Five minutes for democracy

By MICHAEL A. CARRIER Opinion in Philadelphia Daily News  07 October 2004

THE BITTER wounds opened by the 2000 presidential election continue to fester. But if we don't act to address the dangers of electronic voting machines, the 2004 election may be far worse, with potentially devastating and irreparable consequences for democracy.

As U.S. citizens, we generally take pride in our democracy. We may not be as active in the daily monitoring of our government as we should be, but at least we can head to the voting booth every few years to "throw the bums out." What would happen, then, if we lost our democracy? If the election results didn't match our choices on Election Day?

To be sure, fraud in voting is nothing new. Stories of stuffing ballot boxes trace back for decades, if not centuries. But what is new is the potential for fraud on a scale never seen before. The potential for electronic voting that does not reflect what voters want. Even worse, the potential, by not leaving any paper trail, to erase those preferences from our collective electoral consciousness without a trace.

Electronic voting warrants concern on several levels. First, it has been plagued by flaws and mishaps. Many elections have been marred by machines that jammed, failed to record votes, refused to credit votes for particular candidates and declared the losing candidate (based on hand recounts) to be the winner.

Second, reflecting at least a potential conflict of interest, all of the major voting-machine vendors have ties to the Republican Party. The contacts include:

• An active Republican fund-raiser who promised "to help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" (The Diebold CEO).

• A member of the right-wing Council for National Policy and Christian Reconstructionist movement (Election Systems and Software - ES&S - initial-funder Howard Ahmanson).

• Ex-President George H.W.

Bush (recent senior adviser to the Carlyle Group, a partner of a parent company of Sequoia).

• Tom Hicks (significant investor in Hart Intercivic and purchaser of Texas Rangers from President George W. Bush).

Third, the results of previous elections warrant suspicion. The 2002 elections in Georgia were conducted entirely on electronic machines from Diebold, with company employees changing the software before the election and creating an Internet folder called "rob-georgia." Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of upsets of Democrats occurred in these elections, including that of triple-amputee Vietnam vet Max Cleland (leading in pre-election polls but who lost 53-46 percent) and that of Gov. Roy Barnes (leading by 9-11 points, lost 51-46 percent).

Just to name one other example, a major Republican upset in the 1996 election involved the election to the Senate of Chuck Hagel, who - two weeks before announcing his candidacy - was CEO of ES&S (then American Information Systems), the company whose machines counted 85 percent of the votes in the Nebraska election.

If this state of affairs is disturbing, there is still time left to take democracy into our own hands by making four phone calls.

First, call Congress (800-839- 5276) and tell your representative to pass H.R. 2239, which would require a voter-verified paper record for electronic voting machines. Second, ask your senator to support S. 2437, which also requires a paper trail.

Because there may not be time to add paper trails by November, make two more calls, to Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro A. Cortes and Philadelphia city commissioners to demand an ample supply of paper ballots (for at least 25 percent of a precinct's registered voters), "stand-alone" voting machines that are not connected to modems, wireless devices or the Internet, and the posting of results at each precinct when the polls close.

We can still save democracy. But it will take five minutes of your time - four phone calls. I know, you're not an "activist."

But we share this thing called democracy. We share the pride it instills in us. And each one of us is responsible for maintaining this democracy. Each one of us has to have five minutes to spare for democracy. If we don't, who will?