Election 2000 was my first election in this country: I became a citizen in 1999 and was now eligible to vote. It was a mess. My first election was supposed to be perfect with my candidate cruising to victory. It was not, and he didn't - instead it was a mess...
As a result, Help America Vote Act was introduced, which left us with paperless electronic voting machines. Great!
In addition, leading manufacturers of these machines are rabid Republicans.
In addition to that, the software that is used in these machines is proprietary and there is no way to tell if it does what it suppose to do, which is count votes accurately, or gives 3 (or is it 4?) out of 5 votes to Republican candidate.
(More below...)
Florida left me really mad, but now I feel helpless and hopeless, which is worse - I'd rather be mad. Democrats turned to be totally ineffective pushing for mandatory paper trail (or may be Republicans were extremely effective blocking it). Given another 2 years (till midterm) or 4 years (till next presidential elections) they may be no more successful. But even if they will succeed in banning paperless voting, I feel it won't be enough. And it is not just voter disenfranchisement, although it is very important. Unless we have open source software in these voting machines we won't be able to feel confident about voting. After all, as long as Republicans control vote counting, even with paper trail, they can come up with any numbers they like. Paper receipts are to be used in case of recount, but if the margin of victory is wide enough (let's say 119,000 votes), no recount will be required. The rule could be very simple: steal enough votes and you never will be caught. (There is no absolute proof so far that fraud did happen in this election, but I have no confidence in Republicans and sure that they will do whatever it takes to win. If electronic fraud didn't happen this time, it will happen next, count on it)
But there is a good example of how it should be. Look at Australia.
While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.
Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on specifications set by independent election officials, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What's more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.
Phillip Green, electoral commissioner, learned from our experience:
"We'd been watching what had happened in America (in 2000), and we were wary of using proprietary software that no one was allowed to see," he said. "We were very keen for the whole process to be transparent so that everyone -- particularly the political parties and the candidates, but also the world at large -- could be satisfied that the software was actually doing what it was meant to be doing."
It took them only a year to change Australian law to allow electronic voting to go forward. Both the draft and the finished software code were available on the Internet for the public to review. In addition to the public review, independent verification and validation company was hired to audit the code and prevent a developer from having any election-subverting code in there.
This is what Matt Quinn, the lead engineer of the Software Improvement's (company that developed Australian voting software) had to say about Diebold machines:
"The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections," Quinn said. "It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election."
"I can't imagine what it must be like to be an American in the midst of this and watching what's going on," Quinn added. "Democracy is for the voters, not for the companies making the machines.... I would really like to think that when it finally seeps in to the collective American psyche that their sacred Democracy has been so blatantly abused, they will get mad."
And I thought we were mad after 2000 elections. Apparently not mad enough.