This Fall, up to one third of the voting population will cast their ballots on electronic machines. One third.
Machines notorious for their security flaws. Machines that many counties and precincts across the nation allow election workers to take home up to weeks before election day, with no ability to ensure the integrity of those machines. Machines whose counts cannot be verified independently through a paper trail. Machines that, in the past have lost votes or counted too many votes, and have been known to mysteriously cast votes for Republican candidates even if the voter has selected a Democrat.
Even Republicans don’t trust these machines when it might impact their internal party elections.
While a few brave souls are taking steps to prevent another election debacle this November, they are few in number, and vastly underfunded in relation to the companies who make these questionable evoting machines, and their supporters in and out of government.
(cont.)
This year already has seen news reports that at least seventeen (17) states are at high risk of compromised elections due to their use of electronic voting machines without a verifiable paper trail. Among those seventeen states are Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Another twenty-three (23) states are at a mid-level risk of their elections being compromised, because, even though they use evoting machines which have a verifiable paper trail, they do not conduct manual audits of those machines. In these 40 states, 40% of the votes will be tallied by evoting machines.
Add to this the massive GOP effort to suppress the vote among Democrats generally, and in the Hispanic and African American communities in states like Ohio, and one can easily envisage elections which return Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. In short, we are poised to repeat the same mistakes that led to questionable elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004.
I wish I had an easy answer to these concerns. A sure fired solution to what I believe will be another attempt by the Republican Party and their conservative supporters this Fall to hijack our elections. I do not.
I applaud those who are working to prevent this looming catastrophe, or at least to limit its scope, such as VerifiedVoting.org, New Yorkers for Verified Voting, Virginia Verified Voting, Verified Voting New Mexico, North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting, Georgians for Verified Voting, Unitarian Universalists for Verified Voting, Defenders of Democracy, PA-VerifiedVoting.org, VoteTrustUSA, National Committee for Voting Integrity, Citizens for Voting Integrity, National Ballot Integrity Project , CountTheVote.org and so many others.
I urge you to join one of these fine organizations, or contribute financially to their cause if you are able. Yet, the sheer number of them speaks volumes, does it not?
There are two important stories today in USA Today about election matters:
The second story of course has the potential to cancel out the first. I asked the same question – what are people doing to protect our vote? Because it’s more and more clear that it will take vast numbers of us to fix this system.
And I meant to say – ANOTHER GREAT POST. We’ll really miss you. Tend to your wife, but get here when you can!
Thanks for posting the link to Virginia Verified Voting.
It is important to remember that in 1985 Marcos stole the election and he still lost. If we concentrate on turning out our vote we can win.
in the subject, but the machines used in Santa Clara County appeared to work great. And they do have a paper trail; at the end of the voting, you push a button and it prints out under glass and you can review. If it’s okay, you push the “OK” button and the machine prints “Approved” on the slip. I talked to one of the poll workers and he said that a voter can reject the printed slip twice — third time you have to let it go through, but there’s plenty of chance to review your vote on a screen before printing out a slip. As I said, I’m a layman but I was impressed.
I’m concerned about November, but not because of machine voting…I know enough of the Democrats to realize that no matter how rosy things look right now, they’ll figure out a way to screw it up…
I’m not as worried about the Dems screwing it up (but that’s always a factor). I’m definitely worried that – in addition to voting machine fiascos, GWB will pull some ridiculous stunt before the election, via OBL or Iran or something, and the right wing will scurry to the polls to support their leeeeder.
Ok, you don’t have to worry, but please, these monsters will be rigging election machines and counting all across the country. In 2000, 2002, and 2004, their obfuscating tactics (plural — tactics) have not fallen to the mild scrutiny of those in “authority” to oversee elections. And of course, Americans-the-Innocents don’t believe there could ever be voter fraud in this country, especially now that computers are running the show. UGHHHHH!!!!! So NAIVE.
No, I don’t worry, I already know that this coming election will be an utter sham and once again a narrow margin of victory all over the place for Republicans. You only need 51% to win, not a landslide, and that kind of margin is not easy to dispute or contest.
I don’t worry, I know they’ll do it again, and again and again.
