By Nancy Collisson
Ron Dugger has a simple plan — to encourage the use of write-in ballots only.
Dugger has been reporting on the history of elections and the dangers of computerized vote counting since 1987, when he wrote an article about it for the New Yorker.
Dugger’scomments on the dangers of computerized voting have been published in the Los Angeles Times and he has been interviewed on the topic on NPR. He has written biographies on LBJ and Ronald Reagan, and also on the founders of both the Texas Observer and the Alliance for Democracy, a national populist organization.
In a conversation I had with Dugger on his strong belief in the need for paper ballots, he explained that he is concerned that too much unnecessary concern is given to the issue of balloting, as it is, as he says, “a non-problem.”
Dugger explained that on a serious note he is “fundamentally alarmed that computer programmers can steal whole elections. Computers are machines that obey orders that come from the programmers, who are hired by private companies. Some of these machines can count forty to fifty million votes.”
And ‘Yes,” Dugger added, recognizing voter skepticism about these machines, “You can buy an election, if you can buy a programmer.”
Dugger finds the only solution to eliminating doubt by using the present (2015) Canadian model of voting.
“Canadians have 13 million voters, with no precincts larger than 500, 300 average. All votes in Canada are counted within four hours,” Dugger declared.
“Structurally it’s stupid to turn vote counting over to programming experts, since it’s not really a problem anyway! If the media didn’t make it a problem, it wouldn’t be a problem.
At our voting sites, “we’d have an amiable and sociable civic event occurring at the end of the night, where the folks counting ballots got to know one another over coffee and doughnuts, rather than wondering whether the vote was even fair!
“That’s democracy!”
When asked whether the recounts for President George W. Bush should have continued in the heavily questioned Broward County in Florida, Dugger scoffed “Hell yes!”
“Ask yourself,” he said, “if we shouldn’t know who our president is — in the most powerful country in the world!”
Dugger cited a recent Newsweek poll stating that 29 percent of the people in the country do not regard Bush as the legitimate president. “Let’s not kid ourselves that we had a legitimate election ,” he said “we didn’t! And we might as well deal with that fact in a legitimate way.”
Resolving doubts about election truth drives Dugger, and although he firmly believes that submission of hand-written ballots are the best way to ensure a fair, democratic election, he described one method of electronic voting that he would be willing to accept.
While maintaining that voting precincts should be limited to 500 voters, per the Canadian model, he feels the tallying could be decentralized. That is, while a computer would register “mark sense” votes, a paper inside the machine would receive a mark that indicates who received a vote. Each of those slips of paper would be retained inside the machines and tabulated later to ensure parallel counts, but these papers would be kept locked inside the machine.
If the paper slip ballots were printed and released — in a form similar to a receipt that emerges from ATMs, those slips, if used to “verify results,” could be photocopied, thereby increasing the risk of vote-buying.
The worst-case election scenario, according to Dugger, would be the sole use of electronic voting machines with no paper ballots. “If we go to all-electronic, with no ballot made by the voter, it’s just a matter of time before we have a dictatorship — and a smart machine programmer can erase all proof that such an event even happened.”
The solution is simple, according to Dugger.
“Look,” he said.“When somebody counts the votes, they look at the ballot. They see the totals, they see what stack it goes into. There’s little concern about subjectivity because, what the hell, you’re watching each other count!
“It’s the panicky haste of modern life which is undercutting the common sense solution of citizens looking at each other as they count the votes in their own precinct,” he explained.
I agree with Ron Dugger.
At the end of the day, neighbors all over America finding out who our president is by counting marks on ballots while enjoying coffee and doughnuts, sounds a lot more “democratic” to me than vote-staffers and the entire population agonizing over dangling, dimpled, or “pregnant chad” punch-out cards or, now, whether manipulation of mail-in ballots could be faked and then damage our election results.
We must increase the number of voting locations, demand ID cards before voting, and eliminate or highly regulate mail-in ballots.
We need to go back to the basic method of voting of collecting paper ballots at collection points for clusters of 400 voters or to have machines that only handle four or five-hundred votes and that retain copies of those votes inside the machines.
After all, after an election, I think we can all agree that the last thing we need is to wonder whether our president is really our president.
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