Do away with election cheating

4-9-07: Two voting products combine to steal your political privacy

The government and some of its vendors can now access your secret ballot.

It's true: Two voting products are designed to be used together. When combined, these two products do away with the secret ballot. And this is already being used.

Because this secretive process is split between two products, the sales pitch on each product truthfully claims that privacy remains in place. What they DON'T MENTION is that when the products are used together, privacy evaporates.

The two products that combine to strip away your ballot privacy are:

1. Ballot-marked vote tracker systems (VoteHere and, from reports we have received, Populex)

2. Image-retaining vote counters (Diebold, Hart Intercivic)

Once the bar code containing embedded voter information is on the ballot, the image captured by the vote counter creates a computer file with both votes and voter-tied information.

Persons inside government are in the best position to abuse this feature. In fact, government security experts already have ties to the ballot-marked systems.

Current US Secretary of Defense and former CIA head Robert Gates has been on the advisory board of VoteHere. Former US Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, also a former deputy director of the CIA and a long-time Chairman of the Board at the Carlyle Group is on the advisory board for Populex. Surely, these two men know the implications of tracking votes. The second biggest expenditure for the CIA during the 1980s was influencing foreign elections; as a Director of and Deputy Director of the CIA, surely they are aware of the benefits an unscrupulous individual could gain from producing giant vote databases that tie back to voters.

HERE’S HOW THESE TWO SYSTEMS STEAL YOUR POLITICAL PRIVACY

Step 1: Vote tracking system puts bar code on ballot which embeds a connector to your voter registration syst... More