Voting and Democracy: The Challenges Ahead

By Don Hazen, AlterNet
July 30, 2003

The trustworthiness of our nation's voting system is the essential link to hopes for fairness, social justice and the future of our country. If Americans are excluded from voting or feel their votes don't or won't be counted, their investment in their communities and society is dramatically eroded. With corruption in our elections, the country can be dominated by an unrepresentative minority and our aspirations for a healthy democracy thwarted.

After the 2000 election debacle in Florida and other states, the very nature and competence of our voting system was called into question. All measure of voting security irregularities were documented, including suspicion of fraud, voter roll purges, language barriers, obstacles to disabled voters and insufficient or undertrained staff.

To address these formidable problems, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed by Congress after much struggle. But the passage of the Act was just the beginning. Its implementation, which falls on the states, is being contested across the country. To help protect the future of voting, especially for those who have historically been shut out, engagement with and monitoring of the implementation of HAVA is essential to ensure the success of a new system. Voting fairness is a crucial issue for all of us working for change.

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The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away
By Thom Hartmann

Are computerized voting machines a wide-open back door to massive voting fraud? The discussion has moved from the Internet to CNN, to UK newspapers, and the pages of The New York Times. People are cautiously beginning to connect the dots, and the picture that seems to be emerging is troubling.

"A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans," announced the Associated Press in a story on Nov. 7, just a few days after the 2002 election. The story added, "Democrats actually won by wide margins."

Republicans would have carried the day had not poll workers become suspicious when the computerized vote-reading machines said the Republican candidate was trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent in the race for County Commissioner. The poll workers were close enough to the electorate – they were part of the electorate – to know their county overwhelmingly favored the Democratic incumbent.

A quick hand recount of the optical-scan ballots showed that the Democrat had indeed won, even though the computerized ballot-scanning machine kept giving the race to the Republican. The poll workers brought the discrepancy to the attention of the County Clerk, who notified the voting machine company.

"A new computer chip was flown to Snyder [Texas] from Dallas," County Clerk Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip installed, the computer then verified that the Democrat had won the election. In another Texas anomaly, Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth won his race with exactly 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel won her state House seat with exactly 18,181 votes, and conservative Judge Danny Scheel won his seat with exactly 18,181 votes – all in Comal County. Apparently, however, no poll workers in Comal County thought to ask for a new chip.

Editor's Note: This is just a small section of this very long article ... a MUST READ, loaded with important information!

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Voting systems 'can't be trusted'
Machines at risk for fraud, hacking

July 30, 2003
By Susan Greene, Denver Post Staff Writer

Dangling chads, nothing.

Florida's voting snafus during the 2000 presidential election pale in comparison to the vulnerabilities of high-tech voting machines counties throughout the nation are scrambling to buy in compliance with a new federal law, several top computer scientists are warning.

"What we know is that the machines can't be trusted. It's an unlocked bank vault ..., a disaster waiting to happen," said David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor who has prompted more than 110 fellow scientists to sign a petition calling for more accountability in voting technology.

The researchers fear that problems with software systems will result in hacking and voter fraud, allowing people to cast extra votes and poll workers to alter ballots undetected.

--snip

Watchdogs grumbled about the aggressive sales techniques and close ties between voting machine companies and the officials they're trying to woo. In Colorado, for example, the executive director of the Denver Election Commission resigned in 1998 to work for Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment, Inc., a company that received $6.6 million in contracts from his own department.

"There's quite a cozy relationship between election officials and salesmen," Dill said.

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The Techno-Voting Nightmare; Digital Vote Corruption-- First California-- then the 2004 Elections.
by Rob Kall, OpEdNews.COM

Imagine that a rogue programmer gets access to a few networks of computers in the California special gubernatorial election. The programmer manipulates the software to count wrong, making sure that Darrell Issa or whoever is running on the Republican ticket gets 10% more votes than the voters really gave him. This software "fix" will do it's work then delete itself. The program can be made to randomize the bogus numbers so they are a little different percentage at each voting location.

Now imagine that this is not some independently acting rogue programmer. What if he works for the company and the company is currying favor for or selling power to the candidate or even to unidentified backers-- like some of the wealthy oil people who have funded attack ads for George Bush in the past. This is no far-fetched scenario. There are a lot of us who believe it has already happened.

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Electronic Voting Machine Fraud Hits Mainstream News!