So you get a crummy piece of paper. Then what? Suppose the final tallies for your county come out funny (as seems more than likely)? Then what? Is someone going to come around and collect and count all these little scraps of paper to see if they match the electronic tally?
Right.
(There is a point you may have missed: On what grounds can you believe that the vote printed on your scrap of paper is the same as the vote the machine tallied? It all depends on the workings of that secret, black-box, proprietory code designed by pro-Republican e-machine companies doesn’t it? Are you going to take their WORD that the two are the same?)
Well, go ahead and vote. It can’t do any harm. Get as many folk out to vote as you can. But when you get trounced in election that you have actually won THEN will you see what is going down? Can you mobilize people to do something about it THEN?
And if so, why not NOW?
…So you get a crummy piece of paper….
I think that the pieces of paper go into what amounts to a ballot box. If they were counted by hand with multilateral supervision, this might even be (part of) an acceptable, reliable system. But that would smack of Canadianity.
But that is not how this particular system is being described.
But no, a receipt is not a ballot, unless it is countable, retained at the polls, and counted.
I LIKE ballots.
A receipt for the voter would indeed be pointless. Although the word “receipt” has been often been used to describe these systems, I think that they do indeed keep a paper record where it can be of some use.
The key point, as you say, is that there must be BALLOTS — and I’d also say, counted by people under observation by interested parties.
RenaRF just cross-posted a great companion piece over at the Purple place, and specifically calls attention to StevenD’s work on this issue… I’m thankful that both of them are keeping it alive.
Isn’t it sad that just a smattering of activists are keeping this issue alive and in our few consciousnesses? Why hasn’t the CORRUPT Democratic National Committee, headed by everyone’s favorite, Howard Dean jumping all over voter irregularities? Why isn’t it the biggest side issue of our times? (Global Warming and The Extreme Evil of the Bush Regime are the Main Course issues)
The Dems can raise close to a billion dollars in a presidential election season, can’t they just kick as with their big time lawyers and get some real election laws passed, and convince states to purchase and devise a flawless election/vote counting system?
They act like a black box counting votes is some technological miracle. Shit! We went to the MOON with computers 50x less powerful than the junky PC boxes tossed on the curbs of America every day!
YOW, I hurt.
The one point I always come back to is that if computers can count our money with pinpoint accuracy, everytime without fail ( when’s the last time you got an extra $5.00 from an ATM ) what the fuck is so hard about counting votes.
My worst suspicion is that Dems aren’t doing anything about this because they also come in handy during those nasty primaries. To the entrenched dems, I fear the motto has become “Better to be a winning candidate in a losing party than the other way around.”
Bill Maher nailed it when he said that we used to mock “democracies” who’s incumbency retention was above 90%, now we have become one of those countries.
Truly fucked, we are.
…We went to the MOON with computers 50x less powerful than the junky PC boxes tossed on the curbs of America every day!…
For the record and perspective on technology: the Apollo computers had 4K bytes of RAM, a few times as much ROM, and could do 40,000 additions per second. Many of those junky computers today contain over 100,000 times as much RAM and are over 10,000 times as fast. (Based on data from “General Design Characteristics of the Apollo Guidance Computer”. I got curious.)
How was this enough to guide a spacecraft to the Moon? — no Microsoft, no Diebold.
I also want to add to the list Black Box Voting. There’s been a concerted effort to discredit this woman, but she has done more for our understanding of how these machines work, and who is behind the corporations counting our vote, than anyone else you could name.
Here is California, she filed a lawsuit which she won that helped stall Diebold at the gates.
I disagreed vehemently with her when she (and many others in the electronic voting reform movement) wanted us to ditch Rep. Holt’s bill, which provide a mandatory accessible voter-verified paper audit trail (AVVPAT) and a mandatory manual audit (hand count) of 100% of the ballots in 2% of the precincts. (She and others take strong exception to the manual audit being conducted under the auspices of the Elections Assistance Commission, a bi-partisan body. I was willing to take that as an interim trade in order to get a 2% audit and mandatory paper records in all fifty states, something we still don’t have. They had other objections, but the gist was that it “wasn’t good enough” and having been in politics most of my life, I know how hard it is to get anything, much less “good enough,” passed into law. I recommend the incremental route because it’s usually more successful.)
