Since the 2010 elections, the US has experienced a tsunami of harsh Republican-led laws attempting to take away the rights of women, workers, immigrants, under served, gays, elderly, non-profits, and voters… to name a few. As far as voting is concerned, many of us have questioned the motives of GOP lawmakers who have pushed through laws that amount to nothing less voter disenfranchisement. There are bills currently making the rounds calling for an end to same day registration, the requirement of voters to show government-issued photo I.D.s, and major cutbacks on early voting.
“There’s barely any voter fraud,” we say. In the voting booth amongst actual voters, I agree. Aside the intentionally deceptive exploits of James O’Keefe, or recently convicted Indiana Secretary of State, Charlie White (R), who made a mockery of Governor Mitch Daniel’s strict voter I.D. laws and who now also claims Daniels himself is guilty of voter fraud, there appears to be very little acts of dead or nonexistent voters popping up during elections.
Of course, the Republicans would have us believe the ghosts of voting evils are running rampant and must be stopped right away (or at least before the 2012 elections)! My own theory is that the GOP knows very well it has no actual game plan to fix anything other than the elections. They have lost their minds and the minds of would-be swing voters, too. So instead of creating policies they can proudly stand behind, they play the blame game alongside the invisible bogeyman game to garner fear and votes of the unknown dangers lurking somewhere ahead.
What they’re not talking about, however, are the multi-billion dollar electronic voting machines that are very real and very quickly eating away at the core of American democracy. Place these machines alongside deep pocketed lobbyists, bottomless corporation donations, ALEC and strict voter I.D. laws, and we can very clearly see that Americans could very well be screwed.
In a little under two short years, the majority of states have adopted or are in the process of adopting restrictive voting laws. See the evolution of these laws taking place here on the lawyerscommittee.org website.
Interesting fact: 38.46% percent of eligible American voters turned out for the 2010 midterm elections compared to 57.45% of eligible voters in 2008 for the presidential elections and 62.08% turnout for the 2004 presidential elections.
The following is a very brief overview on what led us to the age of the touch screen electronic voting, examples of machine malfunctions, voter disenfranchisement, and the many headaches (and possible fraud) touch screen machines have created:
As we witnessed in the 2000 presidential heist, Al Gore won the popular over George W. Bush by some 500,000 votes across the nation. During the recount the MSM was rabidly focused on “hanging chads” in Florida while the real story of the millions upon millions of purged voters, uncounted ballots, obscenely long voter lines, and “lost” votes all across America got buried. Precincts were ordered to stop recounts and Bush’s campaign manager and Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, personally declared the presidency for George W. Bush. Ultimately, the Supreme Court made a per curiam decision and finalized Bush’s stolen election for the presidency. The disaster in Florida brought to light the many problems with our voting process. Everything from painfully incorrect voter purge rolls to long lines to outdated voting machines came into question.
In 2001, CNN reported on a survey conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology that estimated,
1.5 million to 2 million presidential votes were lost in the 2000 election because of faulty equipment and confusing ballots, and that 1.5 million to 3 million were lost because of registration mix-ups.
The report also stated 500,000 to 1.2 million votes were lost because of polling place operations, and an unknown number of votes were likely lost because of absentee ballot problems. Of course, Massachusetts had a problem of its own as the Caltech-MIT/Voting Technology Project estimated 120,000 votes by MA residents were not counted in the 2000 presidential election.
After much of the blame for the fallout of the 2000 elections went to outdated voting machines, Florida switched entirely to electronic voting machines, just in time for the 2002 primaries. In Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Union counties, Florida, voters complained of voting for one candidate while the touch screen voting machines showed their votes registering for another candidate. Over 1,500 votes in Miami-Dade County were simply, “lost” and some precincts reported losing as much as 21.5% of their votes. Votes were simply vanishing without a way to trace their whereabouts.
In late 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was signed by President Bush. It was supposed to help eliminate voter disenfranchisement with “provisional ballots” but it also stipulated anyone who had not voted in a prior federal election to show government issued picture identification. Among other things, HAVA granted billions of dollars in matching government funds to states that turned in their old voting systems for the new electronic touch screen voting machines. This made right-leaning companies like Diebold and ES&S (both companies run by two brothers at the time) billions in many no bid contracts. What was not taken into consideration was the money it would cost taxpayers to house, maintain, secure, deliver, repair and store these machines. Also not taken into consideration were the many opportunities for malfunction, lack of tracking, and fraud these machines had the potential to produce.
