Who really won?

Experts discuss integrity of voting process

Chris Graham  Augusta Free Press   15 November 2004

The 2004 elections have been over and done with for going on two weeks now.

At least that's what most of us have permitted ourselves to believe.

Things are far from being complete, though, in North Carolina, where election officials could be facing down the prospect of having to call a do-over in the wake of reports that UniLect electronic-voting machines in Carteret County failed to register more than 4,500 votes cast on Election Day - a number that could end up outpacing the margin of victory in two hotly contested state races.

And they're still counting votes in Washington, where the governor's race continues to be too close to call, and also in Ohio, despite the fact that Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry has conceded defeat in the pivotal battleground state to Republican Party rival George W. Bush.

And then you consider that stories from across the country of voter intimidation and suppresssion and irregularities involving touch screens that seemed to put votes in the wrong column are fueling a whisper campaign that is getting throatier by the minute - with the general message being that the outcomes of at least a few 2004 elections that we have come to accept as being legitimate could very well be anything but.

And we'd thought that we'd learned our lessons following the 2000 Florida election debacle ...

"My concern is that we tend to have this philosophy that we don't need to put in a stop sign or a stoplight until there's an accident where there is an accident in which somebody gets killed," said Ellen Theisen, the co-founder of www.votersunite.org.

"We're not going to be inclined to want to do anything about the way we conduct our elections until something drastic happens that makes us take notice. But at that point, it's already going to be too late," Theisen told The Augusta Free Press.

For a growing number of people on both sides of the political spectrum, that threshold has already been crossed.

"I don't want to use the word Democrat ... but the more emphatic charges have come from more partisan sources," said Matt Smyth of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

"That might typically be expected. But the fact that we had a three and a half million popular-vote margin in the presidential race should take some of the sting out of what we've been hearing in some quarters," Smyth told the AFP. "It makes it a more difficult case to try to put out there when the margin is as pronounced as what we saw last week."

To be fair, it's not just Democrats who are raising the issues with the handling of the 2004 elections.

"The image that is portrayed in the media is that this is a liberal issue, that the people raising questions about this are whiny Democrats who can't accept the fact that they lost the presidential election," said David Allen, a North Carolina-based publisher and the founder of www.blackboxvoting.com.

"Try telling that to the people in Carteret County. Among the people affected by the voting problems there are Republicans, by and large, and the issue to them is that what happened there might cause their candidate to lose," Allen told the AFP.

"This isn't a Democratic issue or Republican issue. This is an issue for anybody and everybody who has an interest in preserving the integrity of the democratic system," Allen said.

So let's run with the idea that it's not a Democrat issue or a Republican issue - and on that point, the people making the most noise at the present time are third-party presidential candidates Michael Badnarik, David Cobb and Ralph Nader, who have all said that they plan to contest election results from Nov. 2, Badnarik and Cobb in Ohio, Nader in New Hampshire.

The idea that the outcome of elections could have hinged on a series of errors made at local precincts and registrar's offices or a plot or plots to outright steal the election hatched somewhere else seems less than likely.

"The vast majority of the problems that we've looked into are the kind that can be easily explained," Smyth said.

"Machine failures are going to happen. And there are going to be instances where perhaps you see some isolated cases of fraud in some localities across the country," Smyth said.

"We've been looking into many of these reports, and nothing that we've seen makes us think that it would have had an effect on the outcome one way or the other," Smyth said.

Allen agrees with that assessment.

"But that said, people should be concerned about the integrity of the election process," said Allen, a systems engineer. "And they should be concerned about the incompetence and arrogance that we've seen on the part of election officials and voting-machine company representatives."