Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8Real Id Coming Soon? By: Frank Friday Esquire Director Black Box Voting Tales Never Die By: Frank Friday Esquire Director all that is required for now to straighten this situation out. So far, no one has put forward any changes as to which offices in Kentucky may be involved in driver licenses. Kentucky County Clerks do not currently have any responsibility, and most would prefer it stay with the circuit clerks, or move entirely to state agencies. Certainly with the way in which the The 2016 election will certainly go down in history for many reasons, not least of which concerns the many conspiracy tales each side seems to be whipping up. One that got a lot of traction was about the controversial billionaire George Soros and his supposed control of the electronic voting machines used throughout the country. Soros was said to control a British company called Smartmatic, which had something to do with election fraud in Venezuela. The CEO also had Soros ties, but the company currently provides no voting equipment in the United States. Smartmatic briefly owned a U.S. company called Sequoia Voting but sold it in 2006. Sequoia and Premier Voting are owned by a Canadian company called Dominion. They bought Premier, which used to be called Diebold, from ES&S, which is the largest machine maker and was forced to sell Premier in 2010 for anti-trust reasons. That being the case, there just aren’t any current connections to Soros or any of his associates and makers of U.S. voting machines. Most importantly, each county in America has its own inventory of machines from various manufacturers, and each board of elections has its own I.T. people who have to reprogram the machines every election. Even if they wanted to, there is no way manufacturers could rig machines years ahead of time to favor one candidate, as it could not be known what voting positions to change or when random test votes for accuracy would be performed. Given enough time, an outsider might possibly go to each polling place during an election and jimmy open a voting machine, with the codes and hardware taken from somewhere to alter it, but I think the election officers at the polling place might object. The fact is, there is no proven instance of any outsider reprogramming an election machine, and as paper ballots and printouts are increasingly being incorporated into the machines as fail- safes, fears about electronic stealing of votes are diminishing to the point of zero. You may remember that it was in 2004 when the first conspiracy theories bubbled up about black box voting in Ohio on Diebold machines to elect George W. Bush. That charge ultimately proved as unfounded as the 2016 Soros stories. federal laws have been trending, there is a preference to put all the function with a single state agency. But with the 120 counties in our state, that may be impractical in the near future. Eventually, however, it may be the State Police and the Transportation Cabinet who take over some of the driver’s license related work currently performed by the circuit clerks. All these unlikely stories about rigged voting machines, however, are a good cautionary example to those of us who work in the election business to be aware just how seriously people take their votes. Even the slightest hint that something might not be on the up-and- up causes great consternation, and in the end, you can’t blame the average citizen. It is up to the government agencies who run elections to be as transparent as possible and to employ every conceivable safeguard to ensure the people have faith in the vote results. Our very democracy depends upon it. That’s something we in Jefferson County have worked hard to guarantee ever since the introduction of electronic voting machines. We have always had a paper ballot or print-out fail- safe for every vote cast. That will also be the case when our new machines are brought out in 2018. The added expense and trouble of doing all this is minimal, but the value of doing so is proven every time there is an election recount or controversy. There just aren’t any such episodes over election results in our community, and if we keep up our high standards, there should not be any in the future. continued from page 1 2 DLN: 987654321 DOB: 07-16-1971 Ricky Bobby 123 Talladega Anywhere, USA Sex: M Endorse: REAL ID