BIG NEWS: the #Recount campaign has won our court fight in Wisconsin, overcoming the final obstacle to a groundbreaking examination of voting machine source code by defeating voting machine vendors' attempts to gag us from telling the public what we find.

https://www.facebook.com/drjillstein/posts/4920676651305819

WI courts ruled that the largest US manufacturer of voting machines, ES&S, has no right to suppress the findings of our upcoming inspection of voting machine source code. The inspection will bring much needed transparency & accountability to the software that counts our votes.

It's outrageous that the voting machine vendors managed to tie our #recount case up in court for almost 4 years with their legal machinations funded by profits from government contracts, preventing us from examining voting machines used in Wisconsin before the 2020 election.

We're in discussions with @jhalderm to plan our examination of voting machine source code in WI. This is a unique opportunity for independent scrutiny, & will give the public & officials a more complete picture of election security risks & ultimately help make voting more secure.

This is the #Recount's latest win for election integrity. In 2018, we settled with the state of Pennsylvania for a guarantee to replace all paperless voting machines with voter-verifiable paper ballot systems by 2020, and begin risk-limiting audits to verify vote counts by 2022.

We took PA back to court to decertify flawed ES&S Expressvote XL ballot-marking devices, & while the judge ruled against us, it helped dissuade several counties from purchasing EVXLs. In all, our #recount litigation in PA struck a huge blow against paperless DRE voting machines.

The 2016 WI #recount, while not the full hand recount of all counties needed to truly verify the result, brought unprecedented transparency to WI’s vote-counting process, & led to decertification of voting machines observed miscounting ballots during the recount in Racine County.

The 2016 WI #recount produced a mountain of data, which was analyzed by MIT, Harvard, & U of Wisconsin researchers & put to use by election integrity advocates & the WI Elections Commission to improve practices that had led to 1 out of every 170 votes originally being miscounted.

The #recount effort in Michigan was halted by a GOP-appointed judge but still highlighted glaring problems with MI elections, including 84K presidential undervotes, faulty machines in urban areas breaking down, & a state law preventing recounts of precincts where problems arise.

In Detroit, 80+ ballot scanners broke down on election day 2016 & 60% of precincts were ruled ineligible for recounts. While the Michigan #recount was halted, after we shined a spotlight on this disaster MI replaced many of its faulty voting machines following the 2016 election.

Thanks & congratulations to our dedicated legal team, particularly Debbie Greenberger & Chris Meuler in Wisconsin litigation & Ilann Maazel in Pennsylvania, & the thousands of people who supported the 2016 #recount as donors & volunteers. This win for democracy belongs to us all!