--- Political Thread --- Avert Your Eyes ---

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http://www.alternet.org/


The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away

By Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
July 30, 2003

Are computerized voting machines a wide-open back door to massive
voting fraud? The discussion has moved from the Internet to CNN, to UK
newspapers, and the pages of The New York Times. People are cautiously
beginning to connect the dots, and the picture that seems to be
emerging is troubling.

"A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread
ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for
Republicans," announced the Associated Press in a story on Nov. 7,
just a few days after the 2002 election. The story added, "Democrats
actually won by wide margins."

Republicans would have carried the day had not poll workers become
suspicious when the computerized vote-reading machines said the
Republican candidate was trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent
in the race for County Commissioner. The poll workers were close
enough to the electorate - they were part of the electorate - to know
their county overwhelmingly favored the Democratic incumbent.

A quick hand recount of the optical-scan ballots showed that the
Democrat had indeed won, even though the computerized ballot-scanning
machine kept giving the race to the Republican. The poll workers
brought the discrepancy to the attention of the County Clerk, who
notified the voting machine company.

"A new computer chip was flown to Snyder [Texas] from Dallas," County
Clerk Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip installed,
the computer then verified that the Democrat had won the election. In
another Texas anomaly, Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth won his
race with exactly 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel won her
state House seat with exactly 18,181 votes, and conservative Judge
Danny Scheel won his seat with exactly 18,181 votes - all in Comal
County. Apparently, however, no poll workers in Comal County thought
to ask for a new chip.

Startling Results

The Texas incidents happened with computerized machines reading and
then tabulating paper or punch-card ballots. In Georgia and Florida,
where paper had been totally replaced by touch-screen machines in many
to most precincts during 2001 and 2002, the 2002 election produced
some of the nation's most startling results.

USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In Georgia, an Atlanta
Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a
49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox News
Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7)
that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby
Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin
of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a
series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in
none of them."

Just as amazing was the Georgia governor's race. "Similarly," the
Zogby polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls predicted the
upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent
Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45
percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to
39 percent last month with a margin of error of plus or minus 4
points."

Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new
touchscreen computerized voting machines, which produced no paper
trail whatsoever. And nobody thought to ask for a new chip, although
it was noted on Nov. 8 by the Atlanta Constitution-Journal that in
downtown Atlanta's predominantly Democratic Fulton County "election
officials said Thursday that memory cards from 67 electronic voting
machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines were
left out of previously announced vote totals." Officials added that
all but 11 of the memory cards were subsequently found and recorded.

Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in a Jan. 23, 2003
editorial titled "Gee Whiz, Voter Fraud?" "In one Florida precinct
last November, votes that were intended for the Democratic candidate
for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because of a misaligned
touchscreen. How many votes were miscast before the mistake was found
will never be known, because there was no paper audit." ("Misaligned"
touchscreens also caused 18 known machines in Dallas to register
Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed: it's
unknown how many others weren't noticed.)

Apparently, nobody thought to ask for new chips in Florida, either.

In Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported just a few days before the
election (Oct. 30, 2002) that, "Dramatic political developments since
Sen. Paul Wellstone's death Friday have had little effect on voters'
leanings in the U.S. Senate race, according to a Star Tribune
Minnesota Poll taken Monday night. Wellstone's likely replacement on
the ballot, former Vice President Walter Mondale, leads Republican
Norm Coleman by 47 to 39 percent - close to where the race stood two
weeks ago when Wellstone led Coleman 47 to 41 percent."

When the computerized machines were done counting the vote a few days
later, however, Coleman had beat Mondale by 50 to 47 percent. If
Mondale had asked for new chips, would it have made a difference?
We'll never know.

One state where Republicans did ask for a new chip was Alabama. Fox
News reported on Nov. 8, 2002 that initial returns from across the
state showed that Democratic incumbent Gov. Don Siegelman had won the
governor's race. But, overnight, "Baldwin County took center stage
when election officials released results Tuesday night showing
Siegelman with 19,070 votes - enough for a narrow victory statewide.
Later, they recounted and reduced Siegelman's tally to 12,736 votes -
enough to give Riley the victory."

What produced the sudden loss of about 6,000 votes? According to the
Fox report: "Probate Judge Adrian Johns, a member of the county
canvassing board, blamed the initial, higher number on 'a programming
glitch in the software' that tallies the votes." All parties were not
satisfied with that explanation, however. Fox added: "The governor
claimed results were changed after poll watchers left."

