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> 37 Reasons to Ignore Election Fraud and the Ken Starr Rodeo

22 December 2004, 12:29

Sir

The issues you raise are important for the health of democracy not just in America but world wide. Your article is, however, far too long and far too polemical. Personalised abuse about people who do not agree with you adds nothing to the important case you are making. It only helps to cloud the real issues.

The fundamental flaw of many evoting machines, that have been used in America and elsewhere, is their unverifiability. Without the ability to carry out a recount using a separate paper printout, which has been verified by the individual voter, the system is vulnerable to human fallibility or human malevolence or both. This point is largely ignored by proponents of electronic voting. The reason they have ignored it is that they do not seem to have an answer to it. Many of the people who argue in favour of evoting use the tactic of personalised abuse -’bad losers’ or ’conspiracy theorists’ to question the motives of their opponents. People who are raising legitimate questions about the effect that evoting will have on the future health of our democracies should not be drawn into this type of argument. The question that needs to be repeated again and again is a rational one. Why are proponents of evoting so reluctant to allow a voter verified paper ballot to be incorporated into the system?

Your constitution declares all people to be created equal. All people or their representatives should, therefore, have access to the counting of votes that decides who governs. With non verifiable electronic voting only those who manufactured the machines and those who wrote the programmes have access to the count. The rest of us have to take it on trust because we have no way of verifying whether or not the results of the count actually represent the votes cast. With non-verifiable electronic voting a small number of people have it in their power to determine who governs ad infinitum. That is not democracy. It is a recipe for totalianism.

Tony Leavy