On April 3, 2007, for the first time, I voted on a touchscreen voting machine (DRE), because St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners did not offer any alternative method of voting that day. Such a wonder-- to click a button on a screen and my vote slips into the black box! Makes me want to run out and shout
"Paper Ballots! They can be recounted!" Our overworked Elections Director argues that the DREs save the municipalities money spent on paper in the smaller elections. (They also can be programmed with more than one ballot style for overlapping voting districts.) In fact they have a host of ongoing expenses the county pays for, and just ask any candidate who has requested a recount what they think of them.
There is no way to recount electronic votes with assurance of accuracy. Run the electronic records back through again, and they will come out the same. Recounting the paper trail is of little use since people rarely think to check it, or do not notice errors, if they can read the faint and small print. Sometimes the machine eats the paper. Only hand counted hand marked paper ballots have been shown to be truly accurate.
How can we, as concerned citizens, assure the integrity of our elections? We want to boil it down to an assurance that each citizen of this state and this nation has
the right to vote. That right includes having the vote accurately counted. Numerous ways of interfering with that right have been dredged up by jealous minds since humans first drew straws. American history is colorful with stories of election fraud methods and episodes.
The place where we live no longer looks to me like America, though. Does it to you? What has happened to us? Have we fallen to the bottom of the ocean like Atlantis? Are we entering the crux of a lost civilization, or do we still have time to turn around, to heal our water-inundated lungs of this corrupt government drowning in corporatocracy? We simply did not know how to swim in a global electronic age. Computers have become a new literacy test, whether in elections, the stock market, jobs or school. And we have lessons to learn about any process that is electronic.
Let's float with hope for a moment or two. In life energy terms a human who has fallen into cold, clear water has about twenty minutes before rescue efforts will no longer be able to revive the most susceptible neurological pathways. Dirty water, like we have fallen into, complicates the outcome. Magnify this one life into an entire society-- or its middle and lower classes-- and
maybe we do still have time to forestall the worst effects. Some of the outcome may depend on faith and courage. A whole lot of it depends on a long course of difficult rehabilitation for the bad actors. Yes, we will have to work to fix our elections systems. And then
we will have to start actually voting. This can be viewed as an exciting time, though perilous. Currently a suit in Ohio seeks to bring to light the egregious web-based shenanigans that occurred in reporting the outcome of the 2004 elections. In 2006 in Sarasota County, Florida, 18,000 votes mysteriously disappeared. Other stories have been reported in many states. Since then two corporations who sell these machines have admitted problems with the equipment's functioning. How can we know how many elections nationwide may have been affected?
We all owe a debt of gratitude to the citizen journalists and activists who have hammered away at the truth since 2000, when outcomes that were outside of the expectation of exit polls became obvious. Our government, instead of making this evidence very public knowledge, has worked against us by stone walling, with news media taking years to recognize the problem. Now most of us know it exists. We owe it to ourselves to increase our vigilance.
Since the passage of HAVA (Help America Vote Act of 2002) the magnifying glass of reform has been showing questionable elections in many ways. Voter roll purging, especially in urban areas, is usually done under the fiction of preventing individual
voter fraud. Consider St. Louis City in 2000 when 50,000 voters were removed from the rolls as inactive and
at least hundreds of them thereby lost their right to vote. Let's be clear. "
Voter fraud," in which one person tries to vote twice or misrepresent oneself as a qualified voter, is so rare that it does not threaten the outcome of our elections.
Election fraud, on the other hand has had a long and vigorous life everywhere people vote, and may even be part of the human condition, the querulous competitive part that election laws are written to control.
In some states like Missouri we have open primaries not requiring voters to register with a party. Members of one party can encourage crossing the party line to vote in the opposite primary to defeat a candidate, often based on bigotry. Technically this is not illegal-- it's just dirty.
A particular problem in urban areas is the failure of any given state to make provisions for adequate numbers of qualified, trained personnel to work at the polls. This also constitutes an obstruction to the polling booth.
Posting confusing signs, wrong election dates and places or voting qualifications, threatening arrests or sending uniformed guards to polling places are all standard ploys in the election fraud toolkit. Stuffing ballot boxes and lying about a candidate's history or background fit into this category too. Voter caging, which involves sending out letters to voters and then challenging those whose letters are returned, has been reportedly used recently to challenge even the votes of some of our military service members. So these are some of the ways, from the ground up, that disenfranchisement is still accomplished nowadays.
Holding public office is such a plum position, partly because huge sums of money are paid by corporations to keep their very best friends in office.