It turns out the "glitch in the software" in Alabama was discovered by
the Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley
McCullough, who, according to a story in the conservative Daily
Standard, "logged onto the county's municipal website and confirmed
that [incumbent Democratic Governor] Siegelman had actually only
received 12,736 votes - not the 19,070 the Associated Press projected
for him. A computer glitch had caused the error. The erroneous tally
would have put Siegelman on top by 3,582 votes, but the corrected one
gave Riley a 2,752-vote edge."

As the Murdoch-owned Daily Standard noted, "If it hadn't been for one
woman, the Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley
McCullough, things might have gone terribly wrong for [Republican
Gubernatorial candidate] Riley."

Similarly, in Davison County, South Dakota, the Democratic election
auditor noticed the machines double counting votes (it's not noted for
which side) and had a "new chip" brought in.

Hacking Democracy?

This is just the tip of the iceberg of '00 and '02 election
irregularities, as reported by www.votewatch.us. Either the system by
which democracy exists broke that November evening, or was hacked, or
American voters became suddenly more fickle than at any time since
Truman beat Dewey.

Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that
incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war
veteran, was, as Republican TV ads suggested, too unpatriotic to
remain in the Senate, even though his Republican challenger, Saxby
Chambliss, had sat out the Vietnam war with a medical deferment.

Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged
themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly
and inexplicably decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny
Perdue.

Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob
Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other
long-shot Republican candidates around the country really did win
those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them
losing in the last few election cycles, but computer controlled voting
or ballot-reading machines showed them winning.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a
science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third
World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the
United States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate
exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed,
computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and
tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the
voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to
all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and
stockholders - would program, repair and control the voting machines.
You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be
open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny.
You'd think there would be a paper trail of the actual hand-cast vote,
which could be followed and audited if there was evidence of voting
fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

Upsets In Nebraska

It's entirely possible that Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel - who left
his job as head of an electronic voting machine company to run as a
long-shot candidate for the U.S. Senate - honestly won all of his
elections.

Back when Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his own
company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning
and unexpected victories in both the primaries and the general
election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory
against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican
upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris, author of
"Black Box Voting," Hagel won virtually every demographic group,
including many largely black communities that had never before voted
Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate
seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie
Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his Website says, Hagel
"was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on
November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest
political victory in the history of Nebraska." What the site fails to
disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by
computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company
affiliated with Hagel: built by that company; programmed by that
company; chips supplied by that company.

"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's
Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka
(www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). "They say Hagel
shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he
democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft? Between them, Hagel
and Chambliss' victories sealed Republican control of the Senate. Odds
are both won fair and square, the American way, using huge piles of
corporate money to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising. But
either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety in an election
casts a shadow over American democracy.

"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which
all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years
ago. "To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.."

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is
at our doorstep. "They can take over our country without firing a
shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."

Revolution by control of computer chips? Is that really possible in
the USA?

Who's Counting the Votes?

"Imagine it's Election Day 2004," says U.S. Congressman Rush Holt,
also a scientist with a Ph.D. in physics who knows more than a little
bit about both politics and computers. "You enter your local polling
place and go to cast your vote on a brand-new touchscreen voting
machine. The screen says your vote has been counted. As you exit the
voting booth, however, you begin to wonder. How do I know if the
machine actually recorded my vote?"

It's a question that probably hasn't occurred to many Americans, even
those who used the touchscreen machines particularly notable in states
where there were "upsets" and "glitches" in the 2002 election. But it
occurred to Congressman Holt, and after looking at the law, the voting
machines and the companies that produce them, he concluded that, "The
fact is, you don't [know if the machine actually recorded your vote]."

Bev Harris has studied the situation in depth and thinks both
Congressman Holt and candidate Matulka may be on to something. The
company with ties to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when
she went public about the company having built the machines that
counted Hagel's landslide votes.

In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of
business, and the news arms of the huge multinational corporations
that own our networks are suggesting the days of exit polls are over.
Virtually none were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling
silence that caused unease for the many voters who had come to view
exit polls as proof of the integrity of their election systems.

As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians
are wondering if it's a good idea for corporations to be so involved
in the guts of our voting systems. The whole idea of a democratic
republic was to create a common institution (the government itself)
owned by its citizens, answerable to its citizens and authorized to
exist and continue existing solely "by the consent of the governed."

However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite
direction, with governments turning administration of our commons over
to corporations answerable only to profits. The result is the
enrichment of corporations and the appearance that democracy in
America has started to resemble its parody in banana republics.

Further frustrating those concerned with the sanctity of our vote, the
corporations selling and licensing voting machines and voting software
often claim Fourth Amendment rights of privacy and the right to hide
their "trade secrets" - how their voting software works and what
controls are built into it - from both the public and the government
itself.

