We Got Out-Printed, Johnny!
Outvote The Fraud! was a key GOTV message for the MAGA movement in the 2022 midterms.
In nearly all battleground contests—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, along with insurgencies in New York, Connecticut, and New Hampshire—populist candidates were defeated by lackluster, even defective opponents.
Post-mortems are calling for legislation requiring in-person, paper ballots, and restricting early/mail-in voting to root out ballot harvesting operations.
Standards (deadlines, KPI’s, process integrity checks) leveraging new Republican majority’s power of the purse promise greater leverage for driving change.
Per my last post Swimming in Election Denial, compliance can be achieved with failing profit centers through threat of dissolution or break up.
Failing cost centers—such as election boards—can be brought into line by defunding bad behavior and incentivizing success, as we consider below:
Elections Have Inconsequences
Post midterm elections, we are hearing demands— led by Grover Cleveland wannabe himself, Donald Trump— for in-person, same-day, paper ballot voting.
While this solution sounds attractive, it comes with stiff challenges. Since the 24th Amendment abolished the poll tax in 1962, elections have become cost centers for government bodies administering them. Constitutionally, that would be our state and local governments, so the money to pay for these elections— or changing how they are done— will have to come from somewhere.
What money? the in-person advocate may incredulously ask. How could paper-ballot, in-person, same-day voting possibly cost more than electronic systems currently in place?
Elections may be free, but come at a cost as real as the sacrifices to make them fair.
Turn Off The Century Technology
The optical scan, tabulator, and direct recording electronic (DRE) voting technology found in polling stations today is the offspring of a law passed and funding provided to replace —wait for it— same-day, in-person, paper (punch card) ballots, whose error-prone ways gave us the Great Florida Recount of 2000 that decided the American presidency by 537 votes and a 5-4 US Supreme Court decision.
The taste left by that experience in everyone’s mouth was so bad that all sides hailed passage of HAVA, the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which gave us computerized statewide voter databases, provisional ballots, and electronic voting systems. The bill was enthusiastically signed into law by President George W. Bush, who remarked:
The administration of elections is primarily a State and local responsibility. The fairness of all elections, however, is a national priority. And through these reforms, the Federal Government will help State and local officials to conduct elections that have the confidence of all Americans… Citizens of every political viewpoint can be proud of this important law.
Exactly twenty years later, and with 20-20 hindsight (pun intended), it looks like all we really can be proud of is figuring out how to replace one three-body problem with another, even knottier one:
First, voting machines, software and automation technology that are vulnerable to attack, manipulation and compromise. This was known and discussed at length in places like the Brennan Center at NYU as far back as 2005. A whole industry— cybersecurity— has since grown up around the vulnerability of computer-based systems. Voting machines are computer-based, trailing-edge contraptions, the insides of which manufacturers drop billion-dollar lawsuits to keep hidden from you, so you won’t see how antiquated this technology really is.
Compare that with the SolarWinds breach of December, 2020. SolarWinds is a highly complex, globally scalable infrastructure monitoring solution used by Fortune 500 and key Federal agencies. Within twenty-four hours, vulnerability and exploit had been identified, mitigations from CISA and manufacturer published, and by end of week patches from SolarWinds and integration partners released.
How vendors of voting systems that are supposed to do just one thing—count— get a pass when their machines go belly up on Election Day, speaks cui bono volumes.
Second, voter registration databases and election infrastructure bloated by the National Voter Registration (or Motor Voter) Act. The NVRA all but forces government agencies to register economic refugees for a privilege for which they are ineligible (and often don’t particularly want or need) in order to obtain the mobility and social benefits which they do.
The process of pruning these databases, under Section 8 of NVRA, is slow and laborious, and many jurisdictions cannot afford the cost of assigning workers to track down and correspond with each voter on the roll. Meaning these names just sit there and grow into ballots for potential harvesting.
In addition, these databases often reside on computers of unknown provenance and increasingly in unknown locations, leaving them potentially susceptible to hacking and manipulation.
Third, early voting and wi-fi based check-in enabling automation of ballot harvesting. Regime actors and their cut-outs can pre-print and pre-sign mail-in ballots from the registration database, based on who hasn’t (and likely won’t) cast their ballot through early voting and real-time check-in, and dump their way to victory.
For candidates like Katie Hobbs, who runs the voting system in Arizona, running for governor of her own state had to be a walk in the park.
