PA Legislators Call for Election Audit
Earlier this week a delegation of Pennsylvania legislators visited the Arizona audit, which they observed and where they obtained briefings by the auditors and some of their peers among Arizona legislators. Today, those Pennsylvania legislators called for an audit of their own.
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12 comments:
If the audit helps in future elections, well and good. But even though they can show that Biden basically stole the election, there's no way Trump would be reinstated.
I’m well aware of that, but the truth coming out is vital. The people need to know what happened, if only to fix it for the future.
Absolutely, expose the truth. I'm not sanguine that enough fraud, theft, and/or fakery occurred to swing the election, but if the facts surrounding the fraud, theft, and/or fakery aren't exposed, it'll only get worse.
Too, many of the changes done in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were blatantly illegal, and those failures badly want correction.
Eric Hines
I'm becoming convinced that a lot of people won't trust the ballot box again unless a LOT of auditing and cleaning-up is done between now and 2022's elections. And that's if H.B.1/ S.B. 1 don't become federal law. If they do, and/or if changes are not made to the electronic voting and absentee voting systems in several states, I fear it will get uglier and uglier.
LittleRed1
I propose those of us concerned with the oddities of the 2020 election reject the terminology of the media about "fraud", and even "voters". Our concern is BALLOT management.
Even when every voter is properly registered in one place, presents valid ID and matches signatures and even paints his finger purple, then casts a ballot one time on behalf of him/her self without the supervision influence or direction of some party observer or union steward or employer or church deacon ... the election remains vulnerable.
Ballots go missing. Ballot BOXES go missing. Tally machines fail to read the ballot. Tally machines themselves or their memory chips or printed tabulation tapes or other records may go missing. Or folds, dimpled chads, and smudges may be mis-read. A legitimate ballot may be fed into tally machines multiple times. Or a legitimate ballot may be discarded as "spoiled". The arrival time of a ballot at a counting place may be unduly variable. A legitimate voter may have been mistakenly issued a incorrect ballot -- unmatched to the registered address. There are dozens of documented problems with elections that have NOTHING TO DO with "fraud" or suppression of undesired voters or, necessarily, evil intent. But careless design and implementation of balloting systems can and have degraded our trust in elections.
I appreciate nuanced discussions of terminology and other matters. As I understand the current process in Georgia, though, a 'voter' organization can simply walk in with a bunch of voter registration forms they claim pertain to real people who never have to show up or produce ID; and then they are given that many ballots, which they take away allegedly to 'bring to these voters'; and then they drop off the completed ballots, with no one ever meeting the alleged voter.
How do I know these supposed voters even exist? Why should I assume that they do?
I am completely ignorant of the Georgia voter/balloting process described.
If that is their process, the state has surrendered control of the ballots to non-state agents -- on both ends of their process.
I would agree that voters need to exist. That's among the tasks the registration process is intended to accomplish. Embracing our shared affection for accurate terminology, we might insist that reforming registration processes is necessary and not at all suppressive. Although the media attacks on Kris Kolbach (do I have the name right) on the registration /enrollment record review indicate deliberate and on-going confusion of that fact.
The concern needs to be wholly forward-looking, the intent needs to be 100% laser-focused on simplifying and improving the administration of ballots and tallying results, while ensuring identity protocols and chain of custody to a high standard.
Any suggestions or references to past fraud should be stepped on with both feet from a height no less than 10 ft. The only acceptable reference is Election Integrity, because nobody can nuance that identifier into disputed terms or sidetrack that into a different straw-man discussion. Discussions of voter rolls and voter ID issues should be left to the legislators once they've been made painfully aware of how pissed off voters from both parties are on this recent past debacle. 2022 should be treated as a test run to get out the kinks.
Any suggestions or references to past fraud should be stepped on with both feet from a height no less than 10 ft.
While I wholly agree that looking for "Fraud" is counter-productive, I quibble with the idea that we can't examine our history for problems to prevent. I say we HAVE to do that review.
Once upon a time we were concerned that a mine owner or mill owner would march his laborers to the polls, inspect each ballot from each worker to ensure "correct" choices, then submit the whole batch. Shortly after we became concerned that labor steward would do the same thing for/to their laboring union members. Deacons tried to ensure the whole congregation voted as a bloc for "blue laws". Suffragettes worried husbands would bully their newly-voting wives. We now almost always have "booths" and other provisions made at polling places to ensure secrecy. We now even prevent use of cell phones, at the polling place, to prevent an individual from taking instruction from some coercive authority on how to vote. We have to be aware of the historic roots of these modern rules in order to discuss innovations like mass mailing of ballots. How do advocates of universal mail "voting" propose to protect women voters from abusive male partners who might steal women's ballot, representing their political voice and choice? Doesn't seem like a progressive move to me -- but we should discuss it.
It's also the case that all the -- sometimes comical -- rituals of the polling place represent compromise of legislation. Representatives of mine-owners and labor stewards compromise; bigots and race hustlers compromise; techies and luddites compromise. When an unaccountable administrator waives old rules or imposes new rules during the middle of a campaign, it's not only appropriate but necessary to examine what protections were lost and advantages gained -- and by whom.
Yeah, the secret ballot was the answer to all that corporate power-grabbing over the votes of laborers (or, in an agricultural setting, the big man / plantation owner exerting similar influence). But the secret ballot enables other forms of cheating that weren't possible when votes were taken publicly in a town meeting, say.
In-person voting eliminates a lot of the room for cheating: if you actually have to show up with 1,000 people who stand in line to get 1,000 votes, you can't cheat nearly as much as if you can just drop of cases of ballots without needing to produce the 1,000 people. In-person voting with voter ID really makes it hard, though you can still register illegal aliens who were able to obtain ID somehow (several states have made it fairly easy to obtain a drivers' license without documents for citizenship). In-person voting with voter ID where the ID notes whether or not you are a citizen, with the citizenship documents kept on file (as with the Real IDs), that would be pretty hard to cheat. You'd have to have a fake ID production business as well as 1,000 people willing to tramp from one voting station to another.
Of course, if you have two weeks of early voting, you could still do some tramping from one station to another. So limiting early voting sometimes gets mentioned as an idea.
Politicians always seem to suggest that election security efforts are inherently voter suppression efforts, but that seems wrong to me. A person's vote is suppressed if they can't vote, but also (and just as effectively) if you can cast a fake vote that effectively cancels theirs out. If you can cast two such votes, you're suppressing their voice twice as effectively. Etc.
So it should be possible to run both things on the same track: making sure that all and only citizens are registered; that the votes of the citizens are cast, and counted, fairly and without fraud.
Voter registration is an under-examined and under-appreciated process.
It's almost amusing to hear some people declare that all registration issues can be identified and resolved in a minute, (without significant error or fraud) on the spot, with minimal documentation, while attempting to accomplish some OTHER task like pass a driving competency test or, even, vote. We historically have separated registration from ballot management -- for weeks, in some places -- for good reasons. Chesterson's Fence, yes? Those who would clear those hurdles away ought to be able to explain how barriers came to be erected in the first place, and why these structures are no longer needed.
I propose those of us concerned with the oddities of the 2020 election reject the terminology of the media about "fraud", and even "voters". Our concern is BALLOT management.
I remain concerned with the fraud involved in "ballot management." What Mr Melcher describes in his comments are fraud, in part; incompetence, in part; simple (if occasionally serious) error, in part. We need to be concerned about all three, and the only way to correct each of them, or at least seriously mitigate each of them, is to properly separate them out and treat them separately.
It's the speech police (not including Mr Melcher) who need to be stepped on with both feet from a height no less than 10 ft.
Eric Hines
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