On today's edition of "Corporations and Democracy" radio, hosts Annie Esposito and Steve Scalmanini explore "Will New Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett Become the Most Radical Right-Wing Member of the Supreme Court" with guest Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and former president of the National Lawyers Guild.

In the second half of the program, Annie and Steve welcome Harvey Wasserman, a long-time writer and radio host, for a take on "The Integrity of the Presidential Election."

"Corporations and Democracy" airs from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. [Pacific Time] on Mendocino and Ukiah public radio stations KZYX & Z, 90.7, 91.5, and 88.3 FM, or you can listen live at the station website, www.kzyx.org. 

It's no secret that our elections are at risk from undetectable disruption and manipulation by sources  in the US or elsewhere, a risk compounded by public officials and legislators who deny this problem, and by electronic voting systems vendors who ignore or downplay the evidence and obvious potential for tampering. 

Now, just in time for the mid-term elections, there is legislation that will help reform this situation—the Secure Elections Act (SEA) has been introduced. 

On August 22, the Senate Rules Committee will start deliberations on this important bill. The security of our elections demands that it not be weakened. 

Please call or write your Senators and state election officials and demand they protect the Secure Election Act’s strong language supporting manual post-election audits of voter-verified paper ballots.

If you need to get up to speed on this issue fast, there is no better resource than our Fall 2016 issue of Justice Rising on “The People's Vote Must Count: Reclaim Elections, Restore Voting Rights, Protect Our Ballots.” Articles focus on hackable voting machines and the corporate pedigree of electronic voting machine vendors, along with a “how to “ for a successful local campaign for hand-counted paper ballots. Other topics covered include gerrymandering and voter suppression. You can read it online here, as well as download pdfs of individual articles. 
For print copies, please contact us via email or call us at 978-333-7971. 

This sample letter to election officials and  this letter to Congress signed by experts on election security will also provide background for your call. 

The situation is critical as we go into the mid-terms elections. Meanwhile, more than 40 states use electronic voting systems more than 10 years old, and  28 states report that a majority of the machines they use need updates.

Additionally, computer scientists have detailed vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems while cyberattacks originating from both within and from outside the US have been documented. 

Too much of our election security debate has focused on the non-problem of unenrolled or ineligible voters casting ballots - the pet cause of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Trump to set up a Congressional Voter Fraud Commission that has now been completely discredited.  

The real threat lies in unsecure systems, hidden lines of code in electronic voting and 
voting scanning machines, and the complacency of elected officials. We urge you to join with us and our colleagues at the National Election Defense Coalition and speak up for the Secure Elections Act (SEA) and REAL election security.​

In this piece on VotingJustice.us's recount updates, Jill Stein, the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate, provides an excellent report on program made toward voting integrity, right to vote, elections we can trust, and the problems remaining. 

"Protecting our voting system from cyber-threats is critical in an age when everything from hospitals to nuclear power plants are being hacked," Stein writes. "But cybersecurity and an accurate vote count are just the tip of the iceberg for safeguarding our votes, when the US election system is largely designed to protect the power of the economic and political elite."

The 2016 recount effort mobilized by the Stein campaign again focused attention on widespread problems with US elections, from outdated and vulnerable election equipment to systemic obstacles to voting, most consistently directed at people of color, and proposes a to-do list to strengthen election security, voter rights, and amplify the political influence of real people over corporations (or what is commonly referred to as "democracy"). There are lots of links to different issue-oriented democracy movement organizations, including Alliance for Democracy, so you can follow the latest on the work that interests you. 

Stein also repeats the call for a bipartisan emergency commission for election protection and voting justice--certainly a good idea at the state level, where they are likely to be more responsive to the grassroots and where voter groups can use them as a way to get their findings and demands out in front of both legislators and local media.

The $1.3 trillion spending bill that Congress passed in late March includes $380 million in federal funding for states to spend on verifiable paper balloting, post-election audits, and cyberdefense under the 2002 Help America vote Act. The appropriation was made at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Congress supported this funding over concern about Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, specifically attempts uncovered to target voting-related digital systems in 21 states, and the desire to prevent Russian meddling in the 2018 mid-term and 2020 elections. 

But they're catching up to what we already know: years of evidence point to the ease with which electronic voting machines are easy targets for hackers. (), in particular direct recording electronic machines (DREs) and machines that scan to record hand-marked paper ballots. Whether these machines are maliciously or accidently mis-programmed, the errors mount up and elections stolen.

In his article “So Your State Has Come Into Some Election Security Money. Now What?” Dave Nyczepir concludes that some states will have to tread water until the 2020 election as far as purchasing secure voting machines, but where there are voter-marked paper ballots there’s hope.

You can also read “Securing Threats to Election Systems” by Duncan Buell who researches electronic voting systems and AfD Council Member Ethan Scarl's article, “Impossible-Secure Computer Voting.” The “People's Vote Must Count” issue of Justice Rising features a wide range of articles on voting rights, electronic voting, and what we must do to ensure counts are accurate.

