'BradCast' 12/13/2019 (Guest: Prof. Philip B. Stark, of UC-Berkeley)
On today's 'BradCast':\xa0 Another historic day as the U.S. House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to approve two Articles of Impeachment -- for Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress -- against Donald John Trump. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that he intends to rig the U.S. Senate's impeachment trial and has been colluding with the accused. Elections matter: on his way out the door, Kentucky's former Republican Tea Party Governor Matt Bevin pardoned or gave commutations to 428 convicted criminals, including a convicted murderer whose family made big donations to Bevin's campaign. Kentucky's new Democratic Governor Andy Beshear restored voting rights to 140,000 non-violent former felons. In Pennsylvania, election integrity groups sued to block the use of brand new, 100% unverifiable touchscreen Computer Ballot Marking devices that failed to correctly record tens of thousands of votes during last month's municipal elections, because failure of the machines would be more than enough to throw the results of the 2020 Presidential election in the crucial swing state. After that catastrophic failure in a live election, the previously well-respected Verified Voting watchdog group let elections officials and voting machine vendors off the hook by endorsing a so-called Risk Limiting Audit of the computer-marked paper ballot summaries produced by the systems. That was the last straw for today's guest, UC Berkeley's Philip Stark, the inventor of the post-election Risk Limiting Audit (RLA) protocol, who has been warning elections officials and vendors that use of RLA on computer-marked paper ballots is "meaningless," "security theater, not election integrity." Stark explains why he resigned from the board of Verified Voting and explains how RLAs work -- and don't \u2013 and what type of voting systems are best for the secure and overseeable American elections...