HAVE THE REPUBLICANS ALREADY PRE-TAMPERED WITH ENOUGH VOTING MACHINES TO HAVE A GENERALLY ACCURATE FEEL AS TO THE SIZE OF THE REPUBLICAN MAJORITY IN THE NEXT CONGRESS?
I had an interesting night. I went to a forum about the proposed new voting machines that are being auditioned by the Board of Elections, here in New York City. The implications of the choices being made here are, of course, national.
New York is one of the last states to follow the dictates of the notorious Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). Because of this, the state may lose tens of millions in federal aid that could have been used to purchase new machines. That may actually be a good thing.
One of the things that became very clear last night was that many of the machines purchased through HAVA grants are so full of glitches that votes are not counted properly, and paper trails, when they exist at all, are often not readable. The states that received federal money to meet unreasonable deadlines may now have to purchase software fixes that may end up being far more expensive than the grant monies they received.
The panel consisted of a who’s who of experts in the area of New York voting. The moderator was Adam Cohen of the New York Times Editorial Board, and a frequent critic of computerized voting systems, as they currently exist. The panelists were, Congressman Jerold Nadler (D-NY), John Ravitz, the Executive Director of the New York City Board of Elections, Douglas Kellner, Co-Director of the New York State Board of Elections, David Kogelman, HAVA Committee Chair of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council, Bo Lipari, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Verified Voting and Author and NYU Professor, Mark Crispin Miller.
Now, admittedly, the future of voting machines is not a very sexy topic. Yet, over 350 people turned out to find out what was going on in this most important area. What they learned was both interesting and possibly frightening.
Mr. Lipari, a retired software engineer, became interested in voting rights when he realized just how easily computerized voting machines could be, and probably had been hacked, particularly those with no paper trails. Much of his information dealt with that subject. The audience learned that this year, approximately 80% of all votes cast will be on various types of computerized voting machines, many of which, Mr. Lipari believes can easily be hacked and have no paper trails.
Mr. Lipari believes that the machines which operate as optical scanners are the safest, as the voter marks a ballot by hand, scans it, deposits an original in a locked box and keeps a copy. There is no key to the locked box at the polling place, limiting the possibility of on site tampering. Touch screen machines with paper trails provide the voter with a receipt of their vote and also print a copy to be deposited in a locked box.
That led to an interesting question, exactly what guarantee is there that the copy deposited in the lock box will match the receipt given to the voter. In New York, that issue has been addressed in advance of the adoption of any new voting systems. Machines here will be required to display the lock box receipts to voters prior to their being deposited. In other states, that may not be the case, and there is no guarantee that the receipt that the voter gets will actually match the one going into the lock box.
And that takes me to the most frightening part of the evening. Mark Crispin Miller, the NYU professor and noted author, who is also an independent, neither a Democrat nor a Republican, believes that the fix may already be in this year. He felt that the Republicans have already pre-tampered with enough voting machines to have a generally accurate feel as to the size of the Republican majority in the next Congress.
That’s right. Professor Miller feels that Bush and company aren’t worried because your vote may already have been cast, and you just don’t know it. When you do go to the polls, that vote will be replaced with the one pre-assigned to you, if it doesn’t match the one they want.
Oops. How could that be? Can these guys be so evil that they would tamper with our voting process to that extent? Professor Miller believes it to be a real possibility. The problem is that all of the software used in touch screen voting machines is proprietary, and there is virtually no way to check if this type of cheating has been pre-programmed into the machines. Only Oklahoma assumes ownership and management of their voting software. The rest of the states are patsies for the software manufacturers, many of which are large Republican contributors.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich and 18 cosponsors have introduced House Bill HR 6200 IH , The Paper Ballot Act of 2006, which would “amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require States to conduct Presidential elections using paper ballots and to count those ballots by hand, and for other purposes.” The bill doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing this session, but if it fails, it puts the onus on the Republicans to show that their party is not tampering with the election process.
To be sure, the Bush debacle is not the first time in which there has been election tampering, and the Republicans have not always done that tampering. It is fairly well documented that John Kennedy would have lost the state of Illinois and the presidency if dead people hadn’t voted in Chicago in 1960. It is always just one state that makes these things happen in close elections that could go either way.
And that brings me to Professor Crispin Miller’s point. The way to stop the tampering is to have such an enormous turn out on Election Day that no amount of messing around could change the results. No matter how certain we are of a Democratic victory, we need to show up and make it impossible for any other result to be claimed.
We have no other choice if we ever expect to have the choice of who governs us again..
HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT
