F Y I - WHAT'S HAPPENING?
What
About Voting
Systems?
After the fiasco of the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) appropriating $3.8 billion to help states get better voting equipment and establish statewide voter registration data bases. This act established the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to develop guidelines for states on spending federal funds on voting systems and certifying voting equipment.
This was supposed to happen in time to help with the 2004 elections, but the EAC members were not named until the fall of 2003 and only a fraction of the agency’s intended budget was made available during the first fiscal year. So the new guidelines were not released until December of 2005, with the testing and certification process still to come. Most states applied for waivers from HAVA compliance until the 2006 elections.
This was the first time the federal government had offered financial help to states for buying voting equipment, and the three companies that have touch-screen machines to sell went into high gear to sell them. Many states bought them despite their greater expense and despite many reports that they lacked adequate security. Ninety scientists from universities and laboratories across the country signed a Resolution on Electronic Voting saying that “computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering.”
The touch screen voting equipment has serious problems (besides frequent malfunctions). In most cases, there are no paper ballots, so meaningful recounts are not possible. But even with paper ballots there have been problems. In Cayahoga County in Ohio in 2004, where there were paper ballots and the paper totals should have agreed with the machine totals, there were large, unexplained discrepancies and nearly 10% of the paper ballots were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise untrustworthy.
The underlying problem, with both the touch-screen voting machines and the tabulating machines was that their inner programming was secret, proprietary information, unavailable to the public, and could be changed at any time by insertion of a small “memory card.”
It soon became apparent that the programming could be changed by election personnel or even by hackers, thereby changing the voting results. There isn’t even any way to watch the counting of votes – it’s done invisibly by the software.
A different problem, due to the same blind programming, occurred in New Mexico, where hundreds of votes of native Americans recorded no vote for president.
So in the 2004 elections there were many problems with reported election results, some of them arising from the black box machines but even more from the shenanigans of the county or state election officials who controlled the electoral processes. Unfortunately, those officials were too often also in charge of the campaigns of the Republican candidates, giving them a huge incentive to influence the results and the means to do so. There were many irregularities and they almost always favored the Republican candidates.
In Ohio, at least 357,000 voters, the majority of them Democratic, were prevented from voting or did not have their votes counted. Many who had registered found their names were not on the lists at the polls. Many voters complained that the machines registered their vote for the wrong candidate. Provisional votes were not counted. Absentee ballots were sent out too late, and the website set up for them was shut down. The fullest account of the fraud in the Ohio vote is in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Representative John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005.
In the 2004 Florida election, besides suppression of Democratic votes, many anomalies occurred in precincts where optically scanned paper ballots were fed into a centralized tabulator computer, providing an opportunity for hacking. In some counties where there were only 15% to 25% registered Republicans, the recorded vote for Bush ran as high as three-fourths of the total vote.
Exit polls have always been a reliable predictor of final results – so dependable that discrepancies between exit polls and final vote figures have been taken as signs of vote tampering. In the 2004 election, exit polls strongly favored Kerry, yet the official vote count shifted to favor Bush – to an extent believed not to be possible by chance. The discrepancies between exit polls and reported results were higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were themost Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud.
Since the 2004 elections electoral systems in some states have been changed. In North Carolina and some other states, all voting equipment will now give paper ballots which can be counted in the traditional way. But a bill in the House of Representatives that would mandate paper ballots throughout the country has been bottled up in the House Administration Committee for two years despite having 160 co-sponsors.
In the calamitous 2000 election, there were many irregularities. Instead of dealing with them, the counting of the votes was stopped, and the Supreme Court named Bush the winner. A newspaper consortium spent nearly a year after that counting all the Florida votes. Their conclusions were that Gore actually won the popular vote and thus the electoral vote in Florida - that there was no possible doubt about it.
In November, 2001, The New York Times reported this fact but put it after paragraph 17 of a long article with an ambiguous heading. No major media picked up the story, and the consortium was reluctant to undermine the legitimacy of the president so soon after 9/11 by publicizing it further.
So it seems that we have a two-term president whose “win” in both 2000 and 2004 was very questionable. Greg Palast, in Armed Madness, after detailed descriptions of the fraud in the 2004 election in many states, gives reasons for believing that the same thing is being arranged for the 2008 election.
In the 2006 midterm election, the results so clearly favored the Democrats that the outcome was not challenged. In Pennsylvania, however, the importance of paper ballots was shown in Barbara McIvaine Smith’s run for the state house. Election night, she was down 19 votes, but when the absentee and military votes were counted, she was ahead, changing the house from Republican to Democratic.
In Florida, on the other hand, some voters using touch screen machines with no paper ballot complained of problems finding the Congressional race or seeing a machine summary different from what they had voted. And in Saratoga County 18,000 votes did not register any choice for a Congressional candidate, an unlikely result. But without a paper ballot, there was no way of checking the voters’ intent.
Paper ballots are clearly needed. Congressman Rush The makers of the touch screen machines are friends of the President who promised him a victory in Ohio in 2004.
What can you
do?
It’s in the long-term interest of both Democrats and Republicans to have fair elections based on transparent equipment and systems for registration and voting that accurately reflect the citizens wishes. But only vigilant and knowledgeable citizens can make that happen because the power of election officials can be misused when safeguards are not in place.
§ First, find out if the county or state official in charge of your election will also be in charge of one of the political campaigns, as happened in both Ohio and Florida. If so, publicize the need to change that, and FAX your governor about the importance of putting impartial officials in charge of all elections.
§ Get active in your precinct and county political parties. Help with voter registration. Find out what voting equipment will be used and what risks it has.
§ Write letters to the editor, urging the importance of voting and telling what to look out for and report on.
§ Volunteer to help on election day and ask someone you trust what to watch for and how to report irregularities.
The following websites also have information and
suggestions:
When you go to vote:
If using an optical scanning system, be sure the ballot is unmarked at the start, then notify poll worker if the scanner rejects or mangles the ballot, or doesn’t return the ballot for corrections when you direct it to. Be sure paper ballots are fed into a counting machine that can’t be hacked.
If you are using a touch screen system, report it promptly if the machine is not operating or if you touch one name but another lights up, if you are not allowed to change a choice, or if a paper jams or choices are illegible. Machines may miscount votes despite prior testing. If you see problems, insist that the machine be fixed or removed from service.
12-1-06
