Who is counting your vote? Diebold & Bush vs. the public interest

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/4642/1/197/

People's Weekly World Newspaper,
  Jan 17, 2004

Who is counting your vote?
Diebold & Bush vs. the public interest

Author: Barbara Jean Hope

Who is counting your vote? Now is the time, before November
2004, to ask that and a few other questions.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate Jan. 19,
was a courageous fighter for voting rights. He wrote an op-ed
piece in the New York Times, Sept. 14, 1965, as Congress was debating the 
Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"In Selma, Alabama, thousands of Negroes are courageously
providing dramatic witness to the evil forces that bar our way to
the all important ballot box," King wrote.

Those same "evil forces" are alive and well today, although they
have found more efficient methods than poll taxes and phony
literacy tests to disenfranchise voters.

Computerized voting seems to be a good thing at first glance.
It is easier, right? Easy or not, computer technologists and
voting-rights advocates are now sounding the alarm: Just who
owns the machines? Can they be programmed to help the right
wing continue their vote stealing racket so vividly displayed in
the stolen 2000 presidential election?

An Aug. 28, 2003, Cleveland Plain Dealer article quoted Walden
O'Dell who said he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to [George W. Bush] in 2004." O'Dell is the
chairman of the board of Diebold Election Systems, the second
largest company in the U.S. that counts votes . our votes. O'Dell
is also a member of the Rangers and the Pioneers, those who
have contributed the most money to the Bush campaign.

On occasion, O'Dell hangs out at the Bush ranch in Crawford,
Texas. He hosted a $600,000 fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio 
in which Cheney was the featured speaker. Questions began to swirl about 
Diebold's vote-counting
machines soon after they began securing lucrative contracts
under George W. Bush's "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA),
which provides $3.9 billion to the states to help finance a total
shift to so-called direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting by
2006.

HAVA also provides funding for computerized voter rolls, including programs 
for removal of "ineligible" voters. It is modeled on the
vote scrubbing operation carried out by Database Technologies
and its parent company, ChoicePoint, in the 2000 election under a 
multi-million dollar contract signed by then-Florida Secretary of
State Katherine Harris. Tens of thousands of mostly African
American and Latino voters were improperly removed from the
Florida voting rolls, key to George W. Bush's theft of the election.

Critics discovered a web site set up by Global Elections
Systems (GES) that was taken over by Diebold in 2002. It
contained thousands of sensitive files on the hardware and
software of the touch screen machines. It proved just how
vulnerable they are to tampering and vote falsification.

Diebold sought an injunction to block circulation of the memos
on grounds of copyright infringement. But Swarthmore College students had 
posted the memos on dozens of sites on the
Internet. Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich
hosted the memos on his web site. Diebold has since withdrawn
the lawsuit.

Bev Harris, who has since written a book, "Black Box Voting:
Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century" (available free from the
site www.blackboxvoting.org), received 7,000 of the Diebold documents. 
Among them was a memo by GES employee
Lana Hires to her supervisor during the 2000 election: "I need
some answers," she writes. "Our department is being audited
by the county. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as 
to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus
16,022 votes when it was uploaded. Will someone please
explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor
instead of standing here 'looking dumb?'"

Over the past 30-40 years, where voting machine irregularities
have come to light, those irregularities have "overwhelmingly
favored Republican candidates." In 2002, 74 percent of upset elections were 
called in favor of Republicans.

A Nov. 7, 2002, Associated Press story datelined Snyder,
Texas, reported, "A defective computer chip in the county's
optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly
tallied a landslide victory for Republicans." Poll workers
became suspicious. As a result of those workers' inquiry, a
new computer chip was flown to Snyder, Texas, from Dallas.
Once the new chip was installed, the computer verified that
the Democrat had won the election. The question remains:
Was this an innocent computer glitch or something far more
sinister, an attempt to steal that election for the Republicans?

In a July 30, 2003, article published by Alternet.org titled,
  "The Theft of Your Vote is Just a Chip Away," writer Thom
Hartmann reported on another "Texas anomaly." In the
November 2002 election in Comal County, Republican state
Sen. Jeff Wentworth won with 18,181 votes, Republican
Carter Casteel won a state House seat with 18,181 votes,
and Judge Danny Scheel (a conservative) won his race with
18,181 votes. All three in the same county, same day, same
year, all three with exactly the same number of votes.
However, no poll workers in the county asked for a new chip.

A key criticism of some touch screen machines is that they
leave no paper trail, there is no record for the voters to see
of the votes cast. The process has been described as voting
into a "black box."

Georgia and the strange defeat of incumbent Democratic
Sen. Max Cleland in the 2002 election is a clear example.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed Cleland with
a 49-44 percent lead over Republican Rep. Saxby
Chambliss the week before the election. Cox News Service
(Atlanta-based) said, "Pollsters must have goofed."
Chambliss was declared the winner by 53-46 percent.

This was an election marked by almost unimaginable
Republican viciousness. Chambliss ran television ads
savaging Cleland, a triple amputee Vietnam vet, as an
"enemy" of George W. Bush's "war on terrorism." Why?
Cleland had voted against Bush's Homeland Security
Act on grounds that it strips federal workers of their union
rights.

Chambliss was trailing Cleland in every public opinion
poll leading up to the election. Similarly, Republican
Sonny Perdue was declared winner over Georgia's
incumbent Democratic Gov. Ray Barnes, 52-45 percent,
despite a Mason Dixon poll prior to the election showing
the Democrat with a 48-39 percent lead a month before
the election.

Pundits opined that the stunning Republican upset victories
were the result of George W. Bush's barnstorming visits to
the state as well as a backlash by white men angry that the
Confederate flag had been abolished as the state banner.
Yet, post-election polls showed there had been no such
angry surge among white male voters in Georgia.

Suspicious Georgia citizens began investigating. Anecdotal
reports by voters revealed that breakdowns of the Diebold
machines had been widespread. In heavily Democratic Fulton
County, which includes Atlanta, 67 memory cards were mislaid
for 10 days and in neighboring DeKalb County, 10 memory
cards were lost. State officials cannot affirm that the votes on
these "mislaid" cards were ever counted.

Andrew Gumbel of the British Guardian, who observed the
election, writes, "The vote count (in Georgia) was not actually conducted 
by state election officials but by the private
company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first
place under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only
difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties
- for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software 
to ensure the machines worked properly. There was
not even a paper trail to follow up."

Let's look at Minnesota. What happened in the race to have
former Vice President Walter Mondale voted into the U.S.
Senate seat vacated by the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone?
A Star Tribune poll on Oct. 30, 2002, reported Democrat
Mondale leading Republican Norm Coleman 47-39 percent.
When the vote was counted, Coleman won by 50-47 percent
of the vote. Was there a sudden surge of Republicanism in
Minnesota? No one asked for a new computer chip.

Who owns your voting machines? Three corporations
- Election Systems and Software (ES&S), Diebold, and
Sequoia Voting Systems - own the hardware and software
used to count about 80 percent of the votes cast
electronically in the U.S.

Both ES&S and Diebold are owned by Republican
partisans. ES&S is owned by the Omaha World Herald
Company, a company with solid ties to the Republican
Party. Sequoia's owner is De La Rue, based in Great
Britain. Sequoia counted more votes in the California
recall election than any other company. De La Rue is
the world's largest commercial security printer and
papermaker.

Arthur Andersen Co. is to count Internet military votes.
According to Landes, the Internet voting business is
dominated by two corporations. One is Accenture
(whose corporate offices are located in Bermuda) and
the other is VoteHere (Seattle). "The U.S. Department
of Defense recently awarded a coalition of corporations,
led by Accenture, the contract to provide Internet service
that will count the votes of the U.S. military and some
civilians in the 2004 presidential election." Nearly 6 million
voters may be affected. "Accenture was formerly known
as Andersen Consulting, a subsidiary of Arthur Andersen".
Yes, the same company convicted of destroying evidence
in the Enron crime. One of Accenture's most important
business partners is Halliburton.

Admiral Bill Owens is the chairman of VoteHere, the
world's leading supplier of Internet voting software.
Owens is a former high-level military assistant to former
Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Vice
President Dick Cheney. Also sitting on the VoteHere
Board of Directors is Robert Gates, an ex-CIA director
once tripped up in the Iran-Contra scandal. Carlucci (also
of the Carlyle Group and a business partner of former
President George H.W. Bush) was former Secretary of
Defense in the Reagan administration and a Deputy
Director of the CIA in the Carter administration. Carlucci
is also on the advisory board of Populex, which is
producing electronic voting systems for Illinois.

A striking fact about the boards of these companies is
the presence of former CIA directors, including James
Woolsey, Bobby Ray Inman, John Deutch, and Gates
and Carlucci. When has the CIA been pro-democracy?
Why this keen interest in voting technology?

Privately-held companies are in the business of counting
our votes. So who monitors them? The National Association
of State Election Directors (NASED). NASED is tied closely,
according to Landes, to the election industry. There is no
enforcement by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Private companies cite "security and competition" reasons
as to why they can't divulge every aspect of their vote-counting 
procedures. Those procedures and techniques have raised
eyebrows and suspicions.

What is to be done? The 2004 elections are already upon
us. Take a group of friends, call and go to your County
Board of Elections. Ask if your machines have paper trails.
Who makes the machines?

Voting machines must not be privatized. Those who would
profit from skewing elections against the working class
should not own the machines. The voting apparatus should
be publicly owned and operated. There should be no "trade
secrets" in place to ensure that a voting machine company
won't have to tell us how the machines operate.

Harvard University's Rebecca Mercuri, a voting machine
expert, had it about right: "If you want to make Coca-Cola
and have trade secrets, that's fine, but don't try to claim
trade secrets when you're handling our votes."

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) is sponsoring the "Voter Confidence
and Increased Accountability Act of 2004" (HR-2239), which
calls for paper ballots, surprise recounts and auditable
software in voting machines. But some critics say it doesn't
go far enough. The critical issue is to keep the vote directly
in the hands of the voters. The election laws in some
countries require that as many ordinary people as possible
be permitted into the room where the votes are tallied.

The U.S. right wing, frightened as usual into skullduggery
and violence by any whiff of democracy, knows well that it
can't win if it does not cheat. Now is the time to look at your
  voting machines. Better now than after Election Day 2004.


The author can be reached at [email protected].
Tim Wheeler contributed to this story.
-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
		--Brecht.


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