More sinister yet is the apparent direct link between an "administration," corporate money, and the obfuscation of America's best interests. Sticking only to issues related to elections, we now know for sure that the U.S. Department of Justice has been diluting its responsibility to protect voting rights. Further, criminal prosecutions have been sought by politicians under nearly imaginary charges against candidates, officials, or organizations of the "wrong" persuasion; Vendettas were played out in the 2006 press against citizen activists in Kansas City who chose to work toward improving voter participation.The second term firing of eight U.S. Attorneys was, at its heart, intended to produce disenfranchisement, with one such incident here in Missouri implicating a Senator.
Since HAVA, newer methods of election fraud have surfaced. Particularly in Ohio fewer DRE voting machines than needed were delivered to some largely Democratic urban precincts, resulting in long lines and some voters unable to vote in the time available. Because each voter takes several minutes to fill out a touchscreen ballot, especially on long ballots typical of urban areas, lines formed covering blocks. DRE machines can break down, and were all that were offered to some voters, including in some precincts in St. Louis County since 2006 when poll workers were trained to direct voters to use them instead of the optical scanners.
Optical scan ballots are quicker and can be hand counted later if necessary. More voters can vote at once by using them.
At a polling place in November of 2006 in University City, Missouri, about eighty people were waiting outside the front door, plus another twenty inside. Individuals said it took them as long as an hour to vote. Can you imagine waiting like this if you are someone who gets around in a wheelchair? If you have small children? If you need to get to work?
One person, already
inside the door, was told to use a provisional ballot, but that it was too late to get in a separate inside line. The rule is
being in line by 7 p.m.
The use of DREs in and of itself constitutes disenfranchisement in two more ways. First, there is a digital divide. In New Mexico 2004 comparison studies of use of these machines in communities of people of color showed a huge number of undervotes, compared to in white communities.
Even more sinister, though, regardless of whether the machine has a paper trail or not, these machines employ
an electronic ballot, which is neither visible nor verifiable by the voter. Who-- or what-- is doing the counting is the question when18,000 votes in Sarasota County, Florida “disappeared” in 2006.
The so-called
"paper trail" of the DRE is not a ballot. It is not what is counted by the tabulator. What is counted is the ephemeral bit of information that one enters on the touchscreen, which then disappears into the black box. There it may be flipped to the other candidate, made to disappear, added, subtracted, or multiplied. None of this can be seen by the human eye. All traces of malicious or mistaken programming can be eliminated before forensic examination of that machine. And the corporate holders of the trademarks for the machines claim the right to refuse government oversight of the computer code.
In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, an audit of the spring 2006 primary by Election Science Institute showed that the sums recorded on four sources, 1) the paper trail's computer generated total, 2) the hand counted individual votes on the paper trail, 3) the memory card, and 4) the computer's ballot archive (hard drive file),
did not match each other! Four separate but unequal totals were found! These internal inconsistencies were found in all the DREs. No total could be trusted as the correct one.
Thus, it is readily apparent that the effects of HAVA have cost the states more than they imagined possible. Some of the principle players in passing it are now convicted felons (under other corruption charges). The Election Assistance Commission created by HAVA is appointed by the President and has functioned in a partisan way. Benefits to disabled voters of using “more accessible” DREs have not been realized. And it has been largely left up to the states to fix this mess. The vendors of the new machines pocketed the federal funds.
Optical scanners also have problems. The ones we now have in use are programmed with secret code too, which means corporations refuse public review of the computer code. They are also vulnerable to hacking or invasion by viruses, some even by remote wireless connections. And any election administered by private industry is open to corruption.
When a friend and I went to observe the post-election vote counting in St. Louis County in 2006 we were allowed to see a limited view, without audio, while two of the vendor's representatives were inside the room helping with the process. Who might the vendors want elected? Who is doing the oversight?
At least optical scanners do have the paper ballot, though, which can be hand recounted. And the voter, by filling the ballot out by hand, verifies the vote as part of the process, a safeguard that has been proven elusive with the DREs.
HAVA left us all dog-paddling or even on the verge of drowning, whether in the Missouri River, the Gulf of Mexico, or any other body of water touching the United States. We will not arrive back to dry land unless each of us who votes notices what is going on and reports any suspicions to an oversight group, e.g. Election Protection,
by calling 1-866- OUR VOTE. If the majority of us participates as citizen witnesses we might just make it onto some safe shore. Keep on hollering "Paper Ballots! They can be recounted!”
revis. Oct. '08
, received a comment from a