Today, July 25, 2003, CNN finally took notice of the investigation into easily rigged Electronic Voting Machine software. Judy Woodruff, dried-up prune and blatantly rightwing biased host of CNN's Inside Politics, introduced a story titled "Hacking the Vote?". This news item comes directly after the release of a report on July 24, 2003, written by computer security experts at Johns Hopkins University, with findings that even a 15 year old teenager would be able to hack the software used for Electronic Voting Machines. The story posted on CNN's Website is Study E-Voting Flaws Risk Ballot Fraud

The volume of articles and investigations online into electronic voting machines has apparently swollen to such proportions that it has forced mainstream media to take notice. Without the constant hammering by internet watchdog sites, this story would have been swept under the rug along with the rest of the crimes perpetrated by the Bush Cartel and the Republican Party.

In the past few days, major newspapers and news sites ran stories on this subject, which may be why CNN felt compelled to report it, not to be outdone by the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post, MSNBC, or Reuters. And that is great news for voters rights because TV news reaches far more people in one broadcast than any one website can reach. Getting this story out so that all voters are aware of the potential disastrous consequences of machines that can be easily tampered with has been the goal of all the articles and sites which report on this issue. Having more people become aware that the problem exists will spur many more people to action before the 2004 election, cause more to search for info on the internet, and probably encourage countless new articles and investigations into this matter. It will no doubt also compel hordes of rightwing rethugs to come out in defense of the machines and to block any legislation to protect voters rights. After all, they are the ones who will benefit from allowing this to continue. Some people believe they already have.

There should be major investigations into the last two elections. Republicans would argue that it would be too costly, but it would probably only take a tiny fraction of the billions that are being wasted on the Bush war machine to fund something that goes directly to the people's right to choose their officials and to have their votes counted properly. None of the events that have occurred since the ultra conservative republican takeover of our government would have happened had the person elected President in 2000 been allowed to take office. That is how important this issue is, and how important every vote in every election is to the fate of America. And that is why I say it is the most important issue, above all, in this country today.

Judy Woodruff probably would have rather chewed off her own bony foot than to stick it into this pile of steaming republican doodoo. Nevertheless, she did, and in doing so may have inadvertently done the American people one of the greatest favors in history. 

Here is what you can do...

Pass it on! Get the word out! Send articles and links via email to people you know who might not be aware of the issue. (Not spam ... people you know.)

Pass along the following two extremely important MUST READ articles on election fraud!

Inside a U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

Bigger than Watergate!


Link to every site in sight about vote fraud and electronic voting machines ... especially ...

Blackboxvoting.com

Scoop American Coup


Support Congressman Rush Holt's legislation to require a paper trail!

Congressman introduces legislation to require 
all voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper trail

Read Rush Holt, Rep. NJ, Remarks Made On The Floor Of The Congress When He Introduced The "Voter Verifiable Paper Trail" Bill

Last paragraph of the above remarks by Rep. Rush Holt, (D-NJ) :

"Mr. Speaker, there is nothing more crucial to democracy than guaranteeing the integrity, fairness, and accuracy of elections. The election of 2000 was a fiasco, but unless this legislation is promptly enacted the election of 2004 could be a disaster."


Find out what's going on in your area in regard to electronic voting machines and bring the issue to the attention of local officials.


Write your Senators and Reps in Congress and ask them to address the issue.
 
Write Congress

Tell Congress to Fight for Secure Elections! Send them a message! - Electronic Frontier Foundation


Sign Petitions

Act for Change Petition - Stop the Florida-ation of the 2004 Election!

Support Legislation requiring Voter-Verified Paper Trail for 2004 Elections Petition


Get Educated - Get Involved

July 28-29, 2003
USACM Sponsored Workshop on Voter-Verifiable Election Systems
Denver Colorado Adams Mark Hotel:

Billions of dollars will be spent in the next few years on voting equipment. Unfortunately, some believe the new technology may reduce election integrity and voter confidence. A proposed solution is to provide "voter verifiability," so that election results are guaranteed to reflect the intent of the voters. The workshop aims to bring together people interested in these issues. More!

And, if you haven't ....

Register to vote!

There isn't much time left before the 2004 election. We've got to get busy and get this under control before it's too late! Do anything you can think of, but above all, keep this issue on the table, and then kick it up a notch!

