Dems if they are willing), to record themselves on video attesting to how they voted, name, address, fingerprint, and whatever else? You could even get people to sign an affidavit. Could you somehow keep that secret but valid? Could you obscure their face and voice, but still have witnesses. Could you encrypt that raw data, so that it could be audited by select individuals to verify that obscured version is representative of the raw data? Could you do that over a whole county, or more? Even if you couldn’t keep it secret, would it be worth it? Could you get a large portion of Georgia to do that?
I’m a technical guy, and I can tell you that I’m quite convinced that the technological portion of this is quite feasible. The logistics would be tough, but do-able. It would take money, but not a ridiculous amount. Would people be willing to do it? Would it actually do what I’m hoping it to do; to be a second audit path for either the most recent election, or the future runoff? If not a full statewide audit, could it work at a smaller level, such as one county, to demonstrate irregularities? Am I being top optimistic, and there would be way too many people willing to lie on camera, or on an affidavit to the point of making the exercise moot? Are there any precaution or safeties that could be added to mitigate those problems?
If you can’t tell, this is me thinking out loud, with surprisingly little effort to edit as I go. A crazy idea just struck me, and I would rather throw it out here, that just let it go.
4 replies on “The Georgia Election Self Audit”
Letting the state of Georgia audit themselves to help verify the election results makes as much sense as letting Congress give themselves a pay raise.With all of the scrutiny that will happen in the Senate run-offs in Jan., if the Dems. are successful in taking those seats away from us, fairly or by cheating, then we will never win another election. The republican party is being led by cowards and traitors that care about themselves more than the people who elected them. I have divorced myself from the republican party, and will forever be only a conservative.
The problem you face is the same as for the standard election – it will become corrupted unless the process limits the opportunity for such corruption.
Sadly, it seems that the politicians want to process to be vulnerable to fraud.
As a techy myself, i could build a process, with paper ballots and technological tracking and verification of each and every step, but if there is no political will to implement such a robust system, you fall at the first hurdle.
I suggest the best course of action is to support only those politicians who will implement a robust voting process – and stay on their case, create a blog on the subject and document everything ‘election security’ related in your area.
That said, when people outside your constituency can spend millions supporting their preferred candidates in your election, when the media are political activists and when big-tech is tipping the scales …. there are many steps to take before elections become free and fair.
I think I understand what you are saying, and I completely agree that there are some pretty easy ways to make elections more secure than this mess. And based on my experience in the broader IT field, no sane person would design systems like Dominion has if they had any care for security, which lends to the argument of it being intentional on their part. Also, any security system can be compromised, and this election is a good example. “There have to be observers/challengers” Just don’t let them in. Block view, ignore all the rules. This depends on the pause that most decent people will take before immediately assuming evil doing, and the complicity of other officials. I think most Americans will be much less naive regarding elections now, and “well, that’s the way it is” sorts of responses will not fly. On the upside, that is going to help. The downside is that it does let them get one big con off, which they appear to have tried this time.
However, with my rambling post I wasn’t actually trying to suggest this as an in-parallel system to the elections going forward; Doing double the work for no reason doesn’t at all guarantee to make things any better. I was more trying to think of ways to audit the actual election, this one time, since expecting the state legislature to make change before the runoff is very unrealistic. If we take that as a given, is there some way for the citizens to audit the election on their own, without depending on the local politicians finding their brass. Something in the spirit of “stand and be counted”, literally, if possible. And, of possible, do some quality checking on this last election, enough to convince normal folk. Though, if the video evidence that has come out doesn’t concern people, then it is probably an exercise in futility.
Thanks for the reply. I wasn’t expecting too much out of a late-night random idea.
Thanks for the reply, I believe I better understand your point now.
I agree that auditing is essential. Any system I designed would have a full audit trail and any scans (subject to privacy concerns) would be available in real time. That way, progress can be tracked, image recognition software can be used to identify possibly duplicate ballots and signature verification by election staff can be done digitally, where they are offered incorrect signatures occasionally to ensure they are rejecting incorrect signatures.