Secret Software

"If you want to make Coca-Cola and have trade secrets, that's fine,"
says Harvard's Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D., one of the nation's leading
experts on voting machines. "But don't try to claim trade secrets when
you're handling our votes."

The window into who owns whom among the various companies - most of
which are not publicly traded - is equally opaque. One voting machine
company was partially funded at startup by wealthy Republican
philanthropists who belong to an organization that believes the Bible
instead of the Constitution should govern America. Another is partly
owned by a defense contractor. Even the reincarnation of a company
that helped Enron cook their books has gotten into the act.

"There are several issues here," says reporter Lynn Landes, who has
written extensively about voting machines. "First, there's the issue
that the Voting Rights Act requires that poll watchers be able to
observe the vote. But with computerized voting machines, your vote
vanishes into a computer and can't be observed."

To solve this, many are calling for a return to paper ballots that are
hand-counted. It may be slower, but temp-help precinct workers may
even cost less than electronic voting machines (which are a
multi-billion-dollar boon for corporate suppliers), and will ensure
that real humans are tabulating the vote.

"Second," says Landes, "there's the issue of who controls the
information. Of all the functions of government that should not be
privatized, handling our votes is at the top of the list. This is the
core of democracy, and must be open, transparent, and available to
both the public and our politicians of all parties for full and open
inspection."

Although Rush Holt is suggesting there be stringent standards, he
hasn't gone so far as to say corporations shouldn't process our votes.
But why not? Most government functions - from our courts to our fire
departments - run fairly smoothly, despite carping from the extreme
right wing. Increasingly, people across America are demanding that -
like in other democracies around the world - our system of voting
should be publicly owned.

Another point Dr. Rebecca Mercuri raises is that the Help America Vote
Act (HAVA) - passed after the 2000 election - calls for the President
to appoint, as the Act states, "with the advice of the Senate,"
members to "an independent entity, the Election Assistance
Commission." The commission is then to create "the Election Assistance
Commission Standards Board, the Election Assistance Commission Board
of Advisors ... and the Technical Guidelines Development Committee" to
establish standards and oversee compliance of the law by voting
machine companies.

"But the commission has not yet been established," says Mercuri, even
though billions in federal dollars have been distributed under HAVA
for states to buy electronic voting machines and license their
software from private corporations. "As a result," Mercuri says,
"there are currently no meaningful federal standards for voting
machines. Many of the machines used in 2002 were built to industry
guidelines that many question and were established in 1990."

And those standards are problematic. In the course of researching
"Black Box Voting," Harris did a Google search on one of the voting
machine companies, Diebold Election Systems, and found it maintained
an open FTP site on the internet apparently through the 2002 election.
In it, she located computer code used to tabulate elections and,
apparently, actual vote count files that could be downloaded or even
replaced by any visiting hacker.

A website for the New Zealand news publication The Scoop has published
Diebold's files on the Internet, producing lively discussions among
computer enthusiasts and scientists who have apparently (and perhaps
unlawfully) cracked the company's various codes.

The Scoop also performed a statistical analysis comparing American
polls and computer-controlled voting machine results. In many states
there were no variations. In a few, however, they found that "the
Republican Party experienced a pronounced last minute swing in its
favour of between 4 and 16 points. Remarkably this last minute swing
appears to have been concentrated in its effects in critical Senate
races (Georgia and Minnesota) where [the Republican Party] secured its
complete control of Congress."

Purging Voter Rolls

While corporate bungles or the potential for outright vote fraud are a
concern of many opposed to electronic voting machines, another issue
of concern is the concentration of voter rolls in the hands of
partisan politicians instead of civil servants.

In most states, local precincts or counties maintain their own voter
rolls. Florida, however, had gone to the trouble before the 2000
election to consolidate all its voter rolls at the state level, and
put them into the custody and control of the state's elected Secretary
of State, Katherine Harris, who was also the chairman of the Florida
campaign to elect George W. Bush.

As described in disturbing detail in the documentary "Unprecedented"
and in Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," Harris
spent millions to hire a Texas company to clean up the Florida list by
purging it of all convicted felons - using a list of felons who lived
in the State of Texas.

One of the legacies of slavery is that a large number of African
Americans share the same or similar names, and sure enough, when the
Texas felon list was compared with the Florida voter list over 94,000
matches or near-matches were found. Those registered Florida voters -
about half of them African Americans (who generally vote Democratic) -
with names identical or even similar to Texas felons were deleted from
the Florida voter rolls, and turned away from the polls when they
tried to vote in 2000 and in 2002.