Analysis of an Electronic Voting System
by Tadayoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, Aviel D. Rubin and Dan Wallach
Released July 24, 2003.
(The first three authors are at Johns Hopkins University; Wallach is at Rice.)

You can find the article (PDF) HERE

Verified Voting

Verified Voting - Campaign To Demand Verifiable Election Results

Those slick new touch screen voting machines promise to get rid of hanging chads forever. But how do you know your vote was recorded as you intended? You might as well be handing it to a stranger who promises to deliver it to the polling place unchanged. "

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ACTION ALERT!

National: Join Martin Luther King III, ActForChange and over 38,000 voters to support the need for paper trail. All US voters please sign this National petition now.


National: Support Legislation HR 2239 requiring Voter-Verified Paper Trail for 2004 Elections All US voters please sign this National petition as well.

Computer Voting is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
New York Times

The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday.

"We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States.

The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper.

"With what we found, practically anyone in the country — from a teenager on up — could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like," Mr. Stubblefield said.

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Offshore Company Captures Online Military Vote

by Lynn Landes 7/16/03

Last year, while President Bush marshaled U.S. forces for the invasion of Iraq, the patriots at the Department of Defense awarded the contract for a new online voting system for the military... to an offshore company.

It gets worse.

Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) is the system and Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting of Enron bankruptcy fame) is the company. And although Accenture has not been officially implicated in the Enron scandal, they have created a reputation of their own that is already raising eyebrows.

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How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election

By Sandeep Atwal
InfernalPress.com

Purging voter lists is just the beginning: the U.S. has embraced a form of electronic voting that is unreliable, unverifiable and funded by the radical Christian right.

ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia may not be household names like Enron or Arthur Andersen, but these three companies will decide America's next president. In the 2004 presidential election, the full effect of electronic voting will be felt for the first time and these are the companies that will report the majority of the results.

Despite assurances from the corporations that own these machines, the reliability of electronic voting is under intense criticism. One of the most comprehensive examinations of electronic voting fraud came from brothers James and Kenneth Collier. In their 1992 book Votescam: The Stealing of America, the brothers detailed the long history of voting fraud over the past twenty-five years with a special focus on voting machines. American politicians and large media outlets have ignored their book, and their charges remain unanswered.

Now, their concerns are being echoed by a new group of writers, journalists and activists who have raised alarming and explosive details about electronic voting in America. While academics such as Professors Rebecca Mercuri and David Dill and organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery have carefully documented how voting systems are vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation, journalists Lynn Landes, Jerry Bowles and Bev Harris are alerting Americans to an electronic coup d'etat in the making. If their charges are true, and there is little evidence to contradict their claims, George W. Bush has already won the 2004 election.

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The Advisability of Holding One's Nose When Voting

By Bernard Weiner
The Crisis Papers

--snip

I wouldn't want that on my conscience, to know that my help in electing Bush next year -- by not voting at all, or by voting Green or whatever -- would mean that thousands of innocent civilians somewhere (Iran? Syria? Lebanon? Palestine?) will be slaughtered in yet another imperial conquest, that more of the Constitution will be shredded as those resisting such policies have their U.S. citizenship revoked and are prosecuted or deported (as Patriot Act 2 would permit), that the environment will be turned over to corporate polluters, and so on.

I simply can't participate in furthering that kind of behavior. And so, if it comes to it, I will hold my nose one more time and vote for the Democratic candidate, because my own moral purity is of far less importance ultimately than the further damage Bush&Co. can, and will, do to our country and to the world. I will offer my support to that Democrat even if the candidate holds a few views I don't agree with. I will put that aside, with my eyes on the prize, contantly repeating the mantra: "Remove the Bush extremists. Remove the Bush extremists." Everything else is a side issue for the election.

If we're able to defeat Bush at the polls (assuming that dirty tricks are kept to a minimum and that the computer-voting software is made impermiable to illegal manipulation, and always including a verifiable paper trail of actual votes cast), then we progressives -- who helped generate the victory -- will have leverage in working to rid the Democratic party of its more reactionary and corporate-beholden elements. And, in the meantime, we can work from the ground up in electing local progressive Democrats and Green-type candidates, so as to try to change our democracy from the bottom up rather than waiting always for the top-down, leaders-will-do-it-for-us approach to work.

