Read this and judge for yourself. And then, if you agree, take a moment to write to your Senators and Representatives and let them know how you feel. And if you're one of my friends out in SF, you have a particularly heavy responsibility, as your Representative is Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Leader of the House of Representatives.
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The potential for fraud and error is daunting. About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.
About a third of the votes, 36 million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen. Unlike receipted transactions at the neighborhood ATM, however, you get no paper record of your vote. Since, as a government expert says, "the ballot is embedded in the voting equipment," there is no voter-marked paper ballot to be counted or recounted. Voting on the DRE, you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official "can't watch the bits inside," says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks. The four major election corporations count votes with voting-system source codes. These are kept strictly secret by contract with the local jurisdictions and states using the machines. That secrecy makes it next to impossible for a candidate to examine the source code used to tabulate his or her own contest. In computer jargon a "trapdoor" is an opening in the code through which the program can be corrupted. David Stutsman, an Indiana lawyer whose suits in the 1980s exposed a trapdoor that was being used by the nation's largest election company at that time, puts it well: "The secrecy of the ballot has been turned into the secrecy of the vote count." |
In my opinion, this is the single most important issues that faces our nation. If we cannot know with absolutely certainty that our elections cannot be rigged, we become a republic in name only.
UPDATE: You want proof things are bad? Despite the fact the Gov. Jeb Bush is pushing hard the lie that these machines are safe and accurate, the state Republican party last week was sending out flyers to registered Republicans urging them to use absentee ballots in the fall to ensure that their vote is accurately counted. They were caught and called on it by a local paper and have since apologized, but... How's that for a flip flop?
Also in the article - records from the 2003 FL gubernatorial contest have been lost forever. Voting was electronic and no paper backups of the info were made.
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