n last month's Florida presidential primary, Fort Myers polling places had signs saying voters could not vote without photo ID, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida The problem is, the signs were wrong. ...* * *Voter ID laws must strike a balance between preventing voter fraud and not making it unduly difficult to vote. Without a national ID card, it isn't easy. Many Americans do not have driver's licenses, particularly city residents, old and young people, and some members of minority groups. The rules for what is acceptable ID vary widely by state. The Help America Vote Act, the law passed after the 2000 election mess, added new federal ID rules, some making it easier to vote, some making it harder.Above all, election officials should enforce the law accurately. Their record, however, is troubling. ...
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from their "MAKING VOTES COUNT" series.
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." ~ Joseph Stalin
It should be all over for the Bush administration by now. Richard Clarke's damning testimony in front of the 9/11 commission has stood up to scrutiny, and been corroborated by others privy to the inner workings of the White House. His apology to the families and friends of 9/11 victims drew a standing ovation and eliminated the one issue Bush could have conceivably stood on: national security. Attempts to malign this 30-year veteran of public service -- rather than simply answer the charges -- were both vicious (National Security Adviser Condi Rice declassifying e-mails to find one to slime him) and childish (White House flak Scott McLellan saying, "It's Dick Clarke's American Grandstand"). Happily, these gambits backfired as badly as the flyboy-on-the-aircraft-carrier stunt or the "bring 'em on!" taunt.The nail in the Republican coffin was delivered by Bush himself at a press event last Wednesday. Though he makes a joke of the press every time he opens his mouth -- and they report verbatim what he says --this time Bush really was trying to be funny for their benefit. In the course of pretending to narrate a slide show, dubbed an "election year album," Bush screened several shots of himself looking under his desk, behind curtains, and out windows, all the while saying -- with his frat-boy smirk -- "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere." The press laughed right along with this sociopath.
John Kerry didn't. When told of Bush's antics, he said, "If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. Five-hundred and eighty-five American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year, 3,354 have been wounded and there's no end in sight. George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them, and now he thinks that's funny?"
In a nutshell, the "Dukakis in the tank" ad was handed to the Democrats. All they need to do is run footage of Bush doing his slideshow with Kerry's words as the voiceover. Game, set, match.
As stated, it should be over by now.
Yet, one troubling thing remains. Since even members of his own party are expressing doubts that Bush can't win on the issues, his only hope may be to rely on, as Malcolm X once said, any means necessary. Just like last time.
Indeed, after the election debacle of 2000, when the state of Florida made up rules as it went along to assure the governor's brother of victory, Republican-controlled Congress crafted a piece of legislation that they said would prevent a replay. To be fair, some of their motivation was above-board -- to make voting more accessible to the disabled, to end voter fraud and eliminate broken or outmoded equipment -- and many Democrats voted for the bill, as well.
However, the result, called the Help America Vote Act, may as well be called the Help America Vote Republican Act; one needn't have a conspiratorial bent of mind to understand why. One need only follow the money trail and ask the obvious question: Who stood to gain financially from this legislation?
The answer: Diebold, an Ohio-based manufacturer of touch-screen computerized voting machines. Diebold's CEO, Wally O'Dell, is a proud pioneer (read: he donated more than $100,000 to the GOP's reelection bid) who has publicly announced he "is committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." His company, in a Halliburton-like deal, received a lucrative government contract to manufacture 8 million of these touch-screen machines for the 2004 election (according to figures cited in The Progressive , 20 percent of America's voting machines are now touch screen; 31 percent optical scan; 24 percent punch-card; 15 percent lever; 1 percent paper ballots; the remainder "a combination").
To add to the inherently partisan worries, Diebold's machines are said to be easily hacked. According to one software engineer, "The security of a Diebold voting machine is inexcusable. It's not at all complicated. All you have to do is open Windows Explorer, locate the Diebold folder, double-click the Microsoft Access file and read, and modify, access to all votes recorded on that machine."
Most conveniently, Diebold's machines leave no paper trail. And attempts to examine or audit the machines have been thwarted by Diebold's contract language in the states where the machines are used ("proprietary trade secret").
As a friend of mine put it, "Help America vote? I think America is voting just fine. It's the accurate and honest counting of votes that is in dire need of help."
Joe Stalin figured this one out way back in 1935, long before Bill Gates or Wally O'Dell were born.
A welcome to corrente, the newest "friend" of Black Box Notes. corrente is a group of four bloggers who between themselves keep a fine eye on what is happening. Drop by for sure and check out what they are doing. "Friends" are those blogs that link in their sidebars to Black Box Notes.
Just a personal observation: As Dr. Valelly mentions in the below article, "In our elections, we don't count everything well. We have a lot of error." I think that this is a key factor in our sometimes inability to communicate our concerns to elections officials (and others). The fact of the matter is that these people are in an environment where they have gotten used to significant error rates, and so when the new DRE machines suddenly produce similar or even lower error rates, that is OK because these officials are used to seeing these.
Yet this is not what computers do. Computers don't care if they add two numbers together or if they add two million numbers together. They don't get bored, they don't get tired, and, properly programmed, the don't make mistakes.
Some argue that it's "impossible" to write a "perfect program", but even if this is true (and I reject it), it is easy to get pretty close, especially if the application is not that complex. Are these people then arguing that voting is a complex process? Compared to what? Your bank's accounting system? Your stockbroker's? A missile guidance system? Voting is trivial in comparison to these, and yet all of these systems, if not quite perfect, work with remarkable accuracy. Why? Because we demand that they do.
This is what we need to convey to our election officials. That the introduction of full computer automation in the voting process is an opportunity to almost eliminate completely these error rates to which they have become accustomed. That indeed computers are capable of doing this, that voting computers will do this if we demand it of them, and that to fail to implement them with this as a goal would indeed be a great mistake.
Something like 100 million Americans will attempt to participate in a presidential election again Nov. 2, roughly a quarter of them voting electronically on touch-screen systems that have the potential to make the great electoral fiasco of 2000 look like a scrupulously efficient night of church bingo.This isn't necessarily anyone's fault, according to Dr. Richard Valelly of Swarthmore College, a Harvard-trained political scientist who is expert in American party politics and elections.
"In our elections, we don't count everything well," he told me on the phone last week. "We have a lot of error. We've tried to fix it with the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which created a deadline and put a lot of pressure on state Secretaries of State and state election commissions.
"They liked touch-screen voting because people were already using it on automatic teller machines. Since you don't have to handle a lot of different forms, they looked at the machines and said, 'Oh, great stuff.' "
And, of course, they were wrong. ...