Democracy
I read an article on the web some time ago, and I can’t find it to link to. It suggested imagining a supposedly free election in which one party controlled the voting process, carried the ballots off to count in private, announced the winners, and destroyed the ballots. Sounds like the sort of perversion of democracy you’d find in a communist totalitarion state, right? Or what we’ve got here in the U.S. with Republican-owned companies making the electronic voting machines.
Something is rotten in the state of Nebraska
Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it’s true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. […] U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska. […] Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska. […] His hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel “was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska.” What Hagel’s website fails to disclose is 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.
The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday. “We found some stunning, stunning flaws,” said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States.
They’re barking up the wrong tree anyway. How can a machine-produced vote ever constitute a legal vote? Isn’t it merely circumstantial evidence of a vote produced by a machine that may or may not have been cast by a voter? In Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court said, “A legal vote is one in which there is a ‘clear indication of the intent of the voter.’”
Voting machines reflect the action of the machine first and the intent of the voter …maybe. When machines are in the voting booth three violations of federal law take place:
- inability to observe if voting machines properly register votes
- inability to observe if voting machines properly count votes
- inability to enforce the Voting Rights Act, because of the inability to observe if voting machines are properly registering or counting votes
We’ve got some serious problems in this country, but none more serious than this. If the elections are fixed, it’s simply game over for democracy. If it’s not already too late, we desperately need laws requiring any voting machines produce hard-copy ballots that are at least in principle verifiable.
Yeah, because there are more than a dozen Democrats in the state of Nebraska. Red herring.
Posted by Timprov on July 25 2003 20:47
=v= I've met many people in Nebraska, not one of whom voted for Chuck Hagel. There's the slight possibility that my friends aren't the most representative sample, though.
Posted by Jym on July 28 2003 05:19