In 2004, a stand out problem was the number of votes exceeding the number of actual voters in precincts across America. For example, in a town of 19,000 residents over 150,000 votes were recorded by a touch screen machine. There were also reports of optical scanners not working, computer chips and ballot codes not matching, all of the votes given to only one candidate, many votes were again “lost,” some computers failed to record the Spanish-worded ballots, optical scanner miscounting absentee ballots, and “smartcard” encoders failure, all causing many to be turned away at the polls. All of these problems I just spoke of happened in just two states on the West Coast during the 2004 elections.
In Baltimore County, Maryland, almost 200,000 votes were erased from the memory cards as a result of a machine malfunction. There were countless other complications documented in almost every state. The owners of the faulty machines dismissed the errors as simply minor glitches and not enough of a problem to change the outcome of the elections.
In 2003, Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold, sent a letter to Ohio Republicans stating he was, "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." And boy, did he. Exit polls in Ohio were showing John Kerry as the clear winner of Ohio and likely the presidency. Out of nowhere that night there was a sudden shift in votes to George W. Bush who again won the presidential race. Interestingly, Ohio’s Secretary of State and honorary co-chair of the Bush campaign, Kenneth Blackwell, personally called the presidential race for Bush, much like Bush campaign manager and Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, had done in Florida after the 2000 elections. Blackwell has been sued in the ongoing 2006 civil lawsuit, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, as a result of his possible involvement in various civil rights and Constitutional violations in the 2004 elections.
Updated information on the court case can be found here:
A company named SMARTECHCORP, based out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was hired by the state of Ohio to provide a failsafe voting server for the 2004 elections. At the time, SmarTech had its hands on virtually everything electronically associated with major Republican candidates including georgewbush.com, the Republican convention, the RNC’s national web page, and even the private Republican government domain server, gwb43.com. It has since been discovered that the timing of votes sliding toward a Bush win coincided with SmarTech’s late night entrance into the game. However, IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore, and sworn witness in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case, insisted the SmarTech server was not a backup server, rather, “a man in the middle server that had the ability to input and alter voting data on the fly.” In 2011, an architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system from the Ohio 2004 vote surfaced. The lawsuit has not been settled as of today’s date.
ALTERNATIVE PRIVATE SERVERS:
According to Blackboxvoting.org, “In a major step towards global centralization of election processes, the world's dominant Internet voting company (SCYTL) has purchased the USA's dominant election results reporting company.”
A Barcelona, Spain-owned company, SCYTL/SOE Software, has centralized many of our votes into one system; the same type of “middleman” scenario we saw in the 2004 elections with SmarTech. So what does this mean? A privately owned company basically owns the outcome of our votes. Before the public gets to see the votes made in their county or state, the votes will first go through a company like SCYTL before being made public. SCYTL has recently acquired 100% of the vote counting rights in the state of South Carolina and is reportedly set to take on over 500+ jurisdictions within the United States.
SCYTL also handles elections in Spain, Norway, France, Mexico, and Britain, to name a few. This one-shot privatization of votes is why it is ultra important citizens go to their polling precincts and video record or photograph the results that are to be posted after the polls close at each location, then match them with the tallies seen online. At the end of this diary, there will be a link to a short video explaining exactly how this can be done. Alternatively, you can also print out screen shots at random times throughout the night to note discrepancies.
MORE VOTING HEADACHES:
In the 2008 elections, there was not a shortage of problems with voter disenfranchisement or touch screen electronic voting machines. Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel (yes, that Karen Handel of the Susan G. Komen foundation) was caught up in a lawsuit filed by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Voting Rights Project, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and attorney Brian Spears accusing the state of inaccurately purging legal immigrants off the voter rolls in an effort to suppress Latino voters.
