Citizens have overwhelmingly voiced that they want voting administrators “to be sure people’s votes are counted as marked and that all vulnerabilities that threaten their vote be removed.”  They want technology in the voting process reduced and strongly desire SECURITY over CONVENIENCE when it comes to their vote.

We believe Tennessee should:

Authenticate the voter.  Authenticate the ballot.  Authenticate the count.

That can be done with the following Guiding Principles:

• Voter ID is an absolute… and is NOT voter suppression.
• ACCURACY is more important than CONVENIENCE!
• Greater transparency is the rule.
• The voting process should contain as little technology as possible.
• Aggressive voter roll clean-up before should be pursued before every election.
• Voter rolls should be locked and the registration process moved totally offline during early/election day voting.
• The technology in the machines should be moved into the ballot: 
  • Hand-marked, high-security paper ballots with currency-grade security.
• Return to precinct voting (versus vote center voting) so there is no internet in the poll next to voting machines that cannot be inspected internally by citizens or cyber experts before, during or after an election.
• Precincts should be smaller in composition and greater in number.
• No ballot marking devices (BMDs) since they are hackable and produce non-voter-verifiable ballots with vote selections in encrypted QR/Bar codes that can’t be read by humans.
• Empower an election crime division for the state with heavy prison sentences for all who commit voting fraud.
• A reduced early voting season, but election day a holiday.
• Citizens should be able to track their ballot through its counting process.
• Precinct voting should be live streamed to allow citizens to see voting activity, while protecting voter privacy.
• Tabulator accuracy should be checked by hand-counting ballots the next day.
  • The counting of ballots should be live streamed.
• Ballots and key poll officer reports should be posted the next day so citizens could perform their own audit:  “The People’s Audit.”
• No single vendor should be the sole source supplying, generating, scanning, counting and tallying all ballots in an election.  

Additionally, all electronic machines in the county’s voting system must undergo:

• A Security Risk Evaluation instead of a simple recertification (as the State Election Commission has pledged to do which relies on the Election Assistance Commission [EAC] and the Voting Security Testing Labs [VSTL], both of which are untrustworthy).  We’ve spelled out a process for this assessment that would involve a transparent, citizen committee of cybersecurity/IT/process control experts.
• Hash Validation and Penetration Testing implemented before every election on evey machine.

Download Comprehensive Vote Model PDF.