Vellum was the original blockchain. Nothing beats old school technology for the safest, soundest voting.
Say it with me, kids: PAPER BALLOTS AND VOTER ID WITH EVERYONE VOTING ON THE SAME DAY is the only way to restore public faith in our elections.
Under the laws of the United Kingdom, all new laws created by the Parliament must be written on vellum, to be stored securely. The reason is that vellum lasts far longer than paper.
A great piece appeared in the BBC on 15 February 2016:
Last week the House of Lords decided to end the printing of laws on vellum for cost reasons. But now the Cabinet Office is to provide the money from its own budget for the thousand-year-old tradition to continue.
Vellum lasts a long time. Dig into the archives of the UK's parliament and pull out the oldest extant law and you'll find a very old document. It was first inscribed in 1497.
Over time, ordinary paper can deteriorate rapidly, while vellum is said to retain its integrity for much longer. Original copies of the Magna Carta, signed more than 800 years ago on vellum, still exist.
When it comes to storing an immutable record of Parliament’s stated intentions, vellum is far better than ephemeral digital records.
We are far enough into the Computer Age to know how swiftly a “permanent” electronic record can fail.
There's an excellent example of how a digital archive can quickly run into problems.
Between 1984-86 the BBC Domesday Project engaged more than a million people from around Britain.
Children at more than 9,000 schools helped compile a statistical survey, personal thoughts and memories. The data was stored on special laserdiscs, then seen as a technology of the future.
Nearly two decades later, there were virtually no extant disc players able to read the specially formatted discs. After a lot of work, the data was made readable, but the case for digital archiving had suffered a setback.
"Examples like that imply that digital is more fragile than physical," Mitcham laments.
Mike Tibbetts, one of the two creators of the Domesday Project, wrote in 2008, external that "the fault in all this lies not in the lack of vision or foresight by the technologists but that, at least in the UK, the national systems of data preservation and heritage archiving simply don't work reliably or consistently."
This is the issue, according to Jenny Mitcham. Just as preserving a physical archive requires careful consideration of temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure to prevent paper from turning brittle and breaking, so digital archives need to be tended to.
When it comes to American voting, while future historians may value having 150 million vellum ballots to review (or 200 million if Democrat “the dead vote thrice” districts are counted), in reality we only need a solid record of voting to last for the current election, so paper will do just fine.
Paper is wildly better than digital records. Computer records can be deleted, duplicated, replaced, hacked, simply lost if a strong enough magnet gets near a machine. There are so many ways to alter or destroy electronic records, it is simply absurd to tabulate votes using computers.
Say it with me, kids: WE DEMAND PAPER BALLOTS AND VOTER ID WITH EVERYONE VOTING ON THE SAME DAY. That is the best way to secure the vote.
If you want an absentee ballot, you better fill out a notarized form with a doctor's note 6 months in advance of Election Day. That ballot request needs to be viewed and reviewed by at least THREE elected - not appointed - officials, randomly chosen from a pool of eligible people, using a randomizing mechanism used by State Lottery systems.
Running a fair election is not rocket science or brain surgery, but it does require a moral compass. As a magnetic compass points to the magnetic north pole of the planet, in analogous fashion, the paper ballot is the “magnetic north” on a morality test of those concerned with truly fair elections versus every other person who prefers to lie, cheat and steal their party into power.
The Democrats have a wide and weird - to borrow their newest talking point about JD Vance, a hardworking man who believes in God and the family, but using it correctly - array of complaints about requiring a voter to show an ID in order to, you know, elect the leaders of our country. The weirdest by far is their insistence that requiring a person to show an ID to verify their right to vote is …. I bet you’ve already guessed it…. that’s right! “RACIST!”
I cannot for the life of me figure out how something that everyone does all daylong can be racist, but that is the Democrats’ go-to accusation for everything that might restrict their power.