VotingSecurity

Protocol For Honest Elections - America’s Nontransparent Voting System Is ‘De Facto’ Fraud

By Lynn Landes, Publisher

Philadelphia, PA / lynnlandes@gmail.com / 714-204-2690

http://www.thelandesreport.com/ProtocolForHonestElections.htm
http://www.thelandesreport.com/VotingSecurity.htm

January 12, 2021

The 2020 election was a ‘hot mess’ by any standard. It was an ‘anything goes’ affair where many Americans could vote at almost any time, anyhow, and anywhere… completely eliminating meaningful transparency and effective oversight of the voting process. 

Democracy demands transparency, not trust. Yet, America’s voting system has become completely nontransparent, a ‘de facto’ fraud, as critical parts of the process are completely unobservable, particularly voting machines, early voting, and mail-in voting. 

One would think that our nontransparent voting process would be easily recognized as fraudulent and therefore ‘unconstitutional’ by our government authorities, particularly since all of our political parties have complained about it over the years - Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Greens, and the non-affiliated. But such is not the case.

For decades The Supreme Court, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), U.S. Congress, and most state legislatures have taken a pass on nontransparency in our voting process, or made it worse. Consequently, we are experiencing a well-earned catastrophic collapse in public support of our election process, legal system, and law enforcement agencies, by a significant percentage of the American electorate.  

For what good is the right to vote if we can’t prove who won or lost, if the voters don’t even have to show up to prove that they are alive let alone residents or citizens, if the votes can be easily miscounted either by accident or design, and our government won’t do anything about it?

As a nation we should be focused on this fundamental failure in our voting process in relationship to the mass demonstration and the storming of the Capitol building on January 6, and not just the day itself. For we cannot call our nation a democracy when the voting process is unobservable and the results unverifiable.

Our political leaders cannot prove their own legitimacy under these circumstances.

What is the protocol for a transparent and honest election? Up-to-date registration rolls, qualified voters with a state photo ID, voting on paper ballots with hand counts at the local polls on Election Day under the observant eyes of poll watchers. Anything less and we have a voting process based on faith, not fact.

For those who cannot make it to the polls on Election Day, designated teams of poll workers together with poll watchers can visit places such as nursing homes on Election Day in order to conduct onsite voting and deliver the ballots to the local polling station to be counted on that same day, thereby maintaining transparency and chain-of-custody requirements.  Similarly, polls could be set up at embassies, consulates, and military bases for citizens living overseas. And for those who don’t believe we can get enough people to count ballots, election officials have every right to draft citizens into service, as is done with jury duty. 

Hand counting isn’t rocket science. Many, if not most nations ‘hand count’ paper ballots for their elections. Its integrity is in its simplicity.

Election Day should be treated as a sacred day, not a trip to the convenience store. Our Founders Fathers in their wisdom selected one day when all the drama of casting and counting the ballots would play out, and we would collectively select our political leaders. They designated the first Tuesday of November to choose our President and enshrined it in Article Two, Section 1, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution. 

In honor of our Founding Fathers, and for our own sake, we must end the chaos and confusion of ill-conceived conveniences, and return transparency to our voting process… and legitimacy to our elected leaders.  Democracy demands it.

(End)

MORE ANALYSIS:
 

It has been 20 years since the Bush v Gore presidential debacle in 2000, when Democrat Vice President Al Gore candidate lost his race for the presidency via The Supreme Court. Half the nation believed, with good reason, that the election had been stolen.  On George H.W. Bush’s Inauguration Day, this author marched on Washington DC with hundreds of thousands of other protestors who rejected the election results from an unreliable voting process.  But nothing improved and instead got worse.

And now the chicken has come home to roost, the shoe is well and truly on the other foot for the GOP.  Once again many American voters do not trust the election results. And once again, and after 20 years of reporting and researching our failed voting system, this author marched on Washington DC in protest.

We’ve got a constitutional crisis. But it didn’t happen overnight or even in the past 20 years. It was over a century in the making.

For the past 160 years Americans have systematically surrendered the ‘transparency and integrity’ of our voting process, for the ‘ease and convenience’ of voting by absentee, secret ballot, machine, computer, early, mail-in, harvest, and drop box.  The predictable result?  We invited wholesale and systemic fraud into our voting process. Was that an unintended consequence of making voting more accessible, or a calculated ploy by those who wanted to control election results?  You decide.

During the Civil War in the 1860’s, at the very moment freedom for African Americans was being fought, ‘absentee ballots’ were made available to soldiers – destroying transparency in the election process and breaking the chain of custody requirements for ballots, making them completely vulnerable to manipulation and fraud. 

However, it was the introduction of the ‘secret ballot’ in the 1880’s that delivered the single most destructive blow to transparent and honest elections. Many Americans are unaware that ‘open voting’ was the norm before then. Everyone knew for whom you voted. Elections were completely open and transparent.  With the advent of the secret ballot, although it offered some protection from harassment, intimidation, and vote selling, it also made ballots anonymous and untraceable. Consequently, ‘secret ballots’ could be easily destroyed, replaced, or miscounted. 

By the 1890’s ‘lever voting machines’ became popular in the big cities, completely severing the bond between the voters and their paper ballots.  Taken together, all three of these ‘conveniences’ - secret ballots, absentee ballots, and lever voting machines - allowed massive vote fraud to take place with little likelihood of detection. 

Another complication to voting integrity was introduced in 1936 with the roll-out of private polls, such as The Gallup Organization.  Polls were purportedly used to ‘reflect’ public opinion, however polls could also be used to ‘shape’ public opinion and, more importantly, to provide cover or legitimacy for rigged election results.

