Computerized Voting

I read that several county GOP central committees have rejected the last Presidential election and declared that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States. This is quite an accusation and, quite frankly, is rife with potentialities that are not pleasant or pretty. To this I ask myself, “How did we get here?”. There is an axiom in the uniformed services that leaders must hold themselves to higher standards and that there cannot even be appearances of impropriety in their comportment (manner of behaving, bearing, deportment, demeanor, bearing). It does not matter whether there is concrete proof or not that a leader is guilty of crimes, poor leadership or whatnot but that leader can be removed from his command solely for the reason of a “loss in confidence to lead” by his superiors.

I would hold that the election process must be held to the same standards and quite frankly it should be held to even higher standards. I say this because, to me, free and fair elections are what makes the United States of America one of the greatest nations ever, if not the greatest nation, to exist on the face of the earth. Currently, there is great mistrust in the election process and by extension the elected leaders of the nation. Why is there a great mistrust? I would posit that there is great mistrust because of computerized election machines, computerized vote tabulating, and computerized result reporting. Quite honestly, speaking from experience, most of the citizenry does not understand how computers work to include the hardware and especially how software is written to control machines. I would even postulate this includes the vast majority of election officials in the many election’s offices throughout the country. This mistrust the election process is harbored by a great number of Americans in this nation solely because they do not understand how all the computerized election processes work. Perhaps it is time to “relieve the current election process of its authority due to a lack of confidence in its ability to be objective”.

I consider myself more technologically savvy than many of people and perhaps it is for that reason that I am not comfortable with computerized voting machines. I made a point of learning programming languages in my youth and have lived, firsthand, through the rise of Big Tech and its ever increasing encroachment into my life. This encroachment has included a gradual loss of control of my computer and autonomy with each “upgrade” pushed by Microsoft and other application developers. So much so that I feel, despite owning my computer and phone, that I no longer control these machines. For me it is not a great intellectual leap to imagine that the software developers of these computerized voting machines could write code to remotely control them. Which begs the question are they, in fact, remotely controlling them? I do not know but I do not have confidence in the ability of computerized election equipment to objectively report results nor I do not have confidence that programs (algorithms) cannot be changed remotely. To me that should be enough to throw the system out and return to paper ballots with a way to verify the identification of each voter to ensure they have the legal right to vote.

One may ask why paper ballots and hasn’t there also been cheating with paper ballots? Absolutely there has been cheating and it is a far less efficient way to count ballots without a doubt. What I would like to submit, however, is that it makes it harder to cheat. For instance, one does not need to be a computer programmer with forensic abilities to observe the cheating because all one needs is to have eyes to see the cheating. It will take the power back from the computer ballots manufacturers and programmers (big tech) and redistribute power back to the county and local election officials’ offices where it should be. It will put many of the people at ease that they can physically see, touch, and listen to the process that receives and tabulates the elections and reports the results. The current “black box” is not the solution for our nations most sacred institution; elections in which everyone is equal because each person, no matter how rich or poor, politically connected or not, has one vote and only one vote.