The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote—and How To Get It Back

by Thom Hartmann

The article added that women make up the majority of student, elderly, and minority voters, according to the US Census Bureau. In every category, the GOP wins when women can’t vote.

Hofeller drew thousands of maps in his life—thousands of permutations of state maps drawn and redrawn to find all the ways that Republicans could gain electoral advantages without violating the letter of the Voting Rights Act. When he died, Republicans had no idea that he had saved those maps on hard drives. They also had no idea that Hofeller’s daughter would discover those hard drives—and then turn them over to Common Cause, a government accountability group. When Common Cause went through his files, they found a trove of prepared maps for redistricting Republican-controlled states such as Texas and North Carolina.

It’s an example of why Ireland, after experimenting with American voting machines for one election, sold its $80 million worth of machines for scrap metal (for a mere $79,000); it refused to resell them as voting machines, taking a huge loss on the deal, so that there was no chance any other country would buy them and make the mistake of using them in an election.

Even the US ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018, Nikki Haley, called for a return to paper ballots—at least in the Congo. The Washington Post reported in September 2018 that “Haley called on Congo to abandon its plan to use the machines for the first time in favor of paper ballots—what she called a ‘trusted, tested, transparent and easy-to-use voting method.’” And earlier that year, she said, in her official capacity, “These elections must be held by paper ballots so there is no question by the Congolese people about the results. The U.S. has no appetite to support an electronic voting system.”30 Just two months after the Washington Post published that story, 25 states in the United States allowed voting by email or online portals, and around 350,000 voting machines were in use in the 2018 midterm elections.