Why Things Don’t Feel Like Changing
As with any status quo, there are beneficiaries, whose interest vectors zero out any inertia for change:
First there is the power vector. Election “outcome assurance” is My Prrehhshusss!—the Ring of Power which no politician cannot but look upon and lust madly for. The haste with which that assurance has been encoded into election systems to yield outcomes increasingly disconnected from reality says all you need to know. Why would any leader desire change when s/he can put a cyborg into office who will vote as instructed until hacked, or parts wear out?
Next there is the supply vector. Vendors of voting and tabulation systems will typically enter into multi-year contracts to provide election hardware, software, and services contracts to jurisdictions. Cancellation fees to cover product shipped and technicians hired—if not specifically called out in the contract— would most certainly be sought by these lawfare-prone manufacturers.
Finally there is the cost vector. Elections come with their own set of fixed and variable costs, including permanent and temporary employees, training, facility, equipment, transport, ballot, printing, mailing, systems configuration, legal, security, technical support— much which goes into unknown bucket when complexity is introduced or shifted. And currently the biggest cost of elections, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, is technology.
The only time we have seen technological change in American election systems in the last twenty years is when it was underwritten by the Federal government with HAVA, which came with an initial $3 billion in funding for equipment purchases in in 2002, and again in 2018 with $380 million for cybersecurity purchases.
Carrots, Sticks, and Standards
While in-person paper-ballot advocates do not have the power of the pen to force change, they now have access to the power of the purse to drive change—by funding or defunding behavior.
And the desired primary outcome here is not for jurisdictions to jettison their machines— though it would be wonderful if they did—but for election systems first and foremost to work fairly, reliably, and timely.
That is a national priority. Something even President George W. Bush, last beneficiary of the corrupt punch card system HAVA replaced, could get behind.
So how would we fund fairness and defund abuse in our election systems? There’s just not enough brute force to bite The Precious off every governor’s finger. But there is sufficient leverage to get them to drop it. We’re going to propose a three-prong strategy of carrot, stick, and standards:
Carrot—Create a tiered reimbursement system. The first tier might compensate X% of allowable costs for reporting results before midnight, Election Day. A bonus percentage for release of auditable breakouts— in-person, early, mail-in, number of ballots mailed, number received, number rejected, number duplicated, voter roll population totals—active, inactive, voted/did not vote in election, etc. We need to set a finish line and recognize the efforts of those who cross it in time.
Stick— fines levied per day out of compliance, percentage mail-in duplicates with in-person, percentage mail-in ballots voting only one candidate, percentage of provisionals issued, percentage of voters on roll ineligible, etc. The list is neither exhaustive nor authoritative. The point is to set penalties for failure and rewards for success. That’s the only way accountability has meaning.
Standards— recognize those who go above and beyond by providing excellence grants to states for certifying their processes to ISO-level certification, and opening up those processes to random audits, as we see with critical system manufacturers and public utilities. These organizations get rewarded with business for excellence of process. Our election providers— both government agencies and their vendors who mass commit to produce a quality product on time— deserve similar incentives and our recognition for a job well done.
All of these measures will come at a cost. But far less money than we are pouring into Ukraine to jump-start World War 3, and turn our parking meters into cigarette lighters.
It’s also pretty clear that the current election system is costing our country much more than we are paying for it, by creating uncertainty among Americans for their futures, and abroad among our allies. Public trust in our institutions is at an all-time low. Those jealously clutching their prrresshhhussss Fraud-o-Mation schemes, and calling those who point it out ELECTION DENIERS are not fooling anybody at this point, not even themselves.
We can either sever the finger wearing the Ring through the power of the pen, or make the Ring so unbearably hot— by requiring accuracy and alignment of early, mail-in, in-person, and registered voters—that jurisdictions throw up their hands and use paper ballots until they can prove (if ever) that their precious outcome assurance machines meet the speed, accuracy, and reliability that brings home the funding.
Remember, state governments don’t print money. It has to come from somewhere.
Don’t Outlaw The Fraud, Just Make It Expensive
We’ve seen how a minority Democrat leadership was a thorn in Trump’s side for his four years in office. Something a Republican minority under McConnell, McCarthy, and McDaniel was craven to even try with Biden. A slim majority in one house of Congress can drive change. It’s been done before, and can happen again if Republicans will grow spines, Democrats will grow consciences, and rebel against the entrenched partisan leaderships benefiting from the status quo at the expense of We the People.
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Harvey Oxenhorn, is a cybersecurity consultant, founder of Malwords Weekly, and author of the upcoming book, The Atrocity Algorithm, How The Media Became The Enemy of The People. He writes The Five Stages of Unf*ck, Red Pill Journey to January 2.0. , also on Substack. Follow him on Gettr, Gab, and MeWe @HarveyOxenhorn