According to Gallup President Obama (48%) and Mitt Romney (46%) remain closely matched in key 2012 election swing states. Twenty-two percent of voters in those states are undecided or say they could change their presidential preference. Video from [HERE] If people are actually allowed to vote the results will be counted electronically, unobserved by the public and done in secrecy. 

“Why Obama Is Likely to Lose in 2012” is the title of a column Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June 2011. It’s not Rove’s prediction: this is his plan to make sure Obama will lose. He said, “even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out [Obama’s] winning margin in North Carolina.”

Here, Rove is not talking about winning by convincing black voters to vote Republican. The key to victory is preventing the black vote. Period. Rove suggests, with a wink and nudge, the Game Plan:

“If their [black voters’] share of the turnout drops just one point in North Carolina, Mr. Obama’s 2008 winning margin there is wiped out two and a half times over.”

The smell of freshly laundered white sheets, brown shirts, and sulfur is unmistakable: The key to Republican victory, in the Carolinas and nationwide, then, is making sure black people don’t turn out. Or, if they do, that they’re turned away. Or, if they can’t be turned away, that their votes are not counted.

If Rove can stand in the polling station doorway and block three million voters from entering and bulldoze another three million ballots into a landfill he can make the Ice Man’s dreams come true. I can report that Rove is well on his way to success, and he’s only just begun. [MORE] 

Electronic Voting is Unobservable & Done in Secret

From [Bradblog] Last March, the country's highest court found that secret, computerized vote counting was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the country was Germany, and the Constitution violated by e-voting systems was the one that the U.S. wrote and insisted Germans ratify as part of their terms of surrender following WWII.

Paul Lehto, a U.S. election attorney and Constitutional rights expert, summarized the German court's unambiguous, landmark finding:

• "No 'specialized technical knowledge' can be required of citizens to vote or to monitor vote counts."
• There is a "constitutional requirement of a publicly observed count."
• "[T]he government substitution of its own check or what we’d probably call an 'audit' is no substitute at all for public observation."
• "A paper trail simply does not suffice to meet the above standards.
• "As a result of these principles,...'all independent observers' conclude that 'electronic voting machines are totally banned in Germany' because no conceivable computerized voting system can cast and count votes that meet the twin requirements of...being both 'observable' and also not requiring specialized technical knowledge.

Hand-counting paper ballots is no good at all, argue critics, unless you really want to know who the actual winner of the election was...

After the verdict in the case --- filed by a computer expert and his political scientist son --- Lehto wondered how it could be that open, observable democracy is seemingly an inviolable right for "conquered Nazis," but not, apparently, for citizens of the United States...

Particularly since the debacle of Florida's 2000 Presidential Election --- when Republicans went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue that paper ballots should not be counted at all --- the notion of publicly overseen paper ballot tabulation has been widely and unfairly discredited. The discreditors are often media who are too lazy to understand either Constitutional rights or the demands of self-governing democracy; election officials who are either too lazy or too frightened to stand up for those rights for the people they serve; politicians who are quite satisfied with the government's direct control over election results; or the e-voting industry profiteers who have made billions in the wake of democracy's 2000 disaster.

The citizen owners of American elections, however, are the ones who are ultimately left entirely out of the equation.

The argument is made that paper ballots can be easily manipulated; that voters are often sloppy in filling them out, and therefore "voter intent" may be difficult to discern; that human counters are prone to error; and, after all, in this age of computer commerce, entertainment, and everything else, technology surely provides the best answer to the "problem" of reliably counting election results. Technology, after all, is progress – so the argument goes.

Try telling that to Christine Jennings, the 2006 Democratic candidate for Florida's 13th U.S. Congressional District. She was found to have "lost" her election by just 369 votes, even though some 18,000 votes completely "disappeared" on the electronic voting system on Election Day in Sarasota County, her strongest district.

Though Jennings' race was counted on electronic touch-screen systems, even had voter-marked paper ballots existed, they ultimately wouldn't have meant much unless they were publicly hand-counted in front of the citizenry as New Hampshire still reliably and accurately does in some 40% of its precincts at the close of the polls on Election Night. 

Technology does not always offer the most progressive solution to a problem, certainly not when citizen oversight and, thus, the constitutional right of self-governance, is scrapped in the bargain.

While hand-counted paper ballots are routinely discredited by those who stand to gain from secret vote counting, you'll note the odd paradox that in the closest of elections, those same individuals are often the first to demand a fully public hand-count of paper ballots (in jurisdictions where they still exist) to determine who actually won and who actually lost.

In short, hand-counting paper ballots is no good at all, according to the oxymoronic logic of its critics, unless you really want to know who the actual winner of the election was.

It was the fully public counting of hand-marked paper ballots that gave evidence that the unofficial, electronically-scanned election night results in Minnesota's recent U.S. Senate race were wrong. A hand-count settled the results of Washington State's Gubernatorial contest in 2004. And in the 2006 Republican Primary election in Pottawatomie County, Iowa, a hand-count found that seven races had been tallied incorrectly by the county's optical-scan system. Unfortunately, that sort of publicly observable counting has become the exception rather than the rule in this country, and it happens only rarely, in elections where the candidates can afford the extraordinarily high legal costs of a contest, or when the results are so obviously twisted that officials are left with little choice but to count the ballots by hand.

"Hand-counting paper ballots is recognized as the gold standard in state laws across the country," Ellen Theisen of the non-partisan election watchdog organization VotersUnite.org told me. "Why settle for anything less?" [MORE]