What’s the Price of a Secure Voting System? Less Than the Cost of a Bad One

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Enough momentum has been built against America’s faulty voting systems to “secure” the systems by 2008, the New York Times reports. By “secure,” we primarily mean adding paper trails (paper rolls that voters can check before they leave but that stay in the booth).

That’s no a panacea. Models such as Diebold’s TSx make voters to go on a wild goose chase to find their vote record. The scroll is covered by an opaque brown door, making the paper trail if not undetectable, then difficult to find. Three in four voters didn’t check the paper trail after voting. One study showed Cleveland’s paper trail didn’t even match the votes. Bev Harris told us, “It’s like if you ask a 6-year-old to do the dishes and he leaves gobs of food on the plates. It’s almost unusable…. the paper trail is not worth the paper it’s printed on, because nobody uses it and nobody can see it.”

One snag is voting machine companies lobbying against making their software public. Another is the expense. The $150 million proposed in federal aid for the machines is not enough to pay for the changes. That total, by the way, is $50 million less than we spend in Iraq every day. Isn’t it worth more to safeguard voting? Not just because it happens to be the foundation of our democracy, but also because, in a roundabout way, insecure ballots got us into the war in the first place?

— April Rabkin

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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