Red Shift and the dangers of electronic, absentee, and Internet voting
I subscribe to the email list of BlackBoxVoting, the nonpartisan voting integrity organization whose director, Bev Harris, lives in Renton, WA.
In this article I’ll give a very brief taste of the issues. Visit Black Box Voting and read To The American Media: Time To Face The Reality Of Election Rigging for more information.
The gist of the matter is this:Â our voting systems are vulnerable to all sorts of behind-the-scenes manipulation. Unless all aspects of the voting process — Who can vote? Who does vote? How are the votes counted? — are open to public scrutiny, there is little reason to trust the outcome. Relying on “the experts” to count the votes for us is an invitation to fraud.
The aforementioned article To The American Media: Time To Face The Reality Of Election Rigging (authored by Jonathan D. Simon, Executive Director of Election Defense Fund) says:
Study after study–from Princeton, to Johns Hopkins, to NYU’s Brennan Center, to the California Secretary of State’s office, to the GAO itself ( see http://tinyurl.com/3hz7xj2 ) –conclude that this counting process is obscenely vulnerable to insider manipulation and outsider hacking. So have many studies examining computerized voting abroad–which is why countries such as Germany, Ireland, and Holland have begun turning back to human counted ballots. There is consensus verging on unanimity among the experts.
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There is something known as the “red shift.” It occurs when votecounts are more Republican (or more in favor of whatever candidate or ballot issue the Right supports) than the baselines–including exit polls, tracking polls, noncompetitive elections, and handcounts. Since 2002 the red shift has been pervasive. That’s right: for all intents and purposes, there is no blue shift.
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In the Senate elections (16 out of 18 competitive races red shifted), the Governorship elections (11 out of 13 races red shifted), and in the House (a total red shift of 1.9 million votes).
The mad rush to computerized voting machines introduces risks of hacked votes.
In many states there are little or no protections against third parties submitting fraudulent absentee ballots: anyone with access to the voting list can send in fake absentee ballots.
At each point in the voting and tabulation process, it is important that the chain of custody be observable by the public.
Visit here to see additional short videos on the topic.