But I will not be party to the trashing of Bev Harris and the Black Box Voting org, which has some of the smartest, most dedicated and sincere people I have ever met. I hope to see Black Box Voting included in future recommended lists. They get the job done. They’ve been able to get legislation passed and held vendors accountable to that legislation, while others were still just sending out “this is a problem” notices.
Btw – there is a great FREE online documentary called Votergate which makes this really clear to people not familiar with the problems. Highly recommended. They’re also looking for funding to do their final cut, which they will release to theaters in the fall. Help if you can!
Neither will I.
Salt Lake Tribune
article including link to original sources and online petition
Go spend your time worrying about voting machines. Then after the “dems” get their asses kicked in Nov, you will be the first to blame the machines.
Might I suggest the following: the dems are going to get their asses kicked in Nov because they are in the process of self destructing. They have literally presented to the voters ZERO with respect to a fresh outlook; they have offered nothing to us and for that they deserve to lose. Maybe then the folks out there in neverland will wake up and realize that the democratic party is dead! They see on a daily basis that unless they are will to create chaotic situations in Congress they won’t be heard. They proved it when Reid forced the Senate to go into EX session! The media had to report the action. Yet, was there a single follow up?; did a single rep stand up when every action thath they tried was shut down and do something, ANYTHING to break through the blockade?; NOT ONE!
Its all over folks.
So is sitting on your hands a playing nicie nicie with these Republican monster cutthroats.
With electronic voting machines there are two main varieties: the dre (direct response electronic or “touch screen” machine) and the PBOS (paper ballot optical scan).
With the dre there are 3 ballots: 1. the one the voter sees on the screen, 2. the one that gets printed out as a “verifiable paper trail” record, and 3. the one that gets stored and counted electronically inside the memory card of the machine.
Any hacker can make these machines say Kerry on the screen, or print it on the receipt, while the vote is being stored as Bush inside the computer.
Dictatorships have elections all the time. They’re just not transparent.
Neither are elections on dre machines.
Paper ballots are filled out by the voter and then scanned into a computerized tabulator that can be hacked.
The difference is that the paper ballot, when saved, is an authentic record of the actual vote, unlike what is saved in a dre.
Those paper ballots can be recounted in a manual recount in the case of a disputed election.
In the end, low tech is preferable. We’re going to have to essentially shut down the dre lobby if we want verifiable elections. They produce a “paper trail” but do not produce a stored authentic, valid record of the votes cast.
Paper trail no good. Paper ballot good.
Thank you. Thank you for spelling out what the fuck really can happen inside a rigged voting box. Thank you. Why don’t people realize this? It’s been almost 6 years since Florida in 2000, and folks, nothing has changed.
We have no assurances as to which data set of the 3 gets counted, and even then, the counters could corrupt the whole thing (think Ohio, 2004).
Paper trails from black boxes are worthless. We need a better system. Thank the Goddess my state, NY, is so confused that we’re keeping out huge monster mechanical voting machines that have been around from at least the 50’s.
Any vote anywhere can be rigged, and Alexander Hamilton rigged the Constitution to completely foul and will of the people showing through the elites of the Electoral College. Alexander Hamilton was the first American who acts like today’s Republicans. His work on elections is a disgrace.
The AUDIT of the paper trail is what makes paper worth having. Paper ballots that aren’t audited are as useless as having no record at all.
Without changing the hardware, without hiring anyone, the machine-printed paper ballots could all be counted by hand by volunteers, with cross-checks by representatives of both parties. (At least, where anyone cared enough to volunteer.)
Canada counts paper ballots by hand. Of course, they also mark them by hand, and print them on special paper, and have uniform procedures for monitoring the ballot boxes, and…
Editorial adds voice to need for voting investigation:
Lots more at the link.
I’m not worried about the counting. I’m worried by the vast numbers of xenophobic, racist jerks who come out of the woodwork when immigration is an issue, and the time the Republicans have left to exploit this.