Submitted by Doug Ardt
Can you, or did you verify that your election was free, fair, transparent and conducted with integrity with trusted election management systems? No? Then please read this:
AUDIT USA (Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections) is working to make elections transparent, trackable, and publicly verified. We’ve created this guide to help you verify or challenge the official election results in your race.
Our approach is centered around a security feature present in several of the most commonly used electronic voting systems in the nation. These systems are known as “digital scan election systems,” and they’re used to count votes on paper ballots.
Digital scan systems are an update to the old technology known as “optical scan,” although many people confuse the two. Digital scan systems are in use in at least one location in nearly every state, and are used statewide in several states. If they’re used in the state where your campaign or issue was on the ballot, you may be able to conduct your own “Ballot Image Audit” to check whether the machine-generated vote totals are accurate.
If the computers used to count our votes were secure and completely trustworthy, there would be no need for this system of checking the vote counts. But the computers are far, far from secure or trustworthy. They nearly all run on proprietary software that election officials are not permitted even to examine. They have repeatedly proven to be vulnerable to hacking and rigging. And they’ve been shown to be designed to conduct “weighted” elections, where some votes are counted as greater than one and others as less than one whole vote. [11]
Election officials and others may tell you that they know their machines are counting properly because “logic and accuracy” testing has been performed prior to the elections. But logic and accuracy testing has a fatal flaw: computers can be programmed to perform one way during the test, and a totally different way in a real election. The Volkswagen emissions scandal provides a real world parallel: Over half a million diesel-powered cars had defeat devices installed that caused the emissions controls to turn on when the cars were being tested, and turn off when the vehicles were on the road.
Tragically, we cannot trust the official vote tabulation systems in use across the country to count our votes accurately. That’s why AUDIT USA and others have developed methods and tools to use to check official vote counts. For more information, WATCH HERE and AND HERE. ★ ★ ★ ★
