FACTS: Voting In A Nutshell

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Voting was a completely transparent process in America before the Civil War, even though it was restricted to white males.  However, after the Civil War, as the right to vote expanded to African Americans and eventually to women, both federal and state officials began to restrict public access to paper ballots and meaningful oversight of the voting process.

Non-transparent voting began with:

  • absentee voting in the 1870’s
  • secret ballots in the 1880’s
  • voting machines in the 1890’s

Today in America :

  • 50% of all voting is absentee or early
  • 95% of all votes are computer-counted
  • 100% of all ballots are secret and anonymous

In addition, our public voting system has been privatized and outsourced to a handful of domestic, foreign, and multi-national corporations. Just two companies, ES&S and Diebold, started by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich, computer count (using touch screen machines or optical scanners), 80% of all votes.

It is a system impossible to safeguard.  There is little for local poll watchers to watch or federal observers to observe.  There is little to stop corporate insiders from stealing votes nationwide, particularly when computer software must be updated for each new election.  And there is little that can effectively stop election officials from tampering with early voting data or absentee ballots. This all amounts to a big problem for voters.

News media exit polls, government-controlled audits, and post election recounts are neither sufficiently transparent to detect election fraud nor constitutional substitutes for the right to have votes counted properly in the first place.

In contrast, manual counting is the overwhelmingly preferred method of counting votes in countries around the world.