At the Monday, November 13 luncheon meeting, Garland Favorito, founder of Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VoterGA), spoke to Madison Forum members and guests on what’s wrong with our current voting process and how it happened.
Mr. Favorito said that in 2002 Georgia became the first state to implement statewide electronic voting. In 2004 Georgia received a rating as the worst voter implementation in the country after we spent 55 million dollars on that electronic vote implementation. He pointed out that prior to 2002 82% of voters cast their ballots punch cards or optical scan equipment. It could be viewed and verified as being correct. When the electronic link came in, the percentage of eligible ballots was reduced from 82% to 0%. That voting cannot be verified, audited, or recounted today. Voters cannot verify what’s on their ballot, because, if there is a ballot, it is an internal, inaccessible data base record. There is no way to audit this on election night. There is no procedure to make sure on election night that the ballots were counted correctly. These machines do not capture any direct physical evidence of voter intent, so you have nothing to recount. You can only re-accumulate the previous totals. You cannot do what we could consider as a legitimate recount. So, what that basically means is that fraud and error are now undetectable statewide. From the voter perspective, you can’t see what is on your ballot, you can’t physically verify that your ballot was ever cast, and you can’t participate in counting the ballots to determine the election results, so what more can be done to disenfranchise the voters than that.
Mr. Favorito pointed out that essentially the government is saying;” We have your ballot, and we will show you what’s on it, and we will give you the screen, but you can no longer see that the votes actually were reported”. There is a broken chain of custody between the voter and the ballot which is now in an inaccessible data base. There is also a broken chain from the precinct all the way to the state, because the lower levels are not verifying that their totals were placed into the upper level totals correctly. The verification is coming from the top down when we should be verifying from the bottom up.
Mr. Favorito said that many studies have come out, from various universities around the country, showing that these machines that we have carry serious security flaws. In addition, the machines can be reprogrammed to count differently on election night than they do when they were certified. This opens the way for a number of scenarios of error with no way of verifying how any ballot was recorded. Several states have already concluded that the voting machines we use in Georgia are inadequate to conduct elections in this state.
Mr. Favorito says that what we need is equipment that will produce a real ballot, we need procedures at the precincts on election night that make sure those machines counted correctly, and if discrepancies are found at precinct balloting, then the candidates involved should be entitled to a recount at no charge to the candidates and no charge to the parties involved.
Mr. Favorito says we are at this point because the specific recommendation made by the Secretary of State and the 21st Century Voting Commission that the chosen system should have the ability to produce an independent paper audit trail of every vote cast was ignored by the implementation team. As a result no machines that had that capability were evaluated. There are many issues about federal certification that basically allows the venders to set up themselves to certify themselves.
Mr. Favorito’s organization has tried to make itself heard in the state about these issues including having members testify at the Sate Elections Board meeting in March 2006, The board had enough money to provide all machines with printed ballot capability, but over the objections of everyone who spoke at that meeting, the board voted to spend that money on electronic poll books. His group appealed to the Governor, who did nothing. Both Democrats and Republicans have voted against bills requiring audit trails. The 3-precinct pilot self repealed after the pilot, and no audit trail was implemented.
Mr. Favorito said that virtually all the candidates who opposed his organization have now been successfully retired. VoterGA has two bi-partisan bills in the state legislature, SB591 and HB790 and has organized a lawsuit against Georgia’s current unverifiable electronic voting methods intending to prove that current Georgia voting is illegal and unconstitutional according to state law.