Phill Kline, director of the civil Liberties project, said the US needed to restore paper ballots and counting procedures to eliminate loopholes created by the growing digital footprint of elections. His project has recently been challenging the outcome of the 2020 election in the courts.
Phil Kline is a former Kansas attorney general who now heads the Amistad Project. “We were in the Bush V. Gore counting room and we all had to look at the vote and decide if it was valid,” he said.
“We can keep the paper tickets, we can audit the paper tickets, we can audit efficiently. But the primary objective should not be to work behind closed doors for efficiency, but to be transparent and accurate. Those are the advantages of paper tickets.” He said.
Klein made the comments in a concluding speech at the launch of a survey report. The report said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to fund specific voter groups, leaving voters without equal access to all resources because of their political affiliations, in violation of election laws.
According to the report, Mark Zuckerberg funded organizations that gave different treatment to districts that supported different parties.
“In order to actively advance the interests of leftist candidates and leftist agendas, administrators in swing states have facilitated the sharing of sensitive private information about their citizens through unique and new types of contracts,” Klein wrote in a summary of the report.
Thumb on the scale
“This data sharing enables direct access to data of unique political value based on the positions and purposes of the left, and creates new vulnerabilities in the digital operation of state electronic voting books, counting systems and voting machines.”
Such public-private partnerships in swing states, he said, are “placing government’s thumb on the scale.”
Most of Mr. Zuckerberg’s money has gone to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, or CTCL, a nonprofit group founded by former executives and employees of the New Organizing Institute.
The Institute for New Organization, a progressive nonprofit group, disbanded in 2015, training many Democratic digital organizers and providing digital campaign strategies to many leftist candidates. The Washington Post called it “the left’s campaign skills think tank” in 2014.
“Zuckerberg’s funding for CTCL costs about $47 per voter in Democratic strongholds, compared with $4 to $7 per voter in traditionally Republican parts of the state,” the Amistad report notes.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a CONGRESSIONAL hearing on October 23, 2019.
In fact, the money zuckerberg donated was unnecessary, the report said, because public money was still available and underused.
In addition to explaining the impact of Mr. Zuckerberg’s donations, Mr. Klein outlined broader concerns about the growing reliance on digital technology in the election.
“We’ve known for years about the vulnerability of digital footprints in elections,” Klein told the audience. “In fact, the FBI estimated in 2016 that more than half of our poll books were hacked by foreign interests. So the digital concerns are real.”
“There’s a lot of evidence that foreign interests are tied to our digital footprint and the way we manage elections,” Mr. Klein said. “Whether we’re going to continue in this way has to be discussed in this country, it has to be discussed openly.”
“I believe there are major loopholes, so we should be honest and go back to paper tickets,” he said.
Mr Klein’s comments suggest that there are other vote-rigging concerns besides the use of digital systems.
Various electronic systems are used in elections: voting machines, ballot scanners, counting machines and tabulating machines that directly record voters’ voting intentions electronically, some of which can even combine these functions.
Voting machines are used during the Democratic Party primary in Chicago, Illinois, on March 17, 2020.
The makers of the machines say their various products can provide audit leads on paper ballots in accordance with national regulations. Ballot machines that record ballots directly print out paper ballots.
Chris Krebs, former head of the Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was recently fired by President Trump, said paper ticket audit leads had improved since the 2016 election.
He said 82 percent of the votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were “on paper.” He told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that number has increased to 95 percent by 2020.
Mr. Krebs, however, did not specify whether he was referring to actual paper ballots cast by voters by hand or to machine-generated records of paper ballots.
In 2017, a former head of MI6’s foreign intelligence service said paper ballots were the safest and opposed the long-standing process of allowing machines into the UK to count elections by hand.
Sir John Sawers, head of MI6 from 2009 to 2014, told the BBC that the more systems were connected, the more vulnerable they became.
“The only problem is that the younger generation expects to be able to do things remotely via electronic devices,” he said. “The seemingly clumsy pencil and the piece of paper you fold in half into a ballot box is actually much safer than anything electronic.”
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