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Vote Fraud

The Right to vote and to have that vote properly counted is possibly the most important right citizens of this country has because it protects all other rights. That can only be achieved through providing for an independent paper ballot record of the vote, which the voter can verify is correct and can be can be recounted by hand. In the case of electronic vote counting, those paper ballots must have an independent audit to insure that the machines are actually recording the vote totals correctly. I will propose a law, which insures that independent audits happen state-wide in Utah, and conduct independent audits of Summit Countys vote counts. I will make sure that such a system becomes a reality.

They have determined that the only way to confirm that every vote counts is by utilizing a voter verified paper ballot.

In March of 2005, I submitted to and passed a polygraph test regarding these facts. Tim Robinson administered the test. He is a twenty-year veteran of the Florida department of Law Enforcement and the head polygraphist for the state of Florida.

Proposal for Independent Audits of Vote Counts This proposal was killed by Utah Election officials before it was even drafted. This is why it is important to elect election officials who will stand up for our right to vote.

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Corruption

While pushing Diebold touchscreen voting machines on voters Susan Follet told local press untrue stories about Kathy Dopp to wrongly discredit her position against unaudited, insecure Diebold touchscreen voting machines.

Should Sue Follet be declared the winner of the Summit County Clerk seat, it will be a sad day for voters. There is really no way to know for certain if a computer is actually performing the function it tells you it is performing. Anyone with basic knowledge of computer programming can write a software program that can disguise itself as a legitimate application and mask its malicious acts. Thus, the program can erase votes, or reallocate them from one candidate to the other, and then erase its tracks. When tested, it will not reveal its corrupt nature, and will tell the tester what the tester expects to hear.

The corruption of our election officials by cozy relationships with voting machine vendors and lobbyists and the privatization of our elections must stop. By privatizing our elections, our vote counting process and even our detailed vote count data becomes a trade secret and beyond the reach of our open records and sunshine laws.

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Public Election Data Monitoring

Summit County, Utah reports its election results in a way that hides the evidence of vote fraud and miscount. Insiders can padd the votes for one candidate in one vote type while simultaneously subtracting votes in another vote type. The separate counts are added together prior to publicly reporting them, hiding the evidence of both problems. Sue Follet claims that she "does not have the separate vote counts available to release publicly." If that is true, then how can she possibly determine what the election result are?

I propose a policy of publicly releasing all the vote count data that gives the power to monitor our elections back to the voters. It is possible today, with existing technology, to publicly release all the detailed vote count data on the Internet. Even better, Summit County could analyze its own vote count data to monitor our election results for suspicious patterns that might reveal problems.

Every citizen should be able to know that our votes are accurately counted by following the old American tradition of Secretly Cast and Publicly Counted ballots as much as possible.

Beyond the integrity of elections, simple dollars and cents of using an optical scan system would save our county at least 30% in costs to conduct our elections over using touchscreen voting machines.

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Fiscal Responsibility

It is paramount that we be conservative in spending taxpayer dollars over the long term.

I propose that we immediately switch to a voting system that costs 40% less per year to operate and use any extra funds to pay any expenses of performing independent audits, to ensure our votes are accurately counted.

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Do The Job

The push to use virtually paperless touchscreen voting machines is probably one of the biggest lies told to the people of this country; and is particularly unfair to the elderly.

The Help America Vote Act is not a government giveaway program. It is a program where taxpayers have their own money removed from their pay checks and given into the hands of electronic voting machine companies using secret programs which can tamper with our election results.

Clerk/Auditor The Clerk/Auditor's office is a combination of two statutory offices: Clerk functions and Auditor functions. The Clerk's office responsibilities are to prepare, administer, process and maintain all county wide elections. The clerk issues all licenses for marriages and processes passports for qualified candidates. The Clerk is responsible for preparing agendas and taking minutes of the Board of County Commission meetings and keeps on file all official documents. The Auditor administers the financial functions for the County. The Auditor is the chief budget officer and prepares and administers the county wide budget. The Auditor performs and administers the purchasing and all accounting functions. The Auditor maintains records of all financial amounts due to the county, conducts reviews and internal audits of county fiscal transactions and issues all financial statements and reports for the county. The Auditor shares management duties regarding the real property tax system with the Recorder, Assessor and the Treasurer.