Call your state and federal legislators and demand funding for an accurate, comprehensive 2020 census and the removal of the citizenship question.

Last December, the Department of Justice requested addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Census. They claimed this data was needed to make sure all voting-age citizens are counted under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yet this question hasn’t been asked since 1950—five years before the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s announcement that the citizenship question would be included lead to a storm of protests and lawsuits by states, cities, and citizen groups. Despite reassurances that people who don't answer the citizenship question will still be counted, the question's inclusion, plus the threat of fines for returning false or incomplete forms, will doubtlessly discourage migrants from responding. In turn this undermines the government’s constitutional responsibility to count every person every 10 years.

In a recent two-hour hearing, legislators emphasized migrants' legitimate fears of deportation could lead to a serious undercount. Other problems with the census include lack of permanent leadership at the Census Bureau and of funding shortfalls, which could also impact a reliable census.

Why do we need an accurate count? Redistricting, based on total resident population, occurs after every census, so it’s important to have accurate numbers of citizens and non-citizens alike. Combine an inaccurate count with gerrymandering and you can deliver a district to one or another major party. Plus, the census determines state government share of federal dollars for vital programs including healthcare, housing, and emergency planning and relief.

Please call your Representatives and Senators to ask that the 2020 Census be fully funded and that the citizenship question be dropped. You can find contact information for the House here and the Senate here.

VoterGA reports that the Georgia Senate has taken its first major step toward voter-marked paper ballots, with its Ethics Committee voting to abandon both unverifiable electronic voting and “new wave” technology that counts votes in computer-generated barcodes rather than human-readable marks. The committee's vote, which came during a hearing on Senate Bill SB403, was unanimous. 

"Some ballot marking devices employ a touchscreen to create bar coded selections of voter choices that are interpreted internally by a scanner and accumulated when the votes are cast. The unverifiable bar code technology, promoted by certain vendors and the office of the Secretary of State, enables a 'new wave' of hacking possibilities and significant potential for undetectable errors," writes VoterGA in this press release. 

Possible cyberattacks on state voting databases are not the only problem with US electronic voting. As this article notes, and as a 2015  edition of Corporations and Democracy noted, much of our nation's electronic voting equipment is too old to be consistently reliable. According to the story: 

A ProPublica analysis of voting machines found that over two-thirds of counties in America used machines for the 2016 election that are over a decade old. In most jurisdictions, the same equipment will be used in the 2018 election. In a recent nationwide survey by the Brennan Center for Justice, election officials in 33 states reported needing to replace their voting equipment by 2020. Officials complain the machines are difficult to maintain and susceptible to crashes and failure, problems that lead to long lines and other impediments in voting and, they fear, a sense among voters that the system itself is untrustworthy.
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The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was a source of state funding after its passage in 2002, with $3.6 billion given to states and territories to upgrade systems and administration. But since then, there has been no federal level financial support for states to maintain or replace voting machines, and few states still have unspent HAVA funds. (HAVA had its issues, too--its primary author, Rep. Bob Ney, resigned after pleading guilty to conspiracy and making false statements in relation to the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff, whose lobbying clients included touch-screen voting manufacturer Diebold, a big beneficiary of HAVA procurement regulations).

It's clear that paperless electronic voting machines have to go. Even in the absence of any kind of pre-election manipulation, these machines aren't foolproof, and have been documented to occasionally "flip" votes. Without a backup paper trail, the real results, in a recount, are anyone's guess.

Beyond that, there are two ways to deal with obsolescence of our electronic voting machines. First, we could upgrade old systems with new ones, insisting that new machines also allow for easy, efficient paper-based recounts. But even with improved security and audits, remember that the "hack-proof" voting machine is a myth.

But the second is to go back to hand-counted paper ballots. There are advantages and disadvantages to a purely paper system. Counting ballots is time-consuming, especially when states or cities also use a ranked-choice system. It's debatable whether voters would also step up as volunteer ballot-counters. Ballot-box stuffing is a possibility as well--the results are only going to be as valid as the counters are honest. However, as electronic voting expert Jonathan Simon has noted, ballot counting could bring volunteers from different parties together in support of a basic exercise of democracy, reducing partisanship and increasing local cooperation. The time it took to count and verify the results would defuse the "Super Bowl-style" hype around elections. If it took a day or two to learn who was the next mayor, governor, or president, so be it--it's an important decision that we'll be living with for a while.

The Alliance's Peoples Vote Must Count project is a three-step program to institute hand-counted paper ballots, beginning with a look into election hacking, followed by studying how your elections are conducted, and then introducing a hand-counted-paper-ballot initiative to either replace your current system or provide a robust audit of results, depending on local needs. You can find out more here, and read more about election protection and voter rights in this issue of Justice Rising.