Thanks to Ed Martin and the wonderful Phylis Schlafly Eagles, I saw Frieda Keough and Judy Sofka this weekend. For this who don’t know of Frieda and Judy, they were citizens behind the great election reform bills through the Missouri Precinct Project. Thanks to a decade of effort by Frieda, Judy, and many others, touchscreen voting is a thing of the past in Missouri.

When grassroots initiatives meet with fearless legislators, we can do great things. Reacquainting voters with pen and paper was an absolute necessity to reforming elections in the US. But we can’t stop there.

Now, we need to decentralize vote counting.

Centralization Increases Fraud

Blockchain is a massive anti-fraud system. Blockchain is the technology behind crypto currencies. It works by diffusing ledgers across billions of users, providing anonymous but transparent access to every transaction on the blockchain. Why is this anti-fraud?

Because of access.

Imagine you ran a non-profit, and only one person had access to the organization’s financial records. If that one person was completely honest, great. But if that person goes rogue, the organization won’t find out until it’s too late. Where fraud is possible, access to transaction records must span multiple people who are willing turn each other in. Blockchain does this, but centralized vote counting does not.

When transactions are visible to only a small number of people who are loyal to a singular cause, fraud will happen 100 percent of the time. Men are not angels.

The only way to make elections resilient to fraud is decentralization and transparency. Luckily, we have thousands of years of experience showing us how to do this.

Count Votes in the Precinct

For most of US history, votes were counted at the precinct, results provided to a central agency, and ballots preserved for canvassing, recounts, and audits.

This system worked because a representative of each party watched and confirmed the counts—parties who were willing (maybe eager) to turn each other in.

What’s more, most of the Western World still counts votes this way.

Corey Doctorow is a left-wing Canadian author who specializes in high-tech. Following the 2020 election debacle, Doctorow solved our election problems in one sentence:

Elections are actually easy: paper ballots, hand-marked and hand counted in sight of scrutineers from opposing parties.

Exactly what I am saying. Exactly how it’s done everywhere except the USA and banana republics where the CIA wants to control the outcome.

Doctorow goes on to explain how the US election system got so screwed up:

But thanks to a highly consolidated vote-tech sector with plenty of money to spend, Americans have been convinced that this can't work for America.

The vote-tech lobbyists have convinced US politicians that we have too many people to hand-count ballots.

BS, as Doctorow points out:

Canada and the UK don't consolidate all their ballots to a single counting-house where, like, eight people tally the nation's votes.
The votes are counted at the polling place. America has more polling places than Canada, but there's no reason it can't have the same ratio of polling places – and ballot-counters– to-voters as Canada does. To a first approximation, that's already true.

We saw videos from centralized ballot-counting operations in 2020. Hundreds of people at folding tables working all night to produce the results they wanted.

Centralized vote counters in Atlanta, 2020. Photo credit: AP, via ABCNews.com

If those central counters were distributed to precincts, the same number of people could hand-count ballots all day. The ballots would be counted and certified, with signatures, by the counters and a representative from each party. Every hour, each precinct reports its updated counts to the central office.

With precinct voting, results would be known within two hours of poll closing. And fraud, which will still be attempted, would be limited to a few, identifiable precincts and persons.

Counting in the Precinct Puts Dominion Out of Business

Vote-tech companies spend billions in lobbying (bribing) politicians. These firms have made our elections expensive, slow, opaque, and fraud-ridden. Vote-tech deserves to be destroyed.

For the Missouri General Assembly’s next session, let’s pressure our lawmakers to take the next step in cleaning up elections by demand precinct-level counting and certification. While we’re at it, let’s step up pressure on Missouri’s Secretary of State (and likely gubernatorial candidate), Jay Ashcroft, to push the precinct counting initiative.

Make elections fast, cheap, and transparent with a reasonable audit trail, and many other problems disappear.

Contact Jay Ashcroft
600 West Main Street
Jefferson City, MO 65101
Main Office: (573) 751-4936
Info@sos.mo.gov

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How to Fix Elections Once and For All