With the advent of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which again expanded the voting franchise for African Americans and other minorities, two more giant steps were taken toward complete nontransparency in the voting process.  Computerized ‘ballot scanners’ owned by private companies were purchased by state election officials.  At that same time, ‘exit polls’ conducted by private companies and based on anonymous sources were introduced by the major television news networks and the Associated Press. 

Fundamentally, secret exit polls were used to verify the results of a secret voting system that was based on secret ballots. We privatized our public voting process, put it behind a high tech wall, ‘verified’ the results using private exit polls, and no one was the wiser.  With respect to expanded voting rights - what one hand gave, the other took away.  And that’s not something they teach in political science class, nor is it reported by the mainstream news media. The idea that anyone can reliably audit or verify election results under these circumstances is without foundation and completely ludicrous.

For the past several decades, a multitude of activists, lawyers, and their clients have waged war on election fraud.  There is substantial case law on the ‘qualified’ voters’ right to vote and to have their votes counted properly: Allen v. Board of Elections (1969), Reynolds v Sims(1964), and Wesberry v. Sanders(1964).  Nonetheless, our nontransparent voting processes, that allowed for rampant hard-to-detect vote fraud, continued to prevail. 

There is nothing more abhorrent to voting transparency than the use of voting machines, whether mechanical or electronic. How does a machine vote constitute a legal vote?  Or is it just circumstantial evidence of a vote produced by a machine that may or may not have been cast by a voter?  In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court said that a legal vote is "one in which there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter”.  Yet, how can voting machines do that? Voting machines reflect the action of the machine first, and the intent of the voter... maybe. 

Congress passed laws (U.S. Code 42, Sec 1973i) prohibiting “Failure or refusal to permit casting or tabulation of vote”, including “falsification or concealment of material facts” – but to what end? A voting machine is ‘concealment’ on its face. There is nothing to observe. Equally ‘concealing’ are other voter ‘conveniences’, such as early, mail-in, and drop box voting.  All this makes moot the role of the poll watcher or the DOJ’s "Federal Observers" for elections, for there is nothing meaningful for them to observe.

For those who believe that voting machines which produce a paper ballot copy is sufficient protection against computer rigging or hacking, such is not the case. Many state laws will only recount ballots by hand if the election is close. So, all a computer technician from the inside (or an outside hacker) has to do is rig the election by a lot. And audits of election results are often not sufficient to uncover vote manipulation.  But vote fraud is not just about nontransparent machines and processes, it’s about the coalition who support it.

Votescam, The Stealing of America, by the Collier brothers (1992) was the seminal book of our time in which the authors first described in detail the collaboration between voting machine companies, pre-election and exit pollsters, and the news networks, together with the Deep State, including the FBI, DOJ, CIA, political party leaders from both sides, and assorted others. Since at least 1964, many believe that this group has conspired to decide who wins or loses elections in America and in other nations around the world. And although many people read the book (and other books and articles on this subject), personally witnessed vote fraud and voting machine irregularities, and complained to federal and state authorities about it, the voting process continued to worsen. 

In the 2020 election, the Trump campaign claimed victim of a planned, massive vote fraud campaign, that combined ‘old school’ election fraud with high tech computer vote rigging, particularly in the swing states.  The evidence supports many of their assertions – most of which mirror Democrat and other parties’ complaints from this and previous elections. Yet, once again, the DOJ refused to seriously investigate.

So this is not a one party problem, nor that American elections are ‘at risk’ of vote fraud, and that we need to build ‘public confidence’.  But rather, our elections are well and truly broken, as our top federal law enforcement agency stands on the sidelines. 

As a record number of private lawsuits contesting the election results in the 2020 election have been filed, the hope is that they will finally bring forth some  necessary reforms of our voting process, if we are to hold onto the faintest claim of calling ourselves a democracy.  Yet, as of this writing, the Supreme Court has decided to ignore this clear constitutional crisis, and the future does not look hopeful.

And that raises the all-important question: If political leaders can get into office using ‘de facto’ fraudulent nontransparent methods, how can we ever remove them from office if the courts and law enforcement are going to do nothing?  Americans have arrived at a place where, quite literally, we cannot know who truly won any race for political office and have no clear means by which they can be removed. 

What can be done? I know this sounds trite, but our only peaceful option is to organize our communities and claw our way back to transparent elections. We must haunt the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and town councils until they pass laws that support protocols for honest and transparent elections. But, we can do more.

• CONGRESS & STATE LEGISLATURES can pass the "Protocol for Honest Elections". Although it would be difficult to convince the public that the "secret ballot" is a very bad idea, everything else on the list will get wide public support.

• COUNTY COMMISSIONERS run the elections and are in the best position to stop the unconstitutional use of nontransparent voting systems (computers, mail-in, drop box, etc.).

• STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL & CANDIDATES can sue in court to stop the use of nontransparent voting systems, as there is no effective way to observe the voting process.

• CANDIDATES SHOULD NEVER CONCEDE!  No candidate should ever concede an election, under the circumstances of nontransparent elections.

We can go on the offensive and ‘go public’ with our votes. Sign up and be counted, as did the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Conduct ‘Citizen Audits’ where people sign a petition of sorts, indicating who they are and who they voted for. Citizen Audits have been conducted over the years, but it’s time to ‘go viral’. They can be conducted online or on paper. They would be particularly easy to conduct in small towns, who can ‘lead by example’ for larger municipalities.  We need to stop hiding behind the illusion of safety that the ‘secret ballot’ does not provide.

Even if people are unwilling to vote openly, then at the very least the voting process needs to be as transparent as possible – meaning that we vote on Election Day only at our local poll with our state photo IDs, using only paper ballots and hand counts, under the unobstructed view of poll watchers, ensuring that only those qualified to vote are allowed to vote, and that their votes are counted properly… for free and fair elections for candidates and voters alike.