--snip

Let's close with these words about Bush&Co. from Wade Hudson, recently returned from a Peace Team in Baghdad: "These power-hungry, authoritarians actually could create a totalitarian state if we let them fulfill their dreams...I am totally impressed with how serious the Bush people are. They are a qualitatively different breed from their predecessors. They are rigid, brutal, authoritarian, self-righteous, narrow-minded fanatics who have taken over the United States government in a secret, silent coup. They must be stopped, even if it means supporting a Democrat, virtually any Democrat."

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Thousands to Cast Ballots by Web in 2004

Thousands of people serving in the military and Americans living abroad will have that option next year in the nation's most extensive Internet voting experiment, viewed by some as a step toward elections in cyberspace.

The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, which began as a tiny demonstration project in the 2000 general election and involved just 84 voters, could give 100,000 voters the chance to cast absentee ballots online in next year's presidential primaries and general election.

--snip

Security remains the top concern for the system's coordinators and fodder for critics.

"I think Internet voting is a good idea for this population if you can assure security, but I'm not confident that they can do that," said John Dunbar, a project manager at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan government watchdog group. "It wouldn't take much for some smart hacker to send around a virus that lays in wait for someone to issue a vote."

Other computer security experts call the project an open invitation to election tampering.

"We're opening up a whole host of opportunities for voter coercion and voter fraud," said Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who specializes in studying electronic vote tabulation.

Mercuri said even the most secure systems can be cracked, hacked or left vulnerable to Internet viruses, leaving the ballot contents and the identity of the voter open to perusal.

"If we have this going on in commerce and all other transactions on the Internet why would people think we can avoid it in voting?" she said. "This is just an experiment that's doomed."

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"The great thing about America is everybody should vote." —George W. Bush"

Florida Election Mess - Political Jokes and Quotes

AUTHORITARIANS GONE WILD
Ted Rall

Whether, Not Who, is the Question About the 2004 Election

NEW YORK--He has canceled elections in Iraq. He will probably cancel them in Afghanistan. Will George W. Bush put the kibosh on elections in the United States next year?

Frightened by Bush's rapidly accruing personal power and the Democrats' inability and/or unwillingness to stand up to him, panicked lefties worry that he might use the "war on terrorism" as an excuse to declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties and jail political opponents.

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The E-VOT-A-THON!

Electronic Voting Machine
Vote as many times as you want until you are asked to leave the voting booth.

(It's a joke, but not so funny after you have read all the articles on this blog, huh?)

US election fraud scandal looms?

Explosive conjectures and evidence

By Egan Orion: Wednesday 09 July 2003, The Inquirer

STEALING ELECTIONS is a sordid tradition in the United States, though it's certainly not unknown in some other countries, as well.
From Tammany Hall's machine politics in the 19th century through Mayor Daley's grasp on Chicago elections, right up to Lyndon Johnson's first election and John Kennedy's 1960 cliff-hanger defeat of Richard Nixon, many US elections have been thought to have had 'irregularities'.

So much so that it's not really certain where 'Vote early, and often!' originated, whether in Boston, New York, or Chicago. It is also well known that many lesser US cities had political corruption, including rampant election fraud, at one time or another in their histories.
Now a New Zealand political activist has published suspicions, along with supporting evidence, that electronic voting in the US is being manipulated by right-wing politicians with the connivance of several voting machine manufacturers. The story revolves around some highly volatile conjectures and might be explosive, if fully investigated.

The article is reprinted below with permission, lightly edited merely for formatting, minor typos and a minor fact (G.W. Bush isn't a Jr.).
Here at the INQUIRER, we can't help but notice that the highly, er... accommodating database software that drives these allegedly dodgy and easily tampered electronic voting machines is... Microsoft Access.
And we're trying to decide on a catchy term that ends in 'gate'.µ

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Bald-Faced Lies About Black Box Voting Machines

and

The Truth About the Rob-Georgia File

By Bev Harris

Bev Harris is the Author of the soon to be published book ' Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering In The 21st Century '
Pre order at… Blackboxvoting.com

Someone needs to get their story straight

Diebold voting machines are used in 37 states. The entire state of Ohio is considering dumping its old system to buy Diebold. Georgia already did.

The Diebold files, supposedly secret voting machine files left on an unprotected web site for nearly six years, are unlocking the truth.

Official stories about voting machine security, acceptance testing and last-minute program changes are beginning to slide around like hot grease on a Georgia griddle.

