http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_nancy_to_080111_we_need_to_eliminate.htmIt's pretty easy to see what happened in New Hampshire: We had an election for which 81% of our ballots were counted in secret by a private corporation, and this resulted in an outcome that is called into question. That's what happened. No recount is going to change this. What will change this is to get rid of corporate controlled secret vote counting in our elections. New Hampshire holds exemplary elections in 45% of our polling places; elections where our paper ballots are counted by hand by our neighbors in full public view with 100% citizen oversight and checks and balances. These hand count elections, of which New Hampshire is the “hands down” expert, provide the only method known today that can guarantee open and honest elections. These are elections where every ballot, every vote, every mark made by the voter, is observed and tallied in full public view with multiple sets of eyes watching and checking and balancing each count.
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Does this logic hold up? Will a recount rectify the problem before us? I say no. The problem before us is that we have outsourced the most precious thing in our democracy: the counting of our votes. And in New Hampshire, we have outsourced more than 80% of our votes to a private corporation counting those votes in secret, and, as it turns out, that private corporation has a convicted drug trafficker on its executive team to boot. A recount does not solve this problem.
Proponents and apologists of the privatized and computerized corporate elections often justify computerized elections saying how “easy” it is to corrupt a hand count election. They say, “But you can always swap out the ballots to get the count you want!” And they are 100% correct about this. But only when there is no citizen oversight. And the only time this happens in a hand count election is in a recount.
In the Election Night count, the first count, the count that matters, all hand count elections have complete citizen oversight as a check against the kind of corrupt outcome you would find in a ballot swapping affair. But in a recount, there is absolutely no citizen oversight for the entire time between Election Night and the recount itself. If we are going to assume the possibility that some nefarious super spy has bothered to rig a New Hampshire election, wouldn’t we assume they have also taken into account our liberal recount laws? Wouldn’t we assume they might have a Plan B to ensure a recount validates their nefarious doings? Is it at all logical that evildoers who find their way into our machine counts might not also find a way into our recounts?
Open and honest elections require citizen oversight. This is a simple thing to accomplish in a hand count Election Night count. But in a recount it is impossible. In a recount, citizens have no control over the ballot chain of custody. Unless citizens have stood guard over every ballot box from the moment that it was sealed and signed by our local election officials, the recount provides no more assurance than the machine counts. A recount of a secret computerized vote count is just another weak link in the chain of publicly observable ballot custody required for honest and open elections.
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