WeCountNow is a newly formed organization developing a bold campaign to directly engage the public in restoring public, observable vote counting, and thus trust and integrity, to our American elections.
The WeCountNow campaign will generate, both nationally and community-by-community, rosters of hundreds of thousands of citizens who volunteer to serve for four hours as Election Day vote counters. Those rosters will be presented, with cameras rolling, to county and state Boards of Election, dramatically answering the stock BOE lament that concealed, computerized counting is necessary because they have no idea where they could find enough humans to do the job.
When this question was polled nationally in 2012, fully 57 percent of respondents answered that they would perform such service (just 23 percent saying no), with that majority cutting across partisan lines. We are confident that number would be much higher today. The problem is that no one has asked.
WeCountNow plans to be the first to ask, working with organizations such as Indivisible and the NAACP to canvass and sign up vote counters using the materials we provide.
We are a new, unproven concept. But the "proven" election integrity groups have unfortunately proven to have not succeeded in substantially changing anything. Serious reform is DOA in the Senate and the battle in the states is not going well. Meanwhile, the disparities between the tallied votes and both tracking and exit polling have only widened over the years, with public trust in electoral outcomes cratering.
Our approach is entirely different because it could not be more clear: a sea change is needed. The public has been hypnotized into assuming an Election Night role of passive spectator, and a blinded one at that. WeCountNow aims to turn spectators into participants and a passive public into an active one – one that embraces the right and the duty to secure our electoral process by counting the votes observably in public.
What we are proposing is not radical: it is how voting is verified in Canada, New Zealand, and Germany; after witnessing our red-flag 2016 elections, Holland and Norway joined the hand-counting fold for their national elections in 2017. We can at least hand count the presidential contest and even all federal contests, of which there are a maximum of three on any ballot. WeCountNow asks each signee to pledge just four hours – it is more than enough to get the job done!
We are well aware that few BOEs are likely to welcome our volunteers with open arms (though we have good reason to believe some will; Virginia Martin, co-commissioner of elections for Columbia County, New York, is, for example, an enthusiastic backer). The crucial first step is to bring visibly and dramatically to national attention that the capacity for public, observable counting does in fact exist and that a sea change in public attitude is underway. Our success is not guaranteed, but the outcome of the 2020 elections for the presidency, Congress, and key statehouses may hinge upon it. Circumstances make it all too clear that we cannot go into this election year fighting the same old fight for an inch of ground in the election administration trenches and standing essentially pat on election security and transparency.
To impact the critical 2020 election, the movement has only a little more than a year to blossom and go viral but the ethos and pathos are there, ready to boil. Over and over – in person at events, on Twitter, and by readers of my book CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy – we are asked the same question: “I know we’re in trouble. Please tell us, what can we do? What can we do?”
Millions of voters want to step up, to act. WeCountNow will give us that opportunity.
Contact: Jonathan Simon; 617-538-6012; VerifiedVote2004@aol.com; @JonathanSimon14.