The Paper Ballot is the Vote of Record

The lifeblood of our American Republic is free and fair elections, and right now we’re hemorrhaging profusely due to illegal elections by far-left fascists, but we can stop the bleeding of our rights and freedoms by restoring legal integrity into state and federal elections.  The validity of elections depends on the legal vote counts; sounds simple enough, right?  To get a legal vote count, election officials need to count the legal version of a voter’s vote.  The legal version of the vote is what it is…it is the “vote of record.”  The vote of record in elections will always be the historical document kept on file of a voter’s original intent — the paper ballot.

If you follow simple logic and the codified law enforced in state and federal elections, counting the vote of record seems to make sense.  However, state, and federal elections have become needlessly complex due to the implementation of electronic voting systems into the voting process.  Somewhere along the way of adding hardware, software, and election night reporting into the electoral process, officials have decided not to count the official valid vote of record, and elections are therefore not accurate or certifiable.  Simplifying the process by returning to counting the paper ballots can help our elections get back on track, and by hand-counting the voter’s original ballot as the “vote of record” we can restore fairness and transparency to the sacred voting process.

This argument is advanced by a simple question: What is the “vote of record?”  Simply stated, the vote of record is the official public record of the voter’s vote, cast as the official paper ballot.  If this is the official vote of record, and the ballots are digitally archived as “back up” then why are we not counting the originals instead of the computerized versions?  If the ultimate version of the voter’s votes are paper ballots archived in each states’ historical records, and these ballots become the official public record of the vote, why are we not counting them?

Counting paper ballots by hand is simple, time-effective, and cost-effective; yet, setting up the electoral process to accommodate electronic voting computers is complex.  For example, election forensic experts have observed that electronic voting systems produce multiple digital copies of a single paper ballot, beginning initially with the voter placing their marked ballot into a scanning device (Tip o’ the hat to Publius 2.0).  How is it possible for an election official to keep track of the different versions to arrive at an accurate vote count?

What does the law say? The question becomes, “Which version of the cast vote does the law prescribe be counted?”  In Loudoun County, Virginia elections for example, we could not find one reference in the law that clearly states what the “official vote of record” is, nor could we find an easy-to-read law prescribing which version of the vote is official in the certified counts.  We have three main versions of the voter’s vote:

1) The “official paper ballot” (Virginia Code 24.2-644).

2) The scanned image of the official paper ballot.

3) A data file representing the scanned ballot image of the official paper ballot, stored in a computer database.

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