North Carolina’s Civitas Institute has revealed that the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the Obama campaign conspired to register at least 11,000 people via the internet in violation of state law. This has been confirmed through records requests filed with all of North Carolina’s 100 counties. The counting is not yet complete.
North Carolina does not allow online voting, but according to Civitas, SBE staff authorized an Obama campaign website, Gottaregister.com, to use a web-based registration program. The SBE’s chief lawyer responded to the charge with a plainly disingenuous 1984-newspeak answer:
Wright repeatedly denied that the SBE allowed online voter registration, insisting that it was “web-based voter registration”[ii] instead, as if there could be a “web-based” process that wasn’t online.
The technology from Allpoint Voter Services uses remote-control pens to transmit “signatures” over the Internet, according to techpresident.com[iii]. After entering voter information in an online form, the citizen “signs” it with a stylus or a finger. The Allpoint technology records the signature and then transmits it to one of two autopens – one in California, the other in Nevada[iv]. One of the pens transcribes the signature on to a paper voter registration form. Allpoint then mails the documents to local election boards – or is supposed to, a point we’ll come back to.
To say this is not “online” registration but “web-based” is like saying a certain vehicle is not a car, it’s an automobile. The point of having a “wet signature” – one in ink – is to provide a universally accepted way proving that a prospective voter is affirming in person all the facts on the form. To have an auto pen inserted at one point in this long computerized process is a far different thing. Even the Obama campaign called it online voter registration. Because, no matter how you twist words around, that’s what it is.
According to Civitas, three years ago the state began exploring ways to get around North Carolina voting laws in order to allow online voting. Currently California, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Nevada, Maryland, and New York allow some form of online voter registration. North Carolina and many other states do not. For obvious reasons, this method is fraught with vulnerabilities to fraud.