Beth Clarkson gets the usual treatment in her testimony October 27
Beth Clarkson on the website that covers her work on getting verification of the vote <showmethevotes.org>, explains what happened when she testified to a legislative body about her contention that the vote needs to be verified if the voter is to feel sure that his/her vote was counted correctly. Here are some selected sections from her description of her testimony, my interpolations are in parenthesis:
"I told the committee flat out that my research, currently under peer review, show that our machines are being manipulated and they needed to do something about that. I could be proved wrong with an audit, except … no audits allowed.
"I complained about the fact that in Sedgwick County we have a brand new expensive voting machine system with a paper trail. Our election officials insist that without a legislative solution, those ballots may never be opened and reviewed by human eyes to verify the accuracy of the count. Which is pretty much what the appeals court judge told me back in September when I asked what voters could do to hold our officials accountable. I think I made it clear to the committee that the current situation was unacceptable."
snip
(She also said she does not think that "audits" will work). She said, "Audits only tell us how off the results were and predict if outcomes were impacted. They don’t fix anything and they don’t prevent anything. We have to do that part too." (What happened was predictable). Here's how she puts it: "I got chided by the Chair about speaking off-topic. I got a lecture by Senator Miller about the unreliability of exit polls – which included a well-delivered “ma’am” that shut me off when I tried to interrupt him." Another senator (Miller), agreed in part with what she said. According to Beth, he "expressed how he agrees with me about the audits. I acknowledged that audits are better. They were my first choice after all. (While) he doesn’t think that exit polls should be taken seriously, (he) . . . acknowledged it’s the best data available to Kansas voters." Another senator indicated that she would like to work with Beth to "prepare" a bill that would "get the transparency we need to have confidence in election outcomes."
So there is a wisp of hope that somewhere down the road we may be able to have trustworthy vote counts in KS. Probably other states would have or have had encounters like the above or are in even worse circumstances for a variety of reasons. But all Beth can do is keep working and I'm sure she'll keep doing that.
