Washblog

Paul Lehto predicts the emergence in his talk here of a new flavor of election cheating -- the invalidation of honest election results on the basis that they're inherently unverifiable.

When vote recording and tabulation is done on hackable, secret software, people who lose elections "fair and square" can validly claim that no one can prove they lost. Lehto notes that the former Chairman of the US Elections Assistance Commission, DeForest Soaries, announced in the past week that US elections are unverifiable and unreliable (why wasn't this big news? See Brad Blog, which cites Soaries' earlier claim to that effect as a sign that Soaries is the rare honest Republican.)

We've seen this argument that an election can't be trusted used here in Washington with the 2004 governor's race. The hand recounts uncovered no proof that the paper ballots were counted dishonestly. On the contrary, everything came up clean on the paper ballots -- pretty remarkable in this race involving 3 million votes. There was, however, strong evidence of cheating in Snohomish County -- only in those precincts where black box voting was used. And here the advantage always went to the Republican candidate. Even though their claim that Democrats cheated has been refuted, Republicans are still gaining political advantage by asserting it over and over. With black box voting, false accusations of cheating cannot be refuted.