What was the program patch known as rob-georgia.zip used for? What were they doing with that ftp site, anyway? Hang in for the first part of this article, the finger-pointing and obfuscating part, because it concludes with a straightforward explanation of what went on in Georgia that has never been made public before.

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"Sludge Report #154 – Bigger Than Watergate!
Tuesday, 8 July 2003, 6:13 pm
Column: C.D. Sludge

In This Edition: Bigger Than Watergate! - How To Rig An Election In The United States - Fantasy vs Reality - How We Discovered The Backdoor - Evidence Of Motive - Evidence Of Opportunity - Evidence Of Method - Evidence Of Prior Conduct - Consistent Unexplained Circumstantial Evidence

IMPORTANT NOTE: Publication of this story marks a watershed in American political history. It is offered freely for publication in full or part on any and all internet forums, blogs and noticeboards. All other media are also encouraged to utilise material. Readers are encouraged to forward this to friends and acquaintances in the United States and elsewhere."

Bigger Than Watergate!

The story you are about to read is in this writer's view the biggest political scandal in American history, if not global history. And it is being broken today here in New Zealand.

This story cuts to the bone the machinery of democracy in America today. Democracy is the only protection we have against despotic and arbitrary government, and this story is deeply disturbing.

Imagine if you will that you are a political interest group that wishes to control forevermore the levers of power. Imagine further that you know you are likely to implement a highly unpopular political agenda, and you do not wish to be removed by a ballot driven backlash.

One way to accomplish this outcome would be to adopt the Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Hun Sen (Cambodia) approach. You agree to hold elections, but simultaneously arrest, imprison and beat your opponents and their supporters. You stuff ballot boxes, disenfranchise voters who are unlikely to vote for you, distort electoral boundaries and provide insufficient polling stations in areas full of opposition supporters.

However as so many despots have discovered, eventually such techniques always fail – often violently. Hence, if you are a truly ambitious political dynasty you have to be a bit more subtle about your methods.

Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody knowing.

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In Computerizing Voting, Memory Would Help
Marie Cocco
Newsday.com
July 3, 2003

The message turned up in my electronic mailbox with the mortgage-rate come-ons and the dieting deals. It seemed no more significant than the usual spam.

"The most important legislation this year," was the hyperbolic headline in the "subject" field. I could not have guessed this would have some truth.

It was a pitch for legislation that would require governments to ensure that their voting systems, especially new computer systems that election officials are rushing to buy, produce a paper record so voters are able to verify that their ballot has been properly recorded before they leave the polls. The record would be kept locked to provide a backup in recounts, an old-fashioned double-check to make sure newfangled technology hasn't run amok.

This idea is a simple safeguard of democracy. Its virtue lies in common sense - it's not for nothing that your ATM offers a receipt. After all, the computers that are now thought to be the salvation of the election system have no immunity from viruses, software glitches, programming problems, hacking and plain old human error.

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Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program
Breaking Story About Electronic Voting
Tuesday, 8 July 2003
Article: Bev Harris

IMPORTANT NOTE: Publication of this story marks a watershed in American political history. It is offered freely for publication in full or part on any and all internet forums, blogs and noticeboards. All other media are also encouraged to utilise material. Readers are encouraged to forward this to friends and acquaintances in the United States and elsewhere.

CONTENTS
Introduction
Part 1 - CAN THE VOTES BE CHANGED?
Part 2 - CAN THE PASSWORD BE BYPASSED?
Part 3 – CAN THE AUDIT TRAIL BE ALTERED?

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See Also Companion Article For Wider Background…
Sludge Report #154 – Bigger Than Watergate!

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Law to restore vote to released felons vetoed by Alabama Governor

"Alabama has one of the nation's most sweeping disenfranchisement laws for felons, who are stripped of the vote for the rest of their lives. It is unfair because it bars people from participating in the democratic process long after they have paid their debts to society. And it disproportionately hurts blacks: 31 percent of the black men in Alabama have been stripped of their right to vote. The Alabama Legislature passed a law this year that would have restored the vote to released felons, but Governor Riley vetoed it."

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HR 2239 IH Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003(Introduced in House) "To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy under title III of such Act, and for other purposes. May 22, 2003 --Mr. [Rush] Holt [D-NJ] introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on House Administration".

Click Here - Enter HR 2239 in the 'Bill Number' submission window.