Fear and loathing post-Election Day

Inside ...

Chris Graham   Augusta Free Press   17 November 2004

Almost nobody's saying this out loud, but it's not too far beneath the surface of the discussion ongoing about the widespread voting irregularities that have been documented since Nov. 2.

Did somebody pull a fast one over on us on Election Day?

That's the question that few seem to want to ask.

And for obvious reasons.

"I'd love to be able to say that was the case. From a partisan standpoint, I'm a Kerry supporter, and if there would be anybody who would be interested in seeing a reason that would lead me to think that there could be a reversal in the outcome of this election, it would be me," said David Allen, a North Carolina-based publisher and systems analyst and the founder of www.blackboxvoting.com.

"But I haven't seen anything that would make me think that there's any evidence of a conspiracy to try to manipulate votes," Allen told The Augusta Free Press.

Which isn't to say that the thousands of reports trickling in to watchdog outfits like Allen's and others from across the country about problems with electronic-voting machines and voter-intimidation and -suppression efforts aren't true.

"It's just that to suggest that there was a conspiracy to manipulate the outcome of the election would imply that there would have had to have been something so widespread that it's preposterous to think that something that would fit that description wouldn't have made its way into the news media by now," James Madison University political-science professor Bob Roberts told the AFP.

"It's next to impossible to even fathom that something like that could ever take place," Roberts said. "The election system in this country is controlled by people at the local level. For something to have occurred on a widespread basis, for example, in Ohio or Florida, there would have had to have a scheme that engaged a number of election officials in a number of different jurisdictions.

"There's no way that a reasonable person could ever believe that something like this could have actually happened," Roberts said.

Let's forget conspiracy for a moment. What about the idea that there was enough in the way of vote-counting failures across the country that the litany of failures themselves ended up skewing the final results?

"I'm annoyed with The Wall Street Journal for the article that it ran (last) week essentially saying that this was a surprisingly error-free election," Allen said. "Try telling that to the people in Carteret County in North Carolina where 4,500 votes didn't get counted because the electronic-voting machine stopped counting at 3,000.

"A machine with a basic design flaw like that is an indication of incompetence that borders on the criminal," Allen said. "There's no excuse for something like that to happen. If a programmer working for me did something like that, I'd be inclined to want to take him out back and shoot him."

So there's that issue with e-voting - and then there's the fact that the vast majority of votes cast nationwide are still counted by optical-scan machines.

"Nobody seems to be interested in the fact that 80 percent of the votes that were cast in last week's election were counted by machines, and that there's almost nothing in terms of auditing procedures in place to guarantee that those machines are counting votes accurately. We just trust that the machines are counting the votes accurately, when if they're not audited, we have absolutely no idea of whether that's the case or not," said Ellen Theisen, the co-founder of www.votersunite.org.

"We're talking about 80 percent of the votes that are cast here. Four out of every five votes. And we know nothing about the veracity of the vote totals that the machines spit out at us," Theisen told the AFP.

We will in Ohio, at least, where Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik and Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb announced on Monday that they are planning to ask for a recount in each of the state's 88 counties early next month.

That bit of news has sparked a new round of breathless speculation about what might be in the offing following the recount.

"My concern is that this issue has become too personal for some people to be able to process all the information," Allen said.

"Look, it was a traumatic election. The divide between the candidate and the parties and the two voting blocs is obvious. There were going to be hurt feelings any way you looked at it," Allen said.

"But unfortunately, this issue is causing a lot of fear and anxiety on the part of a lot of people," Allen said.