This list of 20 amazing facts about voting in America should make you think hard about the "moderinization" of voting machines and how easy it is to steal an election with them.
- 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
- There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
- The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
- The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
- Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.
- Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.
- ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.
- Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
- Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.
- Diebold is based in Ohio.
- Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
- Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.
- Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years. [PDF]
- None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
- California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it!
- 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.
- All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
- The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother.
- Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts recommended further investigation.
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Diebold is not just maliciously fraudulent, it's also aggressively incompetent.
I'm not sure why people bother with elections at all, if they're going to be that kind of charade.
Being a Canadian, I'm often confused by elections in the USA, for many reasons.
One reason I get confused concerns electronic voting. Serious question, no insult, irony, or sarcasm intended:
why would electronic voting be considered superior to any other method, for example paper ballots?
I ask this question assuming that there must have been some genuinely good intentions behind at least some of the decisions to implement electronic voting, using machines produced by any company. Surely these things, when they're not corrupted, have some advantages?
WHAT CAN WE DO???
Okay. Good idea. NOW WHAT CAN WE DO THAT IS LEGAL????
re:TheBrummell
I think the main reason is the paper trail that the list keeps bringing up. With software, you can register and vote and the machine can change it without you ever knowing. Plus it can do it on a massive scale. With old fashioned voting it is much harder for large scale fraud and there's always that paper trail to back check.
Electronic voting has some apeel, i.e. fast counting etc, so long you there is no reason to suspect gaming of the hidden details.
Paper ballets have a long history of high error => votes not counting, which in principal should be overcome by electronic systems.
But clearly we should have some sort of proceedure so that in the case of suspected fraud auditing can be done.
TheBrummel: "I ask this question assuming that there must have been some genuinely good intentions..."
Yeah, you're obviously Canadian. ;-) The paperless digital voting machines have been condemned by every reputable expert since they came along -- for example, browse Bruce Schneier's archives (www.schneier.com), or David Farber's (http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/). Flatly: The only reason for anyone to support the paperless DVMs, is because whoever's running or maintaining them can completely control the results of the election, regardless of those uppity "voters".
We know how to build a machine that will support a verifiable and trustworthy election, and a basic part of that is to create a paper trail which can be both checked by the individual voters, and audited by state or federal officials. The machines in question don't do it that way, and that is very much on purpose -- the purposes of the GOP takeover. The DVMs got pushed along nevertheless, by concerted lobbying of state governments, combined with a near-shutout of the experts from the mass media. E.g., unanimous condemnation from nationally- and world- reknowned security experts typically gets reported on page E23 as "some academics question details of the new machines...", while any GOP shill gets the front page: "New voting machines a vast improvement, say government experts".
Also, the GOP made a concerted effort to capture state Secretary posts, since those usually control the election process. They completed their coup by passing a law requiring all states to get the "new, digital" voting machines by a deadline (2008?). (Not all states have complied yet -- remember, it's the state Secretaries of State that have effective control of the process, and the GOP couldn't get them all....) Oh yes, and they've lately started attacking exit polls, since those can show up major discrepancies between "official" results and how people thought they were voting.
So... we've got a real problem, and it's not at all clear how, or if, it'll be solved.
As a poll worker in Washington state, I feel I have to interject. First, we use Diebold machines which have a paper trail. The article linked above (in #9) is about "new" machines, from 2004.
While the Diebold machines we use automatically count the votes, it's true, so do the electronic readers that paper ballots are fed into at the polls. The biggest advantage to using the electronic voting machines is that they offer the first chance that many disabled voters have had to vote a secret ballot, i.e. with no help from anyone else.
Not only is this accessibility now required by federal law, it is also something I feel very strongly in, in its ability to offer equal opportunity to voters with sight or mobility issues. The machines offer all-audio or high-contrast options for visually impaired voters. For voters who find it difficult to fill in the tiny bubbles (that we have on our ballots), the touch screen provides an easier way to select their choice. For every mistake made on a paper ballot, the ballot is rejected; you can't just cross out the bubble you mis-filled and fill in another, because the machine will read it as voting twice.
