Noted attorney and democracy advocate Paul Lehto is a business law and consumer fraud attorney from Everett, Washington. He is a retired governor of
the Washington State Bar Association and was voted "Rising Star" in 2003 and 2004 by Washington
State Law and Politics magazine.
In 2004 Lehto was one of the thousands of lawyers monitoring the
presidential election. This experience led to greater activity as an election reform advocate. He conducted a highly
regarded study of the unusual 2004 election result patterns in Snohomish
County, Washington (www.votersunite.org/info/SnohomishElectionFraudInvestigation.pdf). The study serves as a blueprint model for evaluating election fraud. Although it focuses mostly on one of the closest
governor's races in the nation's history, Steve Freeman, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania, in his book Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? says it represents one of the best natural studies of election irregularities for shedding light on electronic
voting as a whole.
Following his observations, the lawyer became the plaintiff in
a ground-breaking lawsuit against voting machine manufacturer Sequoia, which controls about 30% of the U.S. market. Lehto and co-plaintiff
John Wells sought to void the purchase contract for the Sequoia electronic voting machines. The approach focused on the illegality
of secret vote counting in democracy, and the inconsistency between "secret" (computerized) voting and the conduct of legitimate
democratic elections. See www.votersunite.org/info/lehtolawsuit.asp.
This lawsuit attracted local and national attention and helped
create a political issue over electronic voting in the county. The political climate changed, and with public focus
also on voting systems because of the election contest in the governor's race, Sequoia ended up losing its touch screen business
in Snohomish County when the County Council voted to abandon touch screen voting machines in favor of mail-in balloting similar
to Oregon's statewide system. Although the county and Sequoia argue this made the lawsuit moot, the lawsuit continues
on appeal, seeking a refund of the county's money.
Award-winning Tribune Media Syndicate columnist Robert Koehler
has featured Lehto in two of his columns on election reform. In one, he quotes Lehto on touch screen
voting: "With DREs (direct-recording electronic, or touch-screen, voting machines), the voter never sees the legal ballot
in the first place, nor do even election officials. The magic numbers just pop out of the DRE" (Direct Recording Electronic voting machine). A representative
sample of Lehto's writing for general audiences regarding elections and electronic voting appeared recently in Real Change News (http://www.realchangenews.org/2006/2006_05_31/jessejames.html).
Most recently Lehto was active in electronic election contest litigation
regarding the 50th Congressional District in California. In the notable appeal from this contest, Congressman Bilbray, who was sworn in by the Speaker of the
House only seven days after the close election, claimed that the swearing in deprived all California courts of any jurisdiction
to protect or even look into local elections for Congress, even though at the time of the swearing in there were no certified
results and over 12,000 ballots had not been counted for even the first time, much less recounted. This "election-nullification"
is perhaps the best example of the kind of anti-democracy actions that Lehto is involved in exposing and opposing.
Lehto appears on radio and television shows, writes for various
publications, and addresses concerned audiences in his work on democracy and election reform and ending the
process of secret unverifiable voting on electronic voting machines, in both their touch screen and optical scan varieties.
Resources: Lehto TV presentation
entitled "Fixing Elections" (panel) http://seattlechannel.org/media/programDetails.asp?title=5010630