The very fact that Sue Follet and Cindy Lopicolo can consider that a vote that exists in an unseen electronic form only is "good enough" says something very terrible about the value they place on the principle of one-person-one-vote.

While Sue Follet was county clerk Diebold lobbyists sold flawed overpriced insecure voting systems to Summit County that will disenfranchise Summit County voters.

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Privatizing Vote Counting

My allegiance is with the constitution of the United States of America which begins "We the People". I am concerned with the security of our voting systems and with the continuation of American democracy and our reputation in the world. We need to strengthen our democracy for US citizens. This can not be achieved by outsourcing our elections to private partisan corporations. As your County Clerk I would work to repeal laws that put our elections under the management of private corporations using secret software. I will also propose legislation that would fix our election systems so that everyone can verify that our vote counts are accurate.

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The "Trust Us" Election System

Electronic ballot voting is like telling our votes to a man behind a screen and trusting that the man will not make any mistakes and will record the votes exactly as we asked him to.

Are our elections officials, in asking for trust and objecting to the implication that they should not be trusted, really the defenders of democracy, the "sentinels of democracy"? A real sentinel will rise to defend at the instant of a possible threat and summon reinforcements. In contrast, some elections officials seem to wish to be left alone with the *actual* threat and ability to modify an electronic election, unmolested by any check on their power or on the power of the voting machine programmers and technicians.

If one is truly defending democracy, one does not wish to be ALONE at a point of technological election vulnerability (or election "opportunity") one wants company! And Lots of it!

That is why as Summit County Election Director, I will invite independent auditors selected from amongst volunteer election judges, to audit the vote and publicly release all the detailed vote count data that Utah county clerks now keep secret.

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Independent Audits of Vote Count Accuracy

Any system that lacks a routine method to detect and correct errors is inaccurate. It is very naive to imagine that no one will tamper with our vote counts when we do nothing to detect or correct errors and the payoff for election rigging is control of budgets in the millions just at the county level.

An independent audit of only 2 to 5% of Summit County votes would allow us to detect vote count errors with 95 to 99% probability, if there were any in at least 10% of the counts. Monitoring the detailed vote count data would find the rest.

Here is a paper explaining how independent audits would work.

I propose we renew the spirit of democracy. More people will vote if they know that their votes will be counted accurately.

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Why Banking is Accurate and Vote Counts Are Not

Computers Bank Accurately, so Computers Can Count Votes Right? Banks conduct routine independent audits to detect and correct errors and to prevent insider embezzlement. Bank depositors are given receipts of transactions, and bank staff knows who owns which accounts and how much money is in them.

On the other hand, votes are deposited anonymously. Securing a voting system presents more challenges than securing banks. Even with security measures that far exceed voting system security, bank systems have been breeched; and because of the openness of bank records, it is easier to catch perpetrators and make corrections than it is to correct wrongly recorded votes.

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Voter Ballot Privacy

Voter privacy is violated by Diebold touchscreen voting machines in two ways: The paper rolls record and store ballots in the same order as voters enter each booth; and a key is associated with each ballot so that ballots can be accessed later and erased or have its status changed individually. This intrusion is hidden from the public and violates the American right to a private ballot.

As a mathematician who has studied programming and worked with PhD computer scientists, let me explain how they work.

Some people are saying that such an intrusion is OK. Those individuals seem to trust the one individual that has designed this system for spying on American citizens votes. What happens if someone who wished to control or buy votes has access to the poll sign in sheets and the electronic record of Diebold votes? What if a Stalin or Hitler made it into office and had the unchecked power to secretly spy on the votes of anyone and everyone?

This unchecked power to both manipulate our vote totals and spy on our votes violates the essence of this country. We founded this country on trust of its citizens and mistrust of any centralized power. The American Revolution was based on taking the power away from a king and dividing it between three branches of government. The sole purpose was to provide for checks and balances. Our very freedom, the essence of this country, hinges on our ability to maintain that balance. Freedom is as much protection from government intrusion as it is to participate in the selection of that government. Freedom and Democracy can not exist in countries where the citizens are not granted the right of privacy and the right to have our votes counted in a transparent way that we can all verify is correct. We need only look to Stalin’s Russia to see how his democracy functioned. Is that what we are willing to accept for this country?

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