How to Secure Our Elections from Russians or Anyone Else, Transparency in Elections

 For questions please email Ralph Lopez: ralphlopez@hotmail.com
  • Are you concerned that our elections can be hacked and that your vote is not being counted correctly?
  • Do you feel that the destiny of our nation could be getting hijacked and not reflect the true will of the people?
  • Are you ready to DO SOMETHING about it?
NEWS: You CAN make a difference! Take these EASY steps to put a law before your state legislature which will make elections transparent and verifiable!

Dear Concerned Citizen,

As the 2020 election approaches, as well as the midterm elections in 2018, we can look at 2016 as a wake-up call to our insecure, hackable elections. No matter which side you are on, one thing has been revealed: Our election systems across the country cannot be trusted to deliver transparent, verifiable results. And election departments are doing everything they can to keep the paper ballots which most jurisdictions use secret.

"Hackers were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in less than two hours at a competition in Las Vegas.  The event exposed glaring deficiencies in the security of U.S. voting infrastructure."

  And last this last June Esquire Magazine said:
 "It increasingly looks like Russian hackers may have affected actual vote totals."

 But there is good news! Election integrity activists have found that many of our elections have been independently verifiable all along, by private citizens, and soon all of them will be.

This is because, as election activists have known for years now, each time a ballot is fed into a modern optical scan vote-counting machine, a digital image of the ballot is taken instantaneously and stored in the machine's memory.

That's right, right now 40% of the voting machines used across the country have this feature which was built in to provide an additional audit trail, one which doesn't require any special handling of paper ballots or election officials to supervise the citizens counting them. By 2020, 85% of voting machines will have this feature. Images of the ballots from each town or city can be posted online, or made available on a DVD, for ordinary citizens to count over and verify the announced results.

Of course, all digital ballots are anonymous, as are all paper ballots.

Why have we not heard of this capability? Well for some reason, it seems many election departments don't want us to know about it, and in fact they have fought citizens in court who have demanded access to the digital ballot images! Some elections departments have even claimed they have the authority to delete the ballot images.

The Digital Ballot Images Are Public Record Act, if enacted in every state, would explicitly declare all digital ballot images to be part of the public record, as they were meant to be. It would require these images to be posted publicly for the independent verification of machine vote-counts by citizens, or made available on a DVD. More about the work which has been done by election integrity activists here: "Voting Machine Digital Ballot Images Could Let Public Recount Elections, But Many Locales Aren't Saving or Sharing This Data" (Alternet).  

We have created four simple steps for you to start the ball rolling in your state.

- Find out who your state representative and state senator is, using the "Find your legislator" link at your state legislature website, all of them linked here: State Legislature websites.

- Report any responses or questions you get back to us, so we can guide you through the legislative process and help answer questions. 

- Use NextDoor.com to enlist the support of people in your neighborhood and ask if they would like to add their signatures to the letter.  Here is a sample introduction: "Sample Introduction to Your Work on Transparency in Elections."

We have the nation's best minds in election integrity available to help you in your efforts. Get everyone you know to follow these steps, and get Transparency in Elections on the front burner.

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