The First Amendment guarantees the right of citizens to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Certainly voter fraud is a public grievance. The purpose of the First Amendment is to promote honesty of government by seeing to it that public business functions under the hard light of full public scrutiny. See Tennessean Newspapers Inc. v Federal Housing Administration . The operative principle is that when the polls are closed to voting, they are open to the public for counting.
Election results are public record.
It is currently illegal in 49 states for citizens to examine the computer software that counts their ballots. And in a North Carolina case, FMC Corp. v Cyprus Foote Mineral Co., trade secrets are not shown if there is evidence that the same technology could be purchased on the market from three or four other vendors. Only the vendors know how the software counts our ballots. Thus, a computer count amounts to a secret count , which defeats the legislative intent of the public count statute. Even if the elections department allowed public inspection of the computer software program that counts our ballots, computer vote fraud is invisible and undetectable.