I have seen personally the frustration of an elderly voter who had to refill her ballot 3 times, and the final time it was still with a mistake. She gave up out of frustration, and though the rest of her votes were counted, the over-voted issue was ignored. It had taken her almost an hour to fill in the 3 ballots, and she was embarrassed and exasperated. This could have all been avoided if she had used the electronic machine (what we call the Accessible Voting Unit).
The machine was available, and I offered it to her, but she was afraid because of all of the bad press, and instead felt it was better to not have one of her votes counted than to risk the machine.
My ultimate point is that this misinformation and conspiracy talk is having an effect on voters, and we should all take heed to get all of the facts before scaring people away from voting the method that works best for them.
A success story: An elderly, blind voter was actually moved to tears because it was the first time *ever* that she was able to vote by herself. She even made her husband wait in the car.
Here is a link to more info on our electronic voting machines:
http://www.metrokc.gov/elections/access/index.asp
While I don't think electronic voting is a solution to fraud, I can find holes in any system. Paper ballots can be stolen or destroyed, mail-in ballots can be bought by the highest bidder.... There are people out there taking elections systems to task, and I believe that we should continue to insist on transparent systems, etc, but electronic voting is not as sinister as people like to make it seem.
I try to focus on getting more people to actually exercise their right to vote. Our national average is embarrassing, and we should all be using our energy and resources to get people to participate instead of scaring them into believing that their votes won't matter anyway.
Here are some sad statistics:
http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2004.htm
Work at the polls and help ensure that election rules are followed and are fair. It only takes a day out of your normal routine, most employers allow for it, and it's well worth it.
The main thing you can do is urge your state to adopt a law that requires paper trails for all ballots. Check out your state's current status at http://electionline.org/Default.aspx?tabid=290 and contact your state representatives to get a paper ballot law enacted.
New Mexico recently passed such a law and switched from touch-screen machines to paper ballots, and the new system just makes so much sense that it's unbelievable that every state doesn't adopt the same system. Basically, you get a big paper ballot, you step into a little booth for some privacy, you mark your choices with a pen or pencil, and when you're done you take your ballot over to the precinct's one central scanner and feed the ballot into the scanner yourself where your votes are counted. This system is:
(a) Cheap! One expensive piece of equipment (the optical scanner) can serve about 20 little voting booths, instead of needing one expensive touch-screen ballot per booth
(b) Fast! By scanning the paper ballots electronically the precinct can get a count immediately when the polls close.
(c) Paper-verified! To do a recount you can examine the paper ballots by hand, scan them again through the same or different machines, do manual spot checks to detect any fraud, etc.
(d) Easy! Ever watch your grandparents trying to figure out those touch-screen machines?
By the way, I find it annoying that a third of the list is conspiratorial Republican-bashing, I'm a Republican and having no paper trail bothers me immensely.
C Hoyt: You'll notice I made a point of specifying specifically the paperless machines. As I said, we're perfectly capable of making a digital machine resistant to tampering, in fact there's at least one Open Source Voting Machine being developed out there. But it does have to be carefully designed, and it has to include a paper trail. That's because a computer is intrinsically opaque -- regardless of what's on the screen, you really don't know what's going on inside. (And this is a computer programmer saying that!)
Conrad: Unfortunately, your party has been hijacked by the so-called neocons, led by a cabal of determinedly insane conspirators who are busily trying to destroy everything America ever took pride in, not to mention any power base that could possibly say "no" to them. At this point, I'd guess the only way real conservatives are going to get back into power is by bolting the GOP en masse, publically disowning the neocons, and founding a new party to stand up for true conservative politics.
Shouldn't we just make sure cynicism about the process doesn't actually prevent people from exercising their right to vote? It seems like that could be a "strategy. . ."