Why election transparency is important

Why can't our state allow access to records to help enhance confidence?

According to Rasmussen, approximately 66% of likely voters don’t trust our electronic voting systems.  Could this be the reason for our state’s abysmal turnout in the primary of roughly 13%?

This should concern every election official and legislator. Instead, they excoriate those who question the elections and who request information to confirm the validity of the election process. To wit, our own SC Election Commission is still trying to sue SC Safe Elections, our grassroots group, for daring to ask for information about the 2020 election (namely Cast Vote Records). They won’t give up on their counterclaim that prevents us from obtaining, via the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act, ANY information from the 2020 election and would force us to pay thousands of dollars of their legal costs. This is harassment in the form of overzealous lawyers spending our tax dollars to punish citizens for requesting records that help us validate our elections. We certainly hope that Judge Coble sees this for what it is and either dismisses (again) their counterclaim; or better yet, awards us our legal fees and admonishes the other side for their brute force tactics.

Dr. Daugherity, one of our expert witnesses, wrote an excellent article, “Balancing Ballot Secrecy Versus Transparency”, that succinctly underscores the importance of Cast Vote Records.  In this must-read article, he provides the history of the secret ballot and emphasizes the importance of voter transparency. It is essential that states across our great country not only comply with our federal and state laws but that they also provide access to these records to ensure increased confidence in our election results.

He states:

“Every CPA or financial officer knows what is necessary for a complete and verifiable audit—physical security, inventory, chain of custody, separation of duties, a complete audit trail, and so on. In everyday language, there must be sufficient data to reconstruct and trace all transactions, in effect to be able to make a “movie” after the fact of everything that happened before, during, and after an election.”

When our election officials ask us to trust the system but don’t provide key reports and records it only foments distrust and suspicion. See the article below:

Auditing is the key to verifiability of the machine vote

Auditing is a key component of the election process and thus needs to be robust, observable, and trustworthy. Unfortunately, our state procedures don’t inspire confidence.  Hand count audits are often done with small samples that aren’t statistically representative of an entire race and aren’t random, nor is the process viewable by observers. This does not align with the spirit of our law.

How can someone observe the process and feel confident about the results when they aren’t allowed to view the ballot content? The secrecy of the ballot is meant to be during the process of casting a vote. Once cast, the ballot, which has no personally identifiable information, should be able to be viewed in its entirety. The only way to audit our elections is to do a full hand-count of all races. We can do this in an efficient manner using our hand count method as outlined in our gold standard elections whitepaper pages 14-20. https://www.scsafeelections.org/the-gold-standard-for-elections/

Better yet, why are we even using the machines? If we handcount to audit as that is more reliable than why not just return to hand-counting handmarked paper ballots?

Here is a truth-telling video that redpills the masses from Scott Adams. He makes a great point!

How secure are these machines?

CISA, the Center for Infrastructure and Security Agency, has been hacked. Multiple government agencies have been hacked and recently the Federal Reserve was hacked. If this can happen, we can’t fully trust that the most important currency we have (which is our vote) to an insecure system. From the article,

Josh Jacobson, Director of Professional Services at HackerOne says the threats made by LockBit speak to the fact that “even our most integral governmental entities are not infallible to ransomware attacks.”

“If the Federal Reserve is impacted, that could have global implications. This is not a siloed infrastructure where a finite number of customers are impacted. The potential for residual impact definitely factors in, as well as long-term reputation and trust,” he said.

Wake up America, are your elections clean or are your leaders selected for you? Who owns these system manufacturers? Who is in charge of monitoring them? The people need to take back their elections. We have developed a gold standard method for doing so. Let’s join other Euorpean nations who have returned to one day of voting on paper ballots which are hand-counted.

Things are getting hot in Pennsylvania

Several lawsuits are heating up and new ones being filed that underscore multiple issues in the Pennsylvania 2020 election. In particular, we are finding out that the state didn’t properly investigate compelling evidence of fraud.

In this must-see interview (start around 23 minutes) Greg Strenstrom and Leah Hoopes discuss their multiple suits and the shocking evidence that demonstrates how Bill Barr told the PA officials to stand down and not look into the 2020 election anomalies and evidence of potential fraud.

Click here for more

We continue to work hard to restore confidence in our SC Elections

Thanks for your continued interest and support. We work every day for you—the people of South Carolina—to make our elections accessible, transparent, secure and verifiable. Please continue to pray for us.

Blessings,

The SC Safe Elections Team