Time to Turn the Page on Electronic Voting?

By MARK ANDERSON

SAN ANTONIO—Using verifiable paper ballots as a back-up measure to supplement electronic voting, or using paper ballots directly without machines, just got a big boost, thanks to honest-election activist Dr. Laura Pressley. She persuaded the Republican Party of Texas Platform Committee to adopt a pro-paper ballot plank during the recent Texas GOP State Convention.

“This is huge,” she said, while describing her tough battle in mid-June to get the Platform Committee to adopt the measure.

Meanwhile, Dr. Pressley’s ongoing, potentially landmark lawsuit is pending before the Texas Supreme Court to require the Lone Star State to abandon what she argues are its unaccountable and illegal election practices and follow its own election code and the state Constitution.

Having noticed irregularities in 2014 when she sought to verify the results of her “loss” as a candidate in an Austin City Council race, Dr. Pressley adopted the credo “trust, but verify” and studied the Texas Election Code. She found “there were no legal ballots for a recount, and no results tapes to document and verify what the results were,” contrary to the law.

Notably, a Harris County (greater Houston area) “cabal,” she said, sent representatives to the state GOP convention to try and block all paper-ballot platform proposals—because once a state as populous as Texas opts for paper ballots, the effect could be nationwide and spell trouble for electronic voting machine vendors whose contraptions are used in over 90% of US voting precincts, with lucrative contracts at stake.

The officials at the convention, who’ve been on a mission to stamp out all paper-ballot options across Texas—evidently to protect their sole electronic voting machine vendor, Hart InterCivic, whose machines lack a paper back-up option—included Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart. Interestingly, while the Platform Committee was chaired by Mark Ramsey (a member of Harris County’s State Republican Executive Committee opposed to paper ballots) Stanart testified to the very same committee before Dr. Pressley did.

Asked what happened to get the Platform Committee to resist the Harris County group and adopt the pro-paper ballot plank, she replied, “Because we had such strong testimony and pressure from the grassroots, they retreated and removed their own suggested planks against paper ballots. State Sen. Bob Hall is credited with taking the Harris cabal to the woodshed. We saved Texas at that convention. Think of him as Moses who parted the waters and we all walked through.”

Dr. Pressley, who holds a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and holds four US patents in semiconductor device technology, explained: “The Hart InterCivic voting system uses phone modems. The memory cards [an electronic ballot box] are taken from individual voting machines to a substation, in order to phone-modem the results to the ‘central accumulator tally computer’ [as is done in large counties. Smaller counties physically take the cards to the central computer]. And my requests to Harris County for original audit logs [from Hart machines] have been denied so far. I may have to take the matter to the Attorney General.”

Over 94% of the delegates to this convention reaffirmed “the strongest election-security platform plank in the country,” Dr. Pressley noted. The plank’s essentials are as follows:

“We support modifications to and the strengthening of election laws to ensure ballot integrity and fair elections. We support the Secretary of State strictly enforcing printing of results tapes for electronic voting for early voting and Election Day at polling locations after the polls close for all counties. We support increased scrutiny and security in balloting by mail; prohibition of internet voting and any electronic voting lacking a verifiable paper trail . . . prosecution for election fraud with jail sentences . . . We support all means of protecting the integrity of our elections, including the optional use of paper ballots.”

So, with all the amicus briefs having been written for the lawsuit, including one from Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton in support of Dr. Pressley’s call for lawfully numbering ballots, “the supreme court,” she remarked, “has the opportunity to uphold the law. Is the law in Texas going to prevail?”

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2018

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