Now, under HAVA, states across the nation are consolidating their
voter lists and handing them over to Harris's various peers to be
cleaned and maintained.

Another concern is Internet voting, since it's impossible to ensure
its accuracy. Imagine if all the time a voting machine was being used,
it also had its back door open and an unlimited number of technicians
and hackers could manipulate its innards before, during and after the
vote.

Activists suggest this is one of the reasons it's dangerous that so
many electronic voting machines today are connected to company-access
modems, but it's an even stronger argument against the very core of
democracy - the vote - being handled out in the public of cyberspace.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to have a private
corporation conduct Internet voting for overseas GIs in 2004, and many
fear it'll be used as a beta test for more widespread Internet voting
across the nation. While many Americans think the ability to vote from
home or office over the computer would be wonderfully convenient, the
results could be disastrous: even the CIA hasn't been able to prevent
hackers from penetrating parts of its computer systems attached to the
Internet.

Votes Are Sacred

On most levels, privatization is only a "small sin" against democracy.
Turning a nation's or community's water, septic, roadway, prisons,
airwaves or health care commons over to private corporations has so
far demonstrably degraded the quality of life for average citizens and
enriched a few of the most powerful campaign contributors, but it
hasn't been the end of democracy.

Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and
maintenance of voting over to corporations that can share their
profits openly with politicians (or, like Hagel, become the
politicians), puts democracy itself at peril.

A growing number of Americans are saying our votes are too sacred to
reside only on "chips," and that it's critical that we kick
corporations out of the commons of our voting, and that we make sure
we have a human-verifiable vote paper trail that goes all the way back
to the original hand of the original voter.

If there are chips involved in the voting process, these democracy
advocates say, government civil service employees who are subject to
adversarial oversight by both parties must program them in an
open-source fashion, and in a way that produces a voter-verified paper
trail.

Anything less, and our democracy may vanish as quickly as a network of
modem-connected election-counting computers can reboot.

Thom Hartmann is a nationally syndicated daily talk show host and the
author of "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient
Sunlight," among other books. This article is copyright by Thom
Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog
or web media so long as this credit is attached and the title remains
the same.
”

“<argh>.”

“That's why my idea of throwing eggs at the candidate of your choice would come in handy.”

“who has time to read all this?”

“Yeah --- I kinda like the egg idea...

Is there a "Giant Cut & Paste Test Thread" somewhere? <G>”

“Egg-zactly. The candidate with the most egg on his or her face wins (the opposite of the current practice) and the yolk's on the voters (which it always has been anyway).”

“That reminds me of a joke I tried to pull on my mother....


I'll spell a word and you pronounce it, okay?

The first word... a type of music: F-O-L-K

The second word... a former President: P-O-L-K

Now, what do you call the white part of an egg?

(she said 'Albumin')”

“This thread should give stratdewd about two weeks worth of ranting.”

“<GRIN>”

“Like he needs a reason.”

“I guess he'll start out with something like this:

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
- Joseph Stalin”

“"I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating."

-- Boss Tweed”

“"Well stop it. It's like those miserable Psalms, they're so depressing..."”

“Albumin is correct.”

“naw....i'm a hanging chad man from way back......”

“The rumors of a Clinton/Clark alliance increased after Mr. Clinton was quoted by The New York Times as telling guests at a dinner party at the Clinton home in Chappaqua that there were "two stars" in the Democratic Party: his wife and Clark. The fact that many former Clinton political allies have signed up with the Clark campaign has only increased the speculation.

However, since Clark entered the race, neither of the Clintons has specifically referred to Clark's candidacy. Sen. Clinton even stopped short of praising Clark and described the entire field as "very strong and impressive," and said neither she nor her husband has a favorite. "We are not supporting or endorsing any candidate," she said.

According to one Democrat, Mr. Clinton has also weighed in, placing calls to some of the other candidates to explain that neither he nor his wife is trying to promote Clark.

Sen. Clinton also reiterated that she has no plans to enter the race. "I’ve said the same thing now consistently for, I don’t know how many years, I guess four years. I have nothing to add to my continuing position that I’m not running," she said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton and her publishers, Simon & Schuster, are up in arms after hearing that part of her memoir "Living History" has been censored in China. At least ten segments of the book - including material on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and on Harry Wu, a Chinese-American human rights activist who was convicted and later expelled from China for being a spy - were either changed or removed all together. According to the Times, Clinton and Simon & Schuster have sent a letter to the Chinese publishers, Yilin Publishing House, demanding it recall the Chinese edition and asking for a proper translation that faithfully follows the original text.”