You Voted Republican, Trust Us
"It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."
– Tom Stoppard, 1972
Purged voter lists are only one method of pre-determining the outcome of an
election. An even more serious problem lies inside the voting machines
themselves. While representatives of Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia herald the
benefits of their systems, not everyone shares their enthusiasm. Dr. Rebecca
Mercuri is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bryn Mawr College
and has been referred to as "the leading independent expert on electronic
voting technology." Shortly before the 2000 Presidential election, Mercuri
defended her Ph.D. dissertation on the subject of "Electronic Vote
Tabulation: Checks and Balances" at the Engineering School of the University
of Pennsylvania.
Mercuri's website is an astonishing checklist of the lack of safeguards and
other failings that plague the current crop of electronic voting systems.
One of Mercuri's primary concerns is that electronic systems provide no way
for a voter, or election officials, to verify that a cast ballot corresponds
to the vote being recorded. As Mercuri notes on her site, "Any programmer
can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else,
and prints yet another result." There is no known way to ensure that this is
not happening inside of a voting system. Companies such as Diebold, ES&S and
Sequoia, which manufacture the machines and provide the code that runs them,
simply take a "trust us" approach.
Mercuri also reports that no electronic voting system has been certified to
even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer
security standards such as the ISO Common Criteria, nor are they required to
comply with such standards. Thus, no current electronic voting system is
secure by the U.S. government's own standards.
Electronic voting systems without individual printouts for examination by
voters do not provide an independent audit trail. All voting systems can
make mistakes and the ability to perform manual hand-counts of ballots is
the only way to verify results. Computer glitches are already cropping up
all across the United States. Numerous irregularities with electronic voting
machines have already been reported:
In Georgia, which recently purchased 22,000 Diebold touch screens, some
voters touched one candidate's name on the screen and saw another
candidate's name appear
A former news reporter in Florida discovered that votes were being tabulated
in 644 Palm Beach precincts: but Palm Beach only has 643 precincts. An
earlier court case in Florida found the same discrepancy. A reporter in New
Jersey observed 104 precincts with votes in an area that has only 102
precincts.
Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman won the state of
Alabama. However, the next morning, 6,300 of Siegelman's votes disappeared
and the election was handed to Republican Bob Riley. A recount was requested
and denied.
In North Carolina, a software programming error caused vote-counting
machines to skip over several thousand votes, both Republican and
Democratic. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the
election.
In Comal County Texas, an uncanny coincidence resulted in three Republican
candidates winning by exactly 18,181 votes each. Two other Republican
candidates outside Texas also won by exactly 18,181 votes.
In October, election officials in Raleigh, N.C., discovered that early
voters had to make several attempts to record their votes on ES&S systems.
Officials compared the number of voters to the number of votes counted and
realized that 294 votes had been lost.
A report from the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project states that an
estimated 1.5 million presidential votes were not recorded in 2000 because
of difficulties using voting equipment and that electronic machines have the
second highest rate of unmarked, uncounted and spoiled ballots in
presidential, Senate, and governor elections over the last 12 years.
Federally mandated voting machines, almost exclusively manufactured by ES&S,
Diebold and Sequoia are being constructed and tested under obsolete FEC
recommendations. The US has authorized spending of over four billion dollars
on new voting equipment, but as Mercuri notes, "failed to require or enforce
adequate security, usability, reliability, and auditability controls over
the products being purchased." The numerous flaws cited above ably
demonstrate Mercuri's point.
Her concerns are echoed by Professor David Dill from Stanford University. He
has created a resolution warning of the dangers of electronic voting
machines. "Do not be seduced by the apparent convenience of "touch-screen
voting" machines, or the "gee whiz" factor that accompanies flashy new
technology," he writes. "Using these machines is tantamount to handing
complete control of vote counting to a private company, with no independent
checks or audits. These machines represent a serious threat to democracy."
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00147.htm
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5 Republicans win by 18,181 votes
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