Guest Viewpoint: Integrity of America's voting system is in danger

By Dianne Lobes??? Eugene Register-Guard?? 23 November 2004

It's the story you're not seeing in the mainstream media yet. You learned the basics of it in first grade, though. This is a country of "one person, one vote," and the sanctity of your vote is a sacred trust between you and the United States of America. You have the right to vote, and to have that vote counted.

We need to protect this sacred trust. Democracy cannot be maintained on blind faith, though our first-grade hearts believe otherwise. The proclamation of a sacred trust and its reality are two different things.

"We have a republic to defend," said Bev Harris, executive director of www.blackboxvoting .org. But according to the mass of evidence she and other voting experts have accumulated, our republic and its much-vaunted voting system are in grave danger.

Harris, a savvy investigator from Seattle, is not referring to terrorism, but to the growing cascade of voting irregularities that have been reported across Ohio, Florida and the country as a whole.

Ohio is the home of Diebold Election Systems, a major purveyor of touchscreen voting machines that, unlike the ATMs the company also manufactures, have no paper trail. Without a paper trail, no recount is possible. The voting machines - the "black boxes" of Harris' Web site - feed into a central tabulator run by secret Diebold software.

That tabulator can easily be hacked, inside and out. Anyone having access to the computer can change, in a minute, results compiled by the secret software and remain undetected. The democracy in this process is undetectable, too.

Many, many reports of miscounts by computer voting machines have been heard at several public hearings organized by grass-roots groups in Ohio. Sometimes, the machines registered the wrong candidate for president, or counted votes backward.

In Ohio, an analysis of the Franklin County Board of Elections' allocation of voting machines consistently showed that far fewer machines were provided to the Democratic city of Columbus, with its large ethnic population and increased voter registration, than to the primarily Republican, white, affluent suburbs.

Freepress.org states, "The Columbus Board of Elections' own document records that, while voters waited in lines ranging from two to seven hours at polling places, 68 electronic voting machines remained in storage and were never used on Election Day." Reports of 11-hour waits were common.

Many of the available machines broke down or didn't work at all, and poll workers were reported to be unconcerned about requests for help. "Observers" and local law enforcement officers intimidated some voters. It's estimated that tens of thousands of voters were driven away. The national election may have turned on this disenfranchisement.

A study of Florida's 2004 vote by the University of California, Berkeley, found evidence that electronic-voting counties could have mistakenly awarded up to 260,000 votes to George Bush. The study was replicated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and checked by seven UC professors, without finding a flaw in the model.

Berkeley sociology professor Michael Hout, who oversaw the research, called on Florida election officials for an investigation. "Something went awry with the voting in Florida," he stated.

Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties - the same heavily Democratic Florida counties involved in the 2000 election fiasco - showed a "small, unexplained boost" in votes going to Bush. Their touchscreen voting machines came from Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems, which along with Diebold sells the majority of electronic voting systems. The CEOs of Diebold and ES&S are brothers.

Recounts are currently under way in Ohio and New Hampshire, requested and funded by the Green and Libertarian parties and grass-roots organizations, including TruthinVoting.org here in Eugene. Election lawyers are filing suit in Ohio. Georgia, New Mexico and Iowa, among other states, are being scrutinized for similar discrepancies in voting patterns.

We cannot allow a company such as Diebold, with a track record of errors and a growing history of voting irregularities, to "ensure" our sacred trust. We the people must be asking questions, getting answers and involving ourselves in the process every step of the way. We must oversee and self-ensure our right to vote.

Josef Stalin said, "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." That's the part we didn't learn in first grade.

We must demand investigations and appropriate recounts of the 2004 election now.