On college campuses around the States during the 2008 elections there were fliers circulating stating students could lose their health insurance or scholarships if they voted, rumors circulated that police would be patrolling the polls seeking out anyone who had unpaid parking tickets, out-of-state students still on their parent’s taxes were told they would be ineligible to vote, student voter registration forms were never turned in or counted, and even a flyer circulated campuses stating Democrats and Republicans must vote on different days. To make matters worse, a whole new line of voter deception practices were emerging heavily online in the form of emails, floating rumors, blogs, and faux “election information” websites.
There were also thousands of reports across the country of long lines (some waiting up to 8 hours to vote), a shortage of ballots or machines, touch screen machine malfunctions, voters not receiving their absentee ballots, and mismatched polling locations. Maryland and Virginia reportedly stopped using the touch screen machines after 2008 citing there was no possible way to conduct impartial recounts should a problem arise. In fact, in some states it would appear against their election codes to hold a vote without the possibility of a physical recount!
During the 2010 Democratic primaries in South Carolina, a little known candidate who had done no campaigning, won effortlessly with 60% of the vote. This triggered an investigation into the state’s touch screen iVotronic machine. The audit found that Charleston County was unable to account for 35,000 votes, one county lost 1,000 votes, two counties had absolutely no data to audit, and only 15 out of 46 counties in SC were able to turn over all of the files requested for the audit.
The New York Times posted anoverview of 2010 election problems across the US featuring reports of intimidation, robocalls with false voting information, faux absentee ballots mailed to voters with the incorrect return address, and even reports of fliers sent to predominately black neighborhoods warning them a straight down-the-line vote for Democrats would cancel out their votes!
Adding to the Republican paranoia of voter fraud that year, Arizona Governor, Jan Brewer (R), in all of her attention hogging, time wasting glory, filed a complaint with the Justice Department against Harry Reid for encouraging union casino employees to vote. Apparently encouragement=bad, intimidation=good, within the GOP camp. Also in 2010, complaints were filed by State Attorney General Douglas Gansler in Maryland against political consultant, Julius Henson, who authorized robocalls on behalf of former Republican Governor Robert Elrich. The calls, made on the eve of the election stated, “Governor O’Malley and President Obama have been successful” suggesting voting would not be necessary. It was found that the calls were directed at registered Democrats in predominately African American districts.
A report released by the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice states that among other problems, as many as 60,000 votes went unaccounted for in the New York state elections in 2010 due to confusing optical scanning machines and poorly calibrated optical-scan readers.
A HACKER’S DREAM:
In 2003, Bev Harris, founder of Blackboxvoting.org, discovered six years worth of Diebold GEMS source code for their machines. There was no firewall or hidden data; the code was listed in plain sight on the internet for the world to see.
In 2006, someone anonymously sent three disks to Cheryl C. Kagan, a former Democratic delegate, containing key components of GEMS code and instructions belonging to the Diebold voting machines. There is videotaped evidence that voting machines have been allowed to be taken home by poll workers and several university professors have submitted clear evidence reports of the inferiority of touch screen voting products. Still, EVM company heads insist these incidents are minor and the security of their machines are top notch.
The following video is the story of Steve Heller, a whistleblower who was eventually charged with three felonies when he turned over documents proving Diebold, Inc. had purposefully used unauthorized software in its voting machines during elections. Heller was charged a $10,000 fine and put on felony probation. Diebold was ordered to take back 15,000 of their machines from California and was fined a mere 2.6 million dollars for their shoddy work and assault on American citizens.
Former California Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, said,
They (Diebold) really literally engage in absolutely deplorable behavior and to the extent that they put the election at risk, jeopardizing the outcome of the election.
Watch the video:
Here is a Diebold internal memo pointing to accusations that Diebold had knowingly used uncertified software in the Alameda, California elections. Diebold held a 12.7 million contract with Alameda.
-----------------------------------
In this video a former Diebold employee speaks out about patches he made to Georgia voting systems that went live, although unauthorized – the very year the state saw its first Republican Governor since the 1870s.
E-VOTING:
Under the guise of being environmentally friendly, web-based voting may be our next new problem:
- Beginning in 2008, American citizens living overseas were allowed to cast their vote for a presidential candidate over the internet.
- The state of Oregon is currently testing iPad voting with disabled voters. The voter is allowed to print out their vote but it does nothing to cure the inevitable hacