Securing Elections in the State of New Jersey is a Small Price for Democracy

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LET'S DEMAND SECURE VOTING MACHINES NOW! 

Picture credit: Philadelphia Inquirer 

New Jersey has the 5th least secure voting system in the country. Given the massive loss of confidence in US elections following the last election, the $60 to $80 million it would take to replace our e-machines with voting machines that produce a paper trail is essential. Let's not give conspiracy theorists or election hackers a foothold in questioning or tampering with our elections in New Jersey. 

HISTORY

N.J. was going to have paper-based voting machines more than a decade ago. Will it happen by 2020? - from The Philadelphia Inquirer from March 10, 2019. 

"New Jersey was once at the vanguard of voting security. In the mid-2000s, it became an issue thanks to a major lawsuit from voters. The state Legislature in 2005 passed a law requiring that machines allow voters to verify paper ballots by 2008, then required audits of those paper trails. It even set aside $20 million in funding to retrofit machines to print records."

"Instead, the governor took back the money as the recession struck; lawmakers suspended the requirement to buy new machines; no funding has materialized since."
"Now, as the 2020 elections draw ever nearer, a handful of counties are replacing their machines, some of them two decades old. Others will continue to rely on current systems, waiting for federal or state funding before undertaking the costly, time-consuming upgrade to protect citizens’ votes."

PRESENT-DAY 
N.J. among nation’s worst in making sure elections are secure. Why haven’t we fixed that?
Updated May 15, 2021; Posted May 15, 2021 - by Jonathan D. Salant | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

"After President Donald Trump and his Republican allies singled out Georgia and Arizona in falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, both states recounted their votes and found no significant problems."

"That’s not so easy to do in New Jersey after each election. It’s one of just six states that do not require a paper trail that allows election officials to check that voting machines were not hacked and the results not tampered with." <snip>

"While New Jersey could do an audit last year because so many ballots were cast by mail, that was a one-shot deal due to the coronavirus pandemic. Going forward, the Garden State will remain an outlier unless the state comes up with the estimated $60 million to $80 million needed to replace county voting machines."

“That’s totally the problem,” said Eileen Kean, a Monmouth County elections commissioner. It’s really a very, very expensive undertaking. Voting experts said that a paper trail will do more for election security than all of the voting restrictions being enacted by Republican state legislatures, including both Georgia and Arizona."

FUNDING DEMOCRACY IN NJ

How can we fund $80 million for secure voting in NJ? The NJ annual budget is about $60 billion dollars. Funding a safe and verifiable voting process would cost 0.0013% of the annual budget. It isn't a question of not having enough money, it is a question of priorities. There are lots of no-sweat choices we can make. For example, we can pay for safe elections through a one-time dip into property tax rebate revenue.
According to the 2021/22 NJ budget, the appropriations for general revenues and property tax relief are up 9.6%, or $2.873 billion. About $1.2 billion is budgeted for property tax relief. Just 6.7% of that money could be used to buy verifiable voting machines. That would still leave $1.12 billion for property tax relief next year. 

And while we are at it, the distribution of the one-time $80 million debit could be progressively shared to make this tax rebate fairer. 

There is a "... divergence in spending on programs offering targeted help to those who need it most and on tax breaks for homeowners no matter their income is largely a function of separate policies that have been put in place over the years for each relief program. But the current trend for divvying up the more than $1.2 billion in annual funding for the relief programs comes as Murphy, a first-term Democrat, regularly talks about enacting fiscal policies that will make New Jersey “stronger and fairer.”  - New Jersey Spotlight - Sept 6, 2020 

If you believe that securing our elections during this national threat to American democracy should be a much higher priority, then: 

1. Share this FB post widely among your friends and with the FB groups to which you belong.

2. Write or call your state representatives and ask them to support Vincent Mazzeo's bill, A291) that would require counties to replace their voting machines and buy machines that produce a paper trail. 

3. CONTACT Gov. Murphy's office and demand that he makes it a priority to secure the vote in New Jersey https://www.nj.gov/governor/contact/all/

OR CALL or write the Governor's office directly: 

Governor Phil Murphy's Office
225 W State St, Trenton, NJ 08625

(609) 292-6000

Thanks.

Obsessive Political Delirium Syndrome – Confessions of a Chronic Sufferer

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

What follows is a post from the Humans of New York Facebook page that unfortunately resonated with both my daughter and me. I recognized this account as a satirical description of what I call “Obsessive Political Delirium” syndrome:

“I had three bottles of wine on election night. I got in bed after Pennsylvania and stayed there for a week. I’d only get up to use the bathroom and get more wine. I’d have left the country by now if it wasn’t for my elderly mother. I’ve weaned myself off Xanax, but I haven’t recovered.

I still watch MSNBC all the time. I’ll spend entire days on the couch. I’ll wake up with Morning Joe and go to sleep with Brian Williams. I’ll get on Twitter during the commercials and search for any hint that somebody’s going to be indicted. I know way too much. I know the name of every congressman. I know their district. I know what percentage of the vote they got.

Before 2016, I hadn’t purchased a book in twenty years. Now I buy all the political ones. The scarier the better. I even got the Omarosa book. Nobody else wanted to read it so I thought I’d take one for the team. I went to DC for four different protests.

And a few weeks ago I drove down to Mexico to see for myself what was happening on the border. I’m obsessed. It’s not healthy. Recently I was able to cut myself off from politics for about a week. But then here comes Brett Kavanaugh and I’m back on the couch for three days.”

The malady described above first gripped me when Richard Nixon won the Presidential election in 1964. His politics and creepiness consumed my attention right up until his impeachment. My political worrying was debilitating and depressing. It also triggered a secondary obsession over the prior assassinations of two Kennedys and a King. I have never been able to shake the feeling that those assassinations are the start of a long thread that has run through U.S. history ever since.

No sooner had I gotten my life back under control when WHAM! Ronald Reagan was elected. He surrounded himself with some of the same creeps and spooks that buzzed around Nixon. That bout of fibral political delirium peaked with the Iran-Contra scandal and dissipated slowly due to the very dissatisfying lack of another well-deserved impeachment.

Then I went into a deep political slumber for a while, and it was glorious. But one evening a CBS news special to explain this new White-Water scandal failed to reveal anything at all of substance. I remember thinking, "OH GOD! Not again!" Here was another rogue’s gallery of radical neo-cons and dirty tricksters flexing their new conservative media machines. They were out for a revenge impeachment of Bill Clinton, and they got it. Clinton wasn't convicted in the Senate, of course, because well... lying about a blow job to protect your reputation isn't exactly a high crime. Still, the dark forces behind the conservative façade got their pound of flesh.

After that I thought I would catch a break, but then Bush v. Gore happened.  I went nuts all over again about the stolen election and the discovery that electronic voting machines were craftily designed to be hacked. All the voting machine companies were owned by partisan Republicans at the time. That bout of the infliction culminated in my having to hire a First Amendment Lawyer to protect me from a threatened SLAPP suit by the company that ran our local elections, and a threatened criminal investigation of me by my county Prosecutor for bringing our local electronic voting machine vulnerabilities to the attention of our county government. I fended off the SLAPP suit (incurring legal fees) but it had its intended effect on me. I shut up about local politics.

I set out to cure myself of obsessive political delirium and was just starting to make good progress when Donald Trump started winning primaries. And OMG… here we are in the thick of the worst political disaster in our country’s history, with a President who is a “Clear and Present Danger” to the security of the United States.

I feel so bad for my children who have come down with this horrible affliction. I have suffered from recurring bouts of it my whole adult life. And the trauma now is greater than at any time in the past. Is this the final festering of an old injury that began with Kennedy’s assassination, or is it the end of America as we know it? I take some solace in the results of the 2016 Congressional election that has installed so many women and such great diversity into the House of Representatives. I also take comfort in the rising activism of a younger generation, including Parkland survivors, that sees things the same way I do. For my children’s sake, I hope that my hope for the future will be realized this time.