Electronic Treason

By Robert C. Koehler
Created Dec 7 2006 - 8:34am

Electronic voting, like the war in Iraq, is starting to get bad press. And
following the debacle of last month's midterm elections, a lot of people
have begun to demand an exit strategy.

Surely there ought to be a limit to the number of egregiously wrong turns
the same ideologues are allowed to make at one time. How many can we afford,
for God's sake? At a time when governments at every level are going
bankrupt, thanks in large part to the Bush administration's trillion-dollar
quagmire in Iraq, they're spending billions of dollars on high-tech voting
equipment that's blowing up in their - I mean our - faces.

Has democracy ever been so crater-scarred?

A year and a half ago, when I first started writing about disenfranchisement
and the troubling evidence of electronic voting fraud in the 2004 election,
this was not a respectable topic for mainstream discourse. Those who
broached it were relegated to a spectrum of mockery that ran from "sore
loser" to "conspiracy nut." But the ongoing horror show of "glitches"
perpetrated on democracy by touchscreen voting machines this year can no
longer be ignored even by those who would prefer to, and e-voting disasters
are now being reported with some regularity.

Consider, for instance, the Washington Post story last week about the
damning report just issued by the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, which advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Paperless
electronic voting machines "cannot be made secure" and, indeed, "a single
programmer could 'rig' a major election," according to the report, which the
Post calls "the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a
federal agency."

Now, let's start connecting some dots, as we take a leisurely visit to
Sarasota County, Fla., site of the most grotesque e-voting crater still
smoldering since Nov. 7. You know, this is where more than 18,000 voters -
fully 15 percent of the electorate - using paperless machines, failed to
vote in the 13th Congressional District race or, hmm, voted but didn't get
their votes recorded. Republican Vern Buchanan allegedly beat Democrat
Christine Jennings, for Katherine Harris' vacated congressional seat, by 363
votes.

Fortunately, Jennings is challenging the results to this spectacularly
tainted election. She joins angry residents in demanding a revote.

Wow, that's some glitch, though - 18,000 votes lost in cyberspace? Cast on
machines that "one of the government's premier research centers" (according
to the Post) said cannot be made secure and are easily rigged? Ain't that a
heckuva coincidence?

And guess what? It gets even weirder - it gets downright Bush vs. Kerry,
2004 revisited, as (prepare to be shocked) most of the precincts where the
undervotes occurred in droves, like Sarasota County's Precinct 31, with 22
percent, are solidly Democratic and, indeed, largely African-American.

The voters who registered no choice in that one race "solidly backed
Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's (other) statewide races," the
Orlando Sentinel reported two weeks after the election, after reviewing
17,846 touchscreen ballots that recorded no vote in the congressional race.
(Hallelujah, a newspaper doing its job!)

"In the governor's race, for example," the Nov. 22 article notes,
"Republican Charlie Crist won handily in Sarasota, easily beating Democrat
Jim Davis. But on the undervoted ballots, Davis finished ahead by almost 7
percentage points."

Maybe this is just more crappy luck for the Democrats. (Remember how, in
'04, it was always, "I tried to vote for Kerry and Bush lit up on the
screen"?) Or maybe these ghastly electronic voting machines are working just
the way they're supposed to.

Yes, the Dems won big in the midterms. They recaptured both the House and
Senate. Nationwide, their House candidates garnered 40.3 million votes, or
52.7 percent, while Republicans got 34.6 million, or 45.1 percent. But
here's something a little odd.

According to the Election Defense Alliance, the Edison-Mitofsky exit poll
results released by CNN on Nov. 7 at 7:07 p.m. EST showed Democrats winning
nationally by a far wider margin, 55 to 43.5 percent. Then, when the "real"
results started coming in, the poll results were adjusted, quietly
reallocating about 1.5 million Democratic votes and, in the process, skewing
other aspects of the poll. (For more info, check out EDA's highly detailed
paper at www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org [1].)

If we're still connecting dots, this is where our crayon usually breaks.
We've just moved from glitch to fraud. As a nation we're hardly ready to
make that final connection, to accuse Bush Republicans of being so
power-hungry they'd disenfranchise their fellow Americans in order to win.

For now, I guess, we can only conclude that electronic voting machines are
committing treason all by themselves.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson