Frost: Fight the (voting) machine
By October Cullum Frost/ CNC Columnist
Thursday, May 26, 2005

Last Saturday, Bev Harris, "founding mother of the movement to... expose the dangers of electronic voting machines" - dubbed by some "the Erin Brockovich of Elections" - spoke in Cambridge. If you've had questions about recent vote counts, Harris's talk would confirm them.

     This isn't just Blue States whining about Nov. 2. The problem goes far deeper - and back at least to Joseph Stalin - who supposedly said, "Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."

     Remember Julia Roberts as a sexy Erin Brockovich? Brockovich, a law firm clerk, stumbled across some records that led her to take on Pacific Gas & Electric, a $28-billion behemoth that ultimately coughed up $333 million in the largest settlement in U.S. history in a direct-action lawsuit.

     Bev Harris is trying to take on even more: The entire U.S. voting system. In 2002, Harris, an able investigator, discovered 40,000 secret voting machine files, including one called "rob-Georgia," which contained instructions to replace Georgia's computerized voting file just before the 2002 election. Those files contained "back doors, secret codes, and other dishonesties." (What's a 'dishonesty'??)

     Harris reminded us that 130 years ago, our soldiers died for democracy; 85 years ago, some of our mothers died for the right to vote; and 40 years ago, too many of our brothers, black and white, died for that precious right. If this were simple, she said, people wouldn't have had to keep dying.

     I haven't heard of Americans dying for the vote in this century, but what would those who gave their lives back then think if they were alive today? Now it's not the right to vote, but whether, and how, our votes are counted. How can we claim to be the prototype of democracy for the Middle East - and the rest of the world?

     You've heard about Diebold's long, checkered history. Then there's Election.com, which is owned by Saudis; Inkavote, owned by a Malaysian gaming company; and Hart InterCivic, owned by one of President Bush's Pioneers.

Have you heard of Election Systems & Software (ES&S), one of the biggest U.S. voting machine corporations? A May 2003 article on the Web site of the Connecticut Green Party says Nebraska's Sen. Chuck Hagel was the chairman of ES&S from July 1992 to March 1995. According to the Washington, D.C. newspaper, The Hill, Hagel was still an owner of ES&S and McCarthy Group, its parent company, in 2003. Apparently he omitted disclosing his ownership to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). Perhaps not so coincidentally, ES&S voting machines were used to count the bulk of Hagel's votes in 1996 and 2002. The Washington Post called his 1996 election - the first Nebraska senatorial Republican victory in 24 years - "the biggest upset in the country."

     Hagel's Web site touts his 2002 reelection, with 83 percent of the vote, as "the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska." However, according to Thom Hartmann, in the May 23 issue of Common Dreams, Hagel's Web site "fails to disclose...that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company."

     Alex Bolton, a Hill reporter, learned in 2003 (apparently from Bev Harris) about the kaleidoscope of facts and implications, and proposed to write up Hagel's misrepresentations on his FEC documents.

     On Jan. 28, 2003, Jan Baran, general counsel for the Republican National Committee and one of the most powerful election lawyers in America, along with Hagel's own chief of staff, Lou Ann Linehan, tried to push The Hill into killing the story. Bolton stood up to them. They told him to soften the story. Bolton refused.

     When Bev Harris told all on her Web site, ES&S attorneys sent her a threatening letter. Harris says "even though the information was true," they claimed they could sue her "because it put their company in a bad light." Knowing her First Amendment rights, she sent the letter to 3,000 news outlets. She has not heard anything from ES&S since.

Is this story unique?

     Even without Harris's hair-raising tales, I've heard enough, and found enough on the Web, to start losing sleep. Where do we go from here?

     Harris said, "If you ask a broken system to investigate itself, you get a dog-and-pony show." She wants to start yesterday to clean it up - from the grass roots.

     Sheila Parks, who introduced Harris Saturday evening, insists we've got to go for 100 percent paper ballots, 100 percent hand counts, and 100 percent audits.

     But Parks greatest contribution of the evening was the story of the 100 monkeys on a Japanese island. The locals used to toss sweet potatoes onto the beach, and the monkeys gobbled them up.

     One day in 1952, a young monkey maiden (!) discovered they tasted better if she washed off the sand.

     Gradually a few others began to follow her example.

     Suddenly, in the autumn of 1958, all the monkeys began washing their potatoes. Some kind of force field had been reached that tipped the group to the new behavior.

     Sheila Parks says she's searching, in voting matters, for the 100th monkey.

     Could it be me? Or you??