So how did the nation vote Nov. 2?
By October Cullum Frost/ CNC Columnist

Thursday, January 6, 2005

It's cold here in Minnesota, but there's only about half an inch of crystalline white on the ground. Although it's very beautiful, it doesn't compare with the 9 inches of snow we left in Lincoln last Wednesday. What will we find on our return two days before you read this column? Will all the beautiful white stuff will have been washed away?

     And how strange that we left Lincoln in 2004, and will return in 2005, just six days later!

     It's also strange that Nov. 2 is two months and four days behind us, and that this is the day our electors meet to return George Bush to the U.S. throne for another four years.

     Protests will already have been held this week - one in Faneuil Hall - and more will be taking place today.

     Some will seem extreme, even to those who wish the election had turned out differently. Others will simply claim the wrong guy won.

     With the nation so divided, it's hard to credibly claim one merely wants to know the truth: How did we vote in November?

     Yet that is the ultimate question in any democratic system. In a choice between A and B, the voters have not only the right to choose, but the right to know who got chosen.

     Last weekend, a Lincoln friend forwarded me 20 statements about electronic voting from "Angry Girl," a woman drummer in an Arizona rock group called Nightweed.

     Don't be put off by those credentials. I have reordered, condensed, and augmented her points here, and, with the help of Google, done some accuracy checking.

     Item: There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.

     Item: 30 percent of all U.S. votes are entered on unverifiable touch screen voting machines, with no paper trail - that is, there's no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is what was entered by voters.

     Item: 80 percent of all U.S. votes are tallied by two voting machine companies: Diebold and ES&S. The latter counts almost 60 percent of all U.S. votes.

     Item: The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. The chairman and CEO of Diebold, a major Bush campaign donor, is the man who wrote in 2003 he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Diebold is based in Ohio.

     Item: In April 2004, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all electronic touch-screen voting machines in the state because of "security concerns and lack of voter confidence." He said he was "passing along evidence to the state's attorney general to bring criminal and civil charges against...Diebold...for fraud."

     Item: Although Diebold's new touch screen voting machines produce no paper trail, the ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines that Diebold also makes all log each transaction; they do generate a trail.

     Item: Jeff Dean was senior vice president of General Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. After Dean was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Diebold retained him as a consultant. Dean, who is largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the U.S., was convicted of planting "back doors" (security holes deliberately left in a system by designers or maintainers) in his software, and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of two years.

      Item: It has been claimed that all the voting machine errors reported in Florida favored Bush and other Republicans; some experts recommend further investigation.

     Item: It is claimed that no international election observers were allowed into Ohio polls.

     That's just part of the electronic voting picture, and part of the story. In the Dec. 11 issue of the Detroit News, AP writer Rachel Konrad says questions have been raised about providing scandalously few voting machines, particularly in poor counties; providing insufficient or incomplete provisional ballots, and not counting some of them; and not properly training poll workers. (In New Orleans thousands of voters were told to come back later because workers couldn't turn on the new voting machines.)

      Konrad also says a handful of voters in six states complained that although they ed Kerry on touch-screen machines, they were shown as voting for Bush until they revised their ballots; equipment manufacturers blamed that on "miscalibration." In one Ohio precinct, 3,893 votes were recorded for Bush, although only 638 people voted. (That error was later corrected.) There were also waits of many hours in some urban areas, even where extra machines were stored in warehouses.

     Some voter registration documents were discarded, some Democrats were apparently intentionally directed to the wrong polling place, and provisional ballots were not always counted.

     Much of this has already gotten a lot of press; all of it bears investigating. It's bad enough that it costs so much to win a U.S. election, and that supporting the winner often gets rewarded with power and wealth. Massive errors, whether intentional or not, strike at the heart of our precious democracy.

     We must not stand silently by.

     October Cullum Frost is a Lincoln resident and a regular columnist for the Lincoln Journal.