A verifiable-voting insurgency

 
Colleen Redman   Guest Commentary   Roanoke Times   02 December 2004

Redman, of Floyd, is a writer and poet.

Just as the U.S. invasion of Iraq seemed over with the fall of Baghdad, so did the 2004 presidential election seem to end when John Kerry conceded. But the war was hardly over when Bush prematurely claimed victory, and the election isn't over, either.

In fact, a new Harris Poll indicates that one in five Americans doesn't believe the election was legitimate. The number of skeptics would probably be higher if more people were aware of the scope of voting irregularities that occurred. Unfortunately, the corporate-owned media have mostly fallen in line with the "powers that be," just as they did in the run-up to the war (something a few major newspapers later apologized for).

In the days following the election, I got my election news from the Internet because the mainstream media weren't covering it thoroughly. Bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states, wrote Thom Hartmann, author and nationally syndicated talk show host, in a Nov. 4 article that really piqued my interest.

With a story here ("Vote count glitches haunt Bush's supposed mandate") and a story there ("Palm Beach County logs 88,000 more votes than voters"), I pieced together news from across the country in an effort to inform myself.

On Nov. 14, I came across a compelling paper by University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven Freeman, titled "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy." After comparing exit polls, which had Kerry in the lead, with the announced results for Bush in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, Freedman, a statistician, calculated that the odds against such an accidental discrepancy in all three states together are 250 million to 1.

Exit polls generally match official voting counts and have been used around the world as a way to verify voter accuracy and guard against vote tampering. Even Dick Morris, a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, said in an article for The Hill, "Exit polls are almost never wrong. ... [They] cannot be wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

In an ironic twist, the media have recently been in high gear covering the suspected vote fraud in Ukraine. Just weeks after our own election, in which exit polls didn't match the computerized tallies, The Associated Press, while reporting the story, included Ukraine's exit poll discrepancies as evidence of alleged vote fraud there.

Not only have the media been neglectful of investigating the validity of the U.S. election, they have occasionally discredited those who have questioned it, referring to them as "conspiracy theorists." Given the high numbers of vote "purges," "spoiled" ballots, voter intimidation incidents and other reported irregularities that disenfranchised mostly Democratic voters, coupled with the knowledge that the largest voting machine companies are owned by known Republicans, or that a John Hopkins study determined that electronic voting machines are wide open for fraud, isn't some oversight in order? Isn't it suspicious that voting anomalies have overwhelmingly come down in favor of Bush?

While tens of thousands of Ukrainians are in the streets defending the principles of democracy, most Americans probably aren't even aware of the University of California-Berkeley statistical study that found that irregularities with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 to 260,000 or more excess votes to Bush in Florida. For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting, someone must explain the statistical anomalies in Florida, the professor who headed up the study said.

If Americans knew that a reputable MIT political scientist succeeded in replicating the Berkeley analysis, would they take to the streets like the Ukrainians, or at least get on the phone to their congressmen?

Contrary to what you might believe if you're following the mainstream news, there is a substantial uprising of activism taking place by those who want our voting systems to be more accountable. Bev Harris, author and founder of www.blackboxvoting.org, has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for vote records for more than 3,000 counties as part of her investigation into possible electronic voting fraud.

The General Accounting Office has agreed to investigate 2004 voting irregularities, at the request of several Democratic leaders. Green and Libertarian presidential candidates have announced that they will file for a recount in Ohio and have raised the money to do it.

While the post-election self-analysis the Democratic Party is currently engaged in may be constructive, I hate to see Kerry supporters lambaste him for losing or beat themselves up for not doing enough, because, due to a lack of confidence in our voting systems, it's not clear that he didn't win.

Kerry supporters should feel some solace in knowing that the latest Zogby poll (Nov. 13) has Bush's approval rating at only 48 percent, with those disapproving at 51 percent (about the same percentages that the exit polls had Kerry winning by). A Gallup poll gives Bush a modest post-election bounce with an approval rating of 53 percent. While that is a higher rating than the Zogby poll, it reflects the lowest post-election approval rating of any of the last seven presidents who won a second term, which is hardly a mandate for Bush.

On the surface, the election night coverage seemed as dramatic and believable as Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations when he reasoned to the world why we were justified to invade Iraq. But in reality, Powell's case was empty of substance, and eventually even he conceded that his evidence against Iraq was wrong.

It's not hard to conclude that election results could have been created by those in power and are not a fact-based reality, considering what the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist David Suskind says a top White House official said to him: "You're part of the reality-based community, one who believes that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. ... That's not the way the world works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too."

Voting fraud is nothing new. It's part of our history and something both parties have been guilty of. If it's easy enough to do, you can be assured someone will do it. And never has it been so easy. Our voting system has been privatized by Republican-owned companies that have no meaningful federal or state regulations. It was Republicans who blocked legislation requiring that electronic voting machines produce a backup paper trail, and some are now calling for an end to exit polls.

I don't want to raise false hopes that the election results will be changed by upcoming recounts and investigations, but I don't want those of us who find Bush's fundamentalist agenda frightening to lose all hope, either. To those Americans, I say, stay informed and be outspoken. And remember: Richard Nixon was re-elected, too, only later to resign.