Article & Essay: The Fight For Fair Elections

The movement for an honest election picked up steam but then landed right in the comfortable lap of the enemy. Will your vote be counted in November? Maybe.
By Elaine Kitchel

For a few moments there was hope. It finally looked as if we might actually see daylight past the tangled web of inaccuracies and lies spun by the voting machine industry. Citizens all over the country have been crying out for fair elections in which every vote gets counted. July 13th saw the “Computer Ate My Vote Day” in which action groups in several states demonstrated for fair elections with verifiable results. Numerous states, including the pivotal state of Ohio, decertified electronic voting machines because of the inability to perform recounts on the machines and because of their proven failures in many state primary elections. The average Joe suddenly became aware that his vote might not get counted. He’s finding that possibility unacceptable and beginning to shout about it.

That’s a good thing. But don’t expect the voting machine industry to stop their sneaky tricks just because they’ve been exposed. The lengths to which they are willing to go and the lack of conscience they display are bad enough, but now we learn that the watchdog of the industry is actually its lapdog.

Here’s what’s happening. Let’s say that you are a concerned voting citizen. You plan to arrive at the polls bright and early to cast your vote. Unlike a vending machine that gives you a soft drink when you put in your quarters, the electronic voting machine gives you no soft drink, no receipt, no evidence at all that your vote, once cast, will be counted or even recognized by the machine. But you’re not worried because we have an Election Center as a “national clearinghouse and resource for the comparison of information” on various matters involving voting machines and elections. The Election Center is a nonprofit organization, with a substantial grant to train machine users and advise Congress and government agencies on voting machine process issues. The Election Center also provides staff services to the National Association of State Election Directors. The Election Center works with your state election officials to make sure all voting machines are certified. And who provides the funds that the Election Center draws on to do this great public service? Well, you could probably guess, it’s the voting machine industry. And don’t forget, the two top voting machine companies, Diebold and ES&S have promised to “deliver” the election to Mr. Bush. (See my previous articles on this subject: Today Indiana, Tomorrow Your State and The Tangled Web of American Voting .) Sounds great, right? Do you feel confident that your vote will be counted?

How do you feel learning that the Election Center is headed by a fellow named R. Doug Lewis, who once owned a used computer store that went bankrupt. He can exhibit no expertise in either computer programming or computer processes. Lewis says he once worked for “a president” but can’t prove it. He is accepting large payments from all the voting machine companies, while at the same time sending his employees out to assure election officials that the electronic voting machines they are considering for purchase are perfectly reliable and certifiable.

But he and his employees know this is not true: they have read the Election Day guideline handbooks from Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and other vendors that list dozens of reasons why their machines may fail to tabulate votes accurately. Here are a few:
· ballot jams
· memory card corruption
· failure of the host computer’s modem configuration
· failure of the modem card

But to worry about that is really to sweat the small stuff. There are much bigger problems. There’s the current of unspoken information that circulates in the voting machine industry. They won’t tell you, but every voting machine manufacturer will have a representative present at the sites where their company’s machines are used, just in case the election officials have difficulties with the machines. Or the election officials may opt to have the voting machine representatives actually tabulate the results. The Diebold “Election Support Guide” for its employees says, “Determine what your role is to be in the election close process.... You will generally be considered to be a high-ranking election specialist and a paragon of knowledge and solutions, which may be disconcerting when things go wrong.” It goes on to say, “Be aware of the fact that pollworkers are often quite aged, and technological issues that to you are utterly banal may be quite daunting to the pollworkers…. Do not offer answers if you are not perfectly comfortable ... offer the minimum amount of information necessary. Consider the nature of the information being discussed, ... the position of the person you are discussing the information with, as well as an individuals or press who may be present who you are not familiar with.”

Are you feeling confident in your state’s ability to carry out a fair election? Here’s more:

“Memory cards from the polls may be either uploaded to the GEMS server by modem, or driven in to election central for direct or Lan-based upload. The former is quicker and fraught with difficulties, while the latter is slower but presents a much more stable process.” What this means is that the election results from any precinct are stored on a little memory card. The results can be sent in via a telephone line, which can be very problematic, or one can get in the car and drive the memory card to the central election data-gathering site. Either way there are problems. Diebold admits that the first way is not reliable, and if a precinct chooses to use the second method, how does one insure that a different card with different results is not substituted for the actual one?

Maybe this reporter is paranoid. But maybe not.

What would you say if you knew that congressmen, congresswomen, senators, and state election officials have all received invitations to take a cruise on the Potomac River, courtesy of the Election Center? During this cruise, attendees are invited to enjoy classes on “The Media: Fighting BackGetting the Story Straight,” “Election Litigation, Election Ethics, and “Why Our Voting Machines Can’t be Tampered With.” This is a straightforward case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Do you want your state election officials being “trained” in election ethics by an organization that expects and receives money from the voting machine vendors? Do you want your election officials schmoozing and getting cozy with the folk who are trying to sell them machines? How about writing to the officials from your state and asking them not to go? Point out to them that it’s a conflict of interest. Here’s where to find them.

More pointedly, do you want your election results tabulated by someone who works for a company that makes the machines?

Consider this: Many precincts will turn over the election tabulation to a voting machine representative, since that person has a pretty good working knowledge of how to do the tabulation. We’ll call this person the “technician.” However, with some machines, such as the Sequoia and Diebold machines, there is a point in the tabulation process at which the technician must do data entry through a DOS prompt or a Windows program. At this point, the entire election results are open to revision by the technician. Unless the technician is being watched by someone who understands the technology, he could any data he wished and no one would be the wiser. The election tabulation from a precinct that uses a technician from the vendor is completely unreliable unless there is a written receipt for every vote.

In any kind of scientific research, unverifiable data is never acceptable. Self-respecting scientists would find data submitted by a vendor to be completely laughable. Let’s say that I wanted to buy a machine that could count the number of red blood cells in a sample of blood. I could easily test the reliability of the machine by counting the cells in a sample myself and then comparing my count with the one from the machine. If they matched on a given number of occasions, I could find the machine’s results reliable. But if I simply let the technician sent by the company use the machine to do the counting, he could tell me anything. I could not be sure that I was getting reliable data. Yet this is the kind of data that will be turned in to nearly every state’s Election Central across the country on November 2nd.

Are you still thinking your vote will be counted? If so, maybe you’ll be invited on the Potomac cruise. Maybe a giant pile of diamonds will appear in your front yard. But if you’re thinking it may not be counted, write to your state election supervisor. Demand that electronic voting machines in your state be capable of producing a paper trail so that election results may be checked and re-checked. You have a right to have your vote counted and to have your election officials show, to your satisfaction, how and when your vote was counted. Without a paper trail, that is just not possible.