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Don’t freak out. The Secretary of State’s RFP is a solid bit of work. It creates a new audit trail capability that we currently do not have. Regardless of how you feel about the companies submitting proposals, this is a tremendous improvement over what Louisiana has now.
Currently, the voting machines use a tabulation, or increment model. When you cast a vote, the machine just increments, or adds one, to the number of votes it has already received. That model is not auditable. However, the new RFP requires the machine to generate an auditable, paper copy of the actual vote. The voter would be able to see that paper ballot before officially approving it.
At the moment, the ability to audit machines is a tremendous advance over what we have now. However, there is one thing I’d like to see added to the voting process with these new machines. Once the new machines are installed, and an election comes along, they are supposed to still operate exactly the same way that our current machines operate. That is, they tabulate votes electronically by incrementing them as people cast their ballot. At 9:00pm on election night, it is theoretically possible for enough results to be in for the news media to call the election. That’s where the new process would stop.
If there’s a challenge to the election, the paper ballots would be an audit trail. That’s a good thing. Instead, I believe that the day after the election, all of the paper ballots should automatically be audited and compared with the tabulations the machine came to the night before. It should also be counted using another vendor’s equipment. That way, the people of Louisiana would be assured that not only did an election take place, but that the election was audited and verified to be free from mechanical or software error. This additional process would not guarantee that the election was completely free from fraud. However, it would guarantee that at least the election night counting process was reasonably accurate.
If you’d like to read the press release I’m holding in the podcast, it’s available at this link: https://assets.newlouisiana.org/louisiana/01272021RFP-rev.pdf There’s also the RFP Facts flyer, which is very similar to the press release. That document is available here: https://assets.newlouisiana.org/louisiana/RFPFactsFlyer-rev.pdf.
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For God’s sake stay away from Dominion Systems. They cannot and will not ever be trusted. Let us not take a chance with our elections going forward. Our future depends on it. Please.
Bravo to your suggestions, Mike.
One might also add the new machines must be made in the USA so the maker can be surveilled.
What about the fact that Dominion Voting Systems are particularly built with the ability to flip votes as detailed in its Users’ Manuals as reported recently by attorney Sidney Powell. Paper ballots are the only fair way to cast votes although much slower to tabulate, but unquestionably more truly accurate and less friendly to the fraudulent action of voter crime as has been witnessed in the Nov. 2020 Presidential Election. Investing in another computer voting system is certainly going to allow voter theft to continue—definitely an ‘in your face’ uncorrected Constitutional disaster!