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URGENT:
Candidates Advised To 'Citizen Audit' Race Before Conceding
Philadelphia, PA/Nov. 2, 2006 -- Candidates should 'citizen audit' at least some
polls before conceding an election. They should ask voters to go public with
their votes. That's the advice of Lynn Landes, a freelance journalist who
specializes in voting security issues.
"With the election essentially controlled by ES&S and Diebold, the stage is
set for another easy-to-rig election," says Landes. ES&S and Diebold will
count 80% of all votes using proprietary software operating in both optical
scanners and touchscreen machines.
Adding fuel to the fire, touch-screen machines are reportedly flipping votes
from Democratic candidates to Republicans during early voting in Texas,
Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida, according to BradBlog.com. Democrats must be
feeling déjà vu, if not outright panic. Vote flipping has been reported in
several races since the 2000 presidential election. And it always appears to
favor Republicans over Democrats.
A Citizen Audit/Parallel Election is an idea that Landes first proposed in a
January 2005 article. Its main purpose is to collect 'hard' evidence of how
people voted by asking voters to 'go public' with their votes. Voters
fill-out ballots that include their name, address, signature, and for whom
they voted. Those ballots can then be used to verify or challenge election
results. A Citizen Audit adds transparency to the voting process. It stands
in sharp contrast to official audits which recount anonymous ballots, or
traditional exit polls which rely on anonymous respondents.
Landes notes, "Most voters don't realize that before the Civil War, voting was
a completely transparent process. It was only after the Civil War, as the
right to vote expanded to African Americans, that the voting process itself
began to recede from public view and meaningful oversight. It started with
absentee voting in the 1870's, secret ballots in the 1880's, and voting
machines in the 1890's. Today, 30% of all voting is by absentee or early, 95%
of all votes are machine-processed, and 100% of all ballots are secret."
Since Landes wrote her article, activists in Texas, Florida, California,
Georgia, and Ohio have conducted Citizen Audit/Parallel Elections. And many
have noticed interesting results. In a 2005
San Diego
election, activists observed a shift of four percent of the vote from
Democratic candidates to Republicans, when their results were compared to the
official tally. On the basis of that evidence, a recount was ordered.
Democrats have considerable cause to be concerned about their candidates. Last
spring, San Diego Democrats were flabbergasted when Francine Busby conceded
the election to Republican Brian Bilbray before all the ballots were counted.
She left thousands of absentee ballots uncounted, more than enough to win her
the election. Busby should have taken a lesson from Republican candidate Steve
Troxler from North Carolina,
who rounded up affidavits from more than 1,400 voters who said they had voted
for him in precincts where voting machines had lost votes. As a result, his
Democratic opponent conceded.
If candidates don't take steps to ensure the accuracy of election results,
Landes predicts a complete collapse of public confidence in America's voting
system.
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Lynn Landes is the publisher of TheLandesReport and a freelance journalist
who writes about politics, health, and the environment. She's become one of
the nation's leading researchers and analysts on voting integrity issues.
Lynn is featured in the books, Hacked and BlackBoxVoting, and appears in
several documentaries including Got Democracy, The Right To Count, Stealing
America, and her own The Fix Is In.
Contact:
Lynn Landes, publisher
www.TheLandesReport.com
Philadelphia, PA
215-629-3553