NATIONAL - CITIZENS SUE TO STOP GOVERNMENT FROM LINKING VOTES TO VOTERS: Public officials now admit they can see how you voted and link it to your name. This issue affects Colorado, almost all of Washington State, as well as some locations in California, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia and likely other states as well.
In Colorado, election officials have been trying to cover up this inconvenient (and unconstitutional) issue, by preventing the public or the media from examining ballots... ever, even after elections are over. The Hart brand ballot scanner, widely used in CO, WA, and TX, affixes a unique identifier bar code to each ballot. With mail-in ballots, this produces a mechanism for the government or its vendors to download how you voted into a database.
The Colorado nonprofit Citizen Center group is now seeking a federal court ruling prohibiting the government from placing marks on the ballots, or otherwise using mechanisms to identify your vote choices. This requires no new law; these practices were put into place in violation of the Colorado Constitution. PRESS RELEASE - Citizen Center -
http://www.thecitizencenter.org/blog/2012/2/12/supplemental-press-materials-21312-press-conference.html
TWO WAYS TO SEE HOW YOU VOTED:
1) By implanting a unique number or bar code on each ballot, compromising ballot privacy for millions of absentee voters at a time;
2) By creating a large number of small voter subsets; then, identifying sets with homogenous votes. Small subsets are created with some mail-in and vote-center systems.
Also see article linked below about Indiana voter privacy theft. This uses a third mechanism, implanted by the vendors into voting machines at the behest of the state of Indiana. If officials admit this now in Colorado and Indiana, and citizens found this in Washington state, one wonders how pervasive vote harvesting is and why this functionality has been kept secret from the public?
http://www.pal-item.com/article/20120130/NEWS01/201300304/Recount-prompts-vote-center-questions?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE
Recount prompts vote center questions - Fayette County won't use vote centers in this year because of privacy concerns..."The bipartisan board would tell the vendor to cancel a number," [Wayne County Clerk Jo Ann] Stewart said. "The clerk can't individually go in and cancel a vote. I don't have the password. Only the vendor has it to protect the integrity of the election."
Only the vendor? (In Indiana). Only the government? (In Colorado). The issue of linking vote choices to voter is going to grow much bigger than Colorado. The core of the Colorado Clerk's arguments revolves around an abhorrent belief that the government has a right to see how you voted. The Citizen Center lawsuit correctly argues that under the Colorado Constitution NO ONE has that right. Indiana is still scratching its head about this.
