VOTERNATOR 2008 -- Battle Against The Machines

Jennifer Brunner is HOT !!!

...and I mean smokin'...

You can check-out her video * here *

Doing a news search (on the big trademarked search engine), 168 results returned for Jennifer Brunner's name; the first thirty of which had been posted in the past seven days. She even made * The New York Times *.

Jen is in the news for her work in the area of voting machine security. She has been leading the edge on voting machine testing, and her results are effecting people across the country. Brunner is * Ohio's Secretary of State * and oversees Ohio's election boards.

A Democrat, Jennifer Brunner ousted incumbent Republican Ken Blackwell in Ohio's 2006 state elections. A year that many Ohio Republicans lost their seats to Democratic challengers.

One of Brunner's campaign promises was to thoroughly investigate the security of Ohio's voting machines. A promise that rang with the populous in answer to concerns from the countless irregularities, both documented and reported, through out Ohio in the 2004 election cycle.

Brunner commissioned a $1.9 million dollar study (nicknamed * EVEREST *) which discovered that machine data could be easily corrupted with something as simple as a magnet. Other problems were discovered as well.

One result of the study has been the ordering of several districts to not use the machines, and use paper ballots instead. The paper ballots are of the type that are optically scanned for tabulation. A method which still seems sketchy to voters who have worked with document scanners in work places; they are notorious for making errors.

As a result of Brunner's investigations, other states have also engaged in testing and decided to not use certain machines.

The insecurity of voting machine methods is, of course, not news to anyone who has seen the 2006 documentary * "Hacking Democracy" * by HBO.

For my salt, I have always balked at the idea of trusting some unknown computer code writer to be responsible for the proper tabulation of my vote, and the votes of my friends and neighbors.

In November of 2006, I had a bad experience voting on a touch-screen machine. The printing head on the paper spool was not working, and thus not recording votes into a paper trail. I was assured by a poll worker not to worry, my vote had been recorded on the little magnetic card. I wasn't assured. I wrote an article about this and posted it to Gather at the time (* "My Diebold Done Somebody Wrong Song" *).

Let's be clear. We know we can't trust all our fellow citizens. There are always some who will want to manipulate the political process for personal gain or ends.

The only defense we have is safety in numbers. The more people involved in the process of counting and recording votes cast, the less likely someone will be able to get away with the fraud of miscounting.

It is not the Republic that makes this nation the great country that it is. It is "The Public" that does this. Because of that, anything to do with The Public's business should be completely open to scrutiny by the public and answerable to the public; for which our government supposedly stands.

Voting, especially.

Paper and hand counting may take longer, but it is much easier to layer with security and achieve complete and documentable accuracy.

For your consideration.


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21 February 2008

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Bill's Spirit is honored to have been selected as a member of Gather's "Election 2008 People's Press Corps"

Bill's Spirit is an Artist, Writer, Poet, Philosopher currently wordsmithing from a humble digital forge in small town Ohio.

The works of the man behind Bill's Spirit have been published in small alternative and amateur presses since 1986. Before that, they just filled notebooks, decorated walls and gathered dust in piles and boxes.

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