Officials admit Indiana law requires a system so officials can see how you voted; broad implications for your rights—quietly, and never fully disclosing the broad reach and rights-violating implications of this, Indiana officials now admit that STATE LAW requires that ballots be traceable to individual voters.
Stripping political privacy out of voted BALLOTS is completely egregious, and in a different class entirely than knowing how people contributed campaign cash. Clandestine harvesting data on who and what you voted for(clandestine, because only certain classes of persons to have this information—election workers and vendors—and because they can do so without ever disclosing it to the public) constitutes political rape.
I’m not sure why attorneys from the ACLU and other voting rights organizations have shown so little concern about removal of our political privacy. Perhaps denial—not believing it can be so, though it is easily provable to anyone who either reads news articles or looks at the databases. Perhaps because elite levels of political parties, and corporate sponsors, place a value on this clandestine information.
With electronic methods, vendors and election officials can now harvest the voted ballot data by the hundreds of thousands, then apply simple connector software, available commercially, to create a massive database showing how everyone voted.
This, of course, is rarely admitted, except in Colorado, where election officials tried (unsuccessfully) to deny citizens the right to look at ballots, admitting that ballots are not anonymous; it has also been proven in Indiana, when during a recount the vendor went in and pulled, name by name, the voted ballots for three voters out of the cast votes in a touchscreen.
The feature enabling theft of privacy in Indiana was quietly excused citing a state law requiring that voters who die after early voting but before election day must have their ballots extracted from the pool. Once again, a miniscule and rather trumped-up issue was used to produce massive collateral damage to voting rights for the entire population. Will the American public ever wise up?
Bev Harris is the founder and director of BlackBoxVoting.org.
