The Strange Death of Liberal America

“The core of our American democracy is the right to vote. Implicit in that right is the notion that that vote be private, that vote be secure, and that vote be counted as it was intended when it was cast by the voter. And I think what we’re encountering is a pivotal moment in our democracy where all of that is being called into question.”

Verified Voting Foundation

Florida again–and Katherine Harris wasn’t even in charge. Yet somehow she seems to have a way of haunting vote counts. In the contest for her vacant House seat 18,000 votes may have never been recorded in Sarasota County. This calls for a short, select history lesson the covers seven years of voting scandals.

• In 1999, officials of the the Sequoia voting machines company were indicted for bribing Louisiana elections commissioner Jerry Fowler with $8 million. In 2005, Sequoia raised a few eyebrows when it was acquired by the Venezuelan company Smartmatic.

• In 2001 the Civil Rights Commission Investigating the Florida Election Mess concluded:

Restrictive statutory provisions, wide-ranging errors and inadequate and unequal resources in the election process denied countless Floridians the right to vote.

• In 2002, Greg Palast investigated how the GOP conducted the purge of Florida voters, finding widespread abuse. Palast has been writing about election abuse ever since so much so that by now he must have a bad case writer’s cramp and a rather large headache that comes from no one listening even though you have identified the crooks and liars innumerable times.

• In 2002, Bev Harris, who would write Black Box Voting–one of the classics of electronic voting literature–first began writing about electronic voting fraud after she discovered that U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel had ownership in and had been CEO of the company that built the machines which counted his own votes. (The company: Election Systems & Software).

• In 2003, Harris, whom Salon.com referred to as the “Erin Brockovich of elections” (Salon.com), just weeks after a stunning electoral upset in Georgia that tipped control of the U.S. Senate, discovered 40,000 secret voting machine files — including a set of files called “rob-georgia,” containing instructions to replace Georgia’s computerized voting files before the election. The files she found contained databases with votes in them and the voting machine programs themselves. She downloaded the files on Jan. 23, 2003 and set them free on the Internet a few months later, where they were studied by scientists and security experts.

• In 2003 Stanford Scientist David Dill authored a petition for a voter-verifiable audit trail on all voting equipment which has been endorsed by thousands of people, including many of the top computer scientists in the U.S. Dill also founded the Verified Voting Foundation.

• In July 2003 Sandeep S. Atwal wrote in investigative report posted on the now defunct infernalpress.com site that the executives in some of the electronic voting machine companies had links to the Reactionary Right., �If [the] charges are true,” he wrote, “and there is little evidence to contradict their claims, George W. Bush has already won the 2004 election.�

• In July 2004, Scientific American bestowed a prestigious Technology 50 leadership award on R. Michael Alvarez and Ted Selker for seeking to reform American voting. Scientific American noted :

Alvarez and Selker recommended four major steps the Election Assistance Commission should take to minimize lost votes in the November 2004 elections. These included better voter registration processes, fixing certain ballot problems, requiring the reporting of more balloting statistics, and developing better voter complaint procedures.

• Today, November 25, 2006, the New York Times concluded, “After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation�s voting system, this month�s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.” The article went on to detail numerous problems with machines, those who operate them, and the companies that manufacture and program them.

At this point allow the author a little leeway as he cites one of the most enduring and overused cliches used by writers. On May 25, 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced to an audience at Rice University, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” On July 20, 1969–a little more than eight years after JFK’s speech–Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface in an event televised around the world. At the time Kennedy made his pledge, the best the United States had been able to do was to send Alan Shephard on a 15 minute suborbital flight.

The point of this oft-quoted example is that it has taken the Bush Administration almost as long to correct our screwed up voting procedures as it did to put someone on the moon. As long as we are knee deep in cliches, let me evoke one more obvious one–getting voting procedures right is not rocket science. So now it’s question time.

First, why have we committed to using computers in the first place? As we have seen the technology is expensive, prone to mistakes and security problems, and requires poll workers trained in how to use the machines. The entire move towards computer voting has been a boondoggle for several companies with questionable records and even more questionable ties to the GOP.

The usual argument is that if we don’t use computers we are back to peering at hanging chads through magnifying glasses. Here is my home state of Minnesota we have been successfully using paper ballots that are counted by machines ever since I first voted way back when. The cardboard ballots contain the fill-in bubbles familiar to anyone who has taken any kind of standardized test. Unless someone fills in two bubbles for the same office or totally misses a bubble, it is pretty obvious who they intended to vote for. The cardboard ballot is kept for verification after the machine tallies it. Since Minnesota has used this system there has not been, as far as I know, a single complaint about the technology. It is simple to use, relatively inexpensive and–most important–can be verified.

Second, why the delay? I could find dozens of programmers in my local phonebook who could probably write a voting machine code. In fact my wife hired one such programmer to help her with a medical research project that used a touch screen survey. It took him three months and cost probably what those contractors were charging for lunch on their expense accounts. There really are only two conclusions: the people running this program are even more incompetent than those running FEMA during Katrina and the GOP, which has never been a fan of making voting easier, has been dragging its feet.

With the Democrats now in control of Congress one of the first items on their agenda ought to be to straighten out this voting mess once and for all. Of course, somehow it failed to make the cut on that famous 100 hour agenda. That was a terrible mistake. Without a reliable system of voting everything else this Congress enacts will have little meaning, because when the next election rolls around it will be more of the same. Before we seek to plant the seed of democracy throughout the world or criticize the voting practices of other nations it would be wise if we cleaned up our own weed patch because it has become so overgrown that many Americans refuse to enter it.

The Times story quotes one voter who asked for a provisional ballot because he felt at least that way he knew his vote would be counted. When we have descended so far that the people no longer trust the system, then the system risks losing its credibility forever. As many countries can testify, when you pollute the rule of the ballot the only alternative is the rule of the bullet.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord, The Strange Death of Liberal America

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