Gray Davis is soon to be a private citizen again; Arnold Schwarzeneggar is king of California. All I can think of is Florida in 2000, when so many people thought elections couldn’t get any stranger. It seems so long ago.
If November 2000 seems long ago, then Bill Clinton’s impeachment must have faded into the mist of ancient history, for how else can we explain the sudden silence of the once-outraged religious right when it comes to the groping, grasping fingers of the governor-elect? Elections are, as Al Gore said, about the future not the past and what happened Tuesday is worth examination, because we all may be seeing something similar soon.
The Californians whose voting portended the future for many of us are the 1.4 million whose ballots were recorded by touch-screen computers. On Tuesday, some Golden Staters had to use a swipe card to activate their machine, scroll through 13 pages of instructions, issues and candidates and touch the screen at the right time and place to record their choices. Many of them made mistakes. How many? We’ll never know. Touch-screen computer balloting machines do not print out a paper receipt that can be kept by the voter or board of elections. If at the end of Election Day, the computer crashes – we’re all familiar with that concept – all the votes in that machine may well be lost.
Worse still, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown that it takes only a few strokes of a laptop keyboard to corrupt the voting software either before or after voting to change the outcome and “stuff” the electronic ballot box. California election officials have said that can’t happen, because the polling station supervisors would prevent it. Unfortunately, our human electoral safeguards are, if anything, more susceptible to corruption than the computer software.
Wired magazine sent a reporter to California and she learned there are no background checks required for polling station supervisors. Any registered voter can volunteer for the job. Once a person is ensconced as a polling supervisor, he or she has access to the voting machines for several days before the election. The machines are in cases closed with tamper-resistant ties, but the Wired reporter found the same ties for sale on the Internet. Confronted with all these opportunities for vote-stealing, the assistant registrar of voters for Alameda County said the “election process is mainly based on trust.”
Where was trust in Florida in 2000, as tens of thousands of law-abiding black citizens were dumped from the rolls as “felons” by a contractor hired by Jeb Bush? Florida, where police erected roadblocks around polling stations in black neighborhoods? Florida, where hundreds of Republican congressional staffers flooded into Miami and Dade counties to harass officials trying to conduct a recount? There was an “election process mainly based on trust,” but the trust was misplaced.
To prevent a repeat of the 2000 debacle, the Republican Congress passed and George Bush signed an electoral reform law in 2002. The law’s requirements will mean more states will have to purchase tamper-susceptible touch-screen balloting machines, like those used in some California counties this week. The leading maker of touch-screen balloting machines is the Diebold Corp. of North Canton, Ohio. Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, has raised over $100,000 for George Bush’s 2004 campaign and recently wrote in a fundraising letter that he is committed to delivering electoral votes to the president next year.
The Voter’s Touch
Gray Davis is soon to be a private citizen again; Arnold Schwarzeneggar is king of California. All I can think of is Florida in 2000, when so many people thought elections couldn’t get any stranger. It seems so long ago.
If November 2000 seems long ago, then Bill Clinton’s impeachment must have faded into the mist of ancient history, for how else can we explain the sudden silence of the once-outraged religious right when it comes to the groping, grasping fingers of the governor-elect? Elections are, as Al Gore said, about the future not the past and what happened Tuesday is worth examination, because we all may be seeing something similar soon.
The Californians whose voting portended the future for many of us are the 1.4 million whose ballots were recorded by touch-screen computers. On Tuesday, some Golden Staters had to use a swipe card to activate their machine, scroll through 13 pages of instructions, issues and candidates and touch the screen at the right time and place to record their choices. Many of them made mistakes. How many? We’ll never know. Touch-screen computer balloting machines do not print out a paper receipt that can be kept by the voter or board of elections. If at the end of Election Day, the computer crashes – we’re all familiar with that concept – all the votes in that machine may well be lost.
Worse still, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown that it takes only a few strokes of a laptop keyboard to corrupt the voting software either before or after voting to change the outcome and “stuff” the electronic ballot box. California election officials have said that can’t happen, because the polling station supervisors would prevent it. Unfortunately, our human electoral safeguards are, if anything, more susceptible to corruption than the computer software.
Wired magazine sent a reporter to California and she learned there are no background checks required for polling station supervisors. Any registered voter can volunteer for the job. Once a person is ensconced as a polling supervisor, he or she has access to the voting machines for several days before the election. The machines are in cases closed with tamper-resistant ties, but the Wired reporter found the same ties for sale on the Internet. Confronted with all these opportunities for vote-stealing, the assistant registrar of voters for Alameda County said the “election process is mainly based on trust.”
Where was trust in Florida in 2000, as tens of thousands of law-abiding black citizens were dumped from the rolls as “felons” by a contractor hired by Jeb Bush? Florida, where police erected roadblocks around polling stations in black neighborhoods? Florida, where hundreds of Republican congressional staffers flooded into Miami and Dade counties to harass officials trying to conduct a recount? There was an “election process mainly based on trust,” but the trust was misplaced.
To prevent a repeat of the 2000 debacle, the Republican Congress passed and George Bush signed an electoral reform law in 2002. The law’s requirements will mean more states will have to purchase tamper-susceptible touch-screen balloting machines, like those used in some California counties this week. The leading maker of touch-screen balloting machines is the Diebold Corp. of North Canton, Ohio. Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, has raised over $100,000 for George Bush’s 2004 campaign and recently wrote in a fundraising letter that he is committed to delivering electoral votes to the president next year.
I’ll bet he is.