Reply #11: Hey, Ojai Person! We've missed each other on this board for quite a while now.

[Peace Patriot]

Great to see your name! It brings back memories of the "old days" at the DU election forum, when we figured out the 2004 election scam.

This VV/CC report really ticked me off. It's so smooth, so slick, so corporate and so-o-o-o optiscanny. And the biggest trouble is, it sets the criteria for election integrity so low. It starts at the wrong end, really--risk of error/fraud. It should start at the top: 100% certainty--full verifiability, full enfranchisement, in an election system with a culture of public service (rather than a culture of secrecy and corruption), and on THOSE criteria, MOST states hover in a negative category. Verifiability is almost nil, and the thrust of the system is to disenfranchise.

Low to high risk of error/fraud just doesn't cut it. It excludes too much. It doesn't aim high enough. I like my scale better (developed for the California assessment): -5 to +5 election integrity.

-5: No verifiability (all touchscreen, no paper trail), culture of hostility to voters, culture of secrecy (corporate culture), across the board. Few or no signs of rebellion in the citizenry. The "risk" of fraud is 100%, and WILL occur (that must be the assumption). (Georgia, South Carolina)

-4: The above, with maybe an election integrity group active. Electronic fraud will occur, but somebody's watching, gathering data and saving pennies to file a lawsuit (which will fail in courts with e-voting 'elected' judges, but the citizens will learn a lot).

-3: Shades of the above, slight improvements.

-2: More improvement. Say, printers are added to the touchscreens (cuz citizens raise hell).

-1: Optiscan system (ballot) to begin with, but tends toward the above, with ZERO auditing. (New Hampshire.)

0: Optiscan (ballot), but election officials are a mixed bag, some into public service, some very corrupt, much citizen activity, signs of hope. Maybe one of the officials caught on, early, and put 1% audit into law. Risk of fraud is still extremely high. California, before Bowen.

+1: California with Bowen--improving. Fraudsters put on notice, but fraud still easy. Citizens up in arms.

+2: Improving. Fraud made difficult.

+3: Improving (or never got corporatized). Fraud nearly impossible. (New York.)

+4: Venezuela--"open source" code electronic system with a whopping 55% handcount. High citizen participation. Culture of public service.

+5: 100% hand-counted paper ballots, with maximum citizen participation, and fraud nearly unthinkable. (Germany, Scotland, maybe UK and Canada. Any other candidates?)

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Virtually ALL states in the U.S. would be rated -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, or +1 on this election integrity scale, and only a handful would be on the positive side of the scale higher than a +1. (New York, and maybe VT, ORE, PA and one or two others, with NY and PA under assault by the election theft industry, and ORE--all mail-in--something of an illusion of integrity, since the mail-in ballots are scanned into an electronic system--ORE's safety is the smallness of its population and economy). And MOST of the U.S. is on the NEGATIVE end of the scale--either LOSING election integrity, or it's already lost, or taking a few baby steps up the scale on the negative side, toward the positive (states switching from touchscreen to optiscan, so they at least have a ballot TO count--though it still takes lots of money and lawyers to get even a limited number of ballots counted).

You could also include how exit polls are handled in this scale. Exit polls in the U.S. are DOCTORED to fit the official results (of "trade secret" code voting counting), and are therefore useless for verifying the vote (unless someone like Jonathan Simon comes along and grabs screen shots of the real exit poll numbers). In other democracies, this would be unthinkable. Exit polls are used to check for fraud--and if they differ from the official results, recounts are required (or demanded). They are NOT used to "verify" fraudulently tallied results, as they are here.

Verification. That should be a chief criteria. Is the vote verifiable--and was it, is it VERIFIED? On this criterion: 0 to 1% in most of the U.S. 55% in Venezuela (five times the minimum needed to detect fraud in an electronic system).

Basing the criteria on risk of fraud or error--with no other factor included (such as corporate-corrupted officials, or citizen activism) favors the corporate vendors, because all they have to do is produce a "paper trail" that nobody checks! That's your current "optiscan" system. They "scan" your ballot and basically throw it away, and the "trade secret" programmed electronics tells you who won, with the corporate-consortium exit pollsters "adjusting" their data to conform with that result.

There is therefore virtually NO state in this country at "low risk" of fraud or error. Almost all are extremely high risk.