November 9, 2006

By PAUL R. LEHTO
Contributing Writer

Jesse James was reportedly asked why he robbed banks and he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Some things are so blindingly obvious, it’s funny to be reminded.

Another obvious association would be elections and political power. Try asking your least favorite politician why he steals elections and, like Jesse James, he’ll say, “Because that’s where the power is.” Right?

When Jesse James robbed a bank, he didn’t get to be bank president or set future vault security policy. But when someone steals an election, they get to preside over the next election and change election security.

The Peter Principle, which says that competent employees are promoted until they’re incompetent, changes in elections to the Jesse James Principle: the most competent election criminals get “promoted,” and then set or influence the rules for the next elections.

Some say that to protect elections, you really have to watch those voters — they might steal a single lousy vote. Yet similar negative attention is rarely lavished on the candidates or the fat-cat political players and the long history of stealing office. Such misplaced scrutiny continues to occur, even while American elections feature huge incentives, like control of the world’s most powerful military and the world’s largest economy, not to mention billions in contracts and millions in political races.

We’ve all heard about people who try to stuff ballot boxes by alerting their friends during informal or online polls. Does this mean that when stakes are much higher people will be much more honest? To protect our elections, everything should be open and above board and no one should enforce a Pollyanna view of human nature.

This is not a partisan issue: if anything, it is an Up/Down issue. The people “down here” have a strong interest in monitoring elections that affect their lives. The people “up there” — the fat cats in power and the media elites who bank millions in ad revenue from those fat cats and use them as “confidential” sources — have a shared interest in covering up the seamier sides of how governance happens. They’ll say anything to maintain “public confidence” in elections, which is to say that they will do anything to maintain public confidence in their personal power.

The only confidence that should be “maintained” is the one that results from proving, through open and public counting of the vote, that the correct result has been achieved. Without this, there’s no basis for confidence in election results that are unverifiable and irreproducible.

We’re now in an age of vote counting done by corporate trade secret software. This makes elections the secret, private property of the corporation chosen by the government officials who “won” the last election. With this secret vote counting, nobody can prove the totals correct, and the public can’t even peek.

Open-source computer code is sometimes offered as protection against corporate manipulations. But Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti’s demonstrations on Diebold voting machines earlier this year indicate that all classes of electronic voting can be hacked without detection. Knowing this, most election watchdogs have concluded that open-source code on touchscreens can't restore “public confidence” because they will still feature invisible ballots filled out for the voter by a computer. Optical scans, while also easily rigged, can work, but only with enough checks and balances — like publicly posted results at each polling place checked against final countywide reports.

Only the public can check and balance elections, because for government, “That’s where the power is.” We need at least the honesty of Jesse James in our elections coverage. Here’s a simple formula for a start: Private Ballots + Public Vote Counting = Verifiable Democracy.

We the People, the rank and file of all political parties, should ask ourselves if we believe that any past generations have sacrificed for a real representative democracy or if any future generations would like one. If so, does the living generation today have the right to let verifiable democracy slip away?