An Open Letter to "The Squad," Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib for Election Reform

Dear Congresswomen,

As we are progressives and admirers of yours, and are greatly supportive of your progressive agenda, we would like to appeal to you to take action on one issue without which nothing else can make great progress.  That is the issue of election reform.  Without being able to elect more progressives such as yourselves, the rest of the progressive agenda stands little chance of passing.

We are all familiar with the news headlines of foreign interference in American elections, in particular Russia, but the fact remains that the threat of our elections being undermined can come from any direction, either foreign or domestic.  It has been shown that any electronic vote counting machine can be hacked into, whether it is on the Internet or not.  The New York Times recently elaborated on this in the piece The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine.

Indeed, in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, a demonstration is given of the ease with which votes can be "flipped" from one candidate to another electronically, on a machine which is not connected to the Internet, and is of a model that is still widely in use across the country.

We are writing to you now to ask that you draft and sponsor legislation which would secure US elections, by making them transparent and verifiable, as there are currently no election reform efforts in Congress which meet the minimum requirements which election integrity activists have detailed, to make elections truly reflect the will of the people.  For more background on these requirements, please read How Bernie Sanders Can Win the Democratic Nomination.

If we cannot express our wills at the ballot box, we cannot elect more progressives.  Representative Ocasio-Cortez, it is interesting that your upset over the entrenched incumbent took place in state where vote-counting machines are of the type we demand, which means that they take a digital image of each ballot as it is fed into the machine, and stored into memory.  This provides an additional check on the vote count, which can discourage hackers.  

The list of our minimum requirements for legislation to meet for us to consider it meaningful reform is as follows.

- First and of bedrock importance, disallow any ballot-marking system but voter hand-marked paper ballots, as the standard for casting votes, of course with exceptions for disability. At the present moment, election departments across the country are updating or getting ready to update the last generation of voting systems, relics of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funding cycle. But in what should be generating outrage from voters, in some states, like Pennsylvania, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, counties are ignoring activists' recommendations and ramming through more easily hackable systems. Why they would want to do this does not lead to comforting answers. One development to be especially vigilant against is the use of BMDs, ballot marking devices, except in cases of disability. These are touch-screen devices by which the voter touches a screen to make choices and then the machine prints those choices on a paper ballot. These are inferior to hand-marked paper ballots, because gone are the unique, hand-markings which distinguish each ballot from every other. It would be laborious to make a large number of bogus ballots by hand marking them. But when a machine prints out the ballots, making large numbers of them would be easy.

- Securing the right of voters to vote within a reasonable amount of time, by mandating a per-voter minimum requirement for the number of voting stations.

- A mandated re-vote for counties in which large numbers of inaccurate or missing registrations are reported.

- For vote-counting machines, unless a jurisdiction hand-counts its ballots, which is always an approved option to election transparency activists, and the way most of Western Europe holds its elections, the only acceptable technology is that in which a voter hand-marks a paper ballot (with exceptions for disability,) and then feeds it into the kind of optical scan device which generates a digital image of each ballot, and then stores it in memory. These are already in use in over 60% of US counties. The images should be posted on the Internet or made available on a DVD for any citizen to recount any precinct. In the event that there are significant discrepancies with the official vote count, that is the signal, and a strong one, for a court to order a hand recount of the paper ballots. At the forefront of efforts to make these images public record are citizen's groups like Audit USA, and citizen activists like Bev Harris, John Brakey, Harvey Wasserman, and Bob Fitrakis.

- A secure chain of custody for all paper ballots, vote-counting machines, and related gear and electronic media, under watch by surveillance cameras 24/7.

There are presently a number of bills in Congress seeking to address election systems reform, all of which fall very far short of the reforms above. One of which is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's Securing America's Elections Act 2018, H.R. 5147, which unforgivably allows the indiscriminate use of ballot marking devices, and says nothing about requiring ballot images to be generated and made available to the public. Another is Jim Sarbanes' (D-MD) H.R. 1, For the People Act. In their present forms, both bills are such that the election system would be better off if Congress passed nothing.

Thank you for your time and we look forward to working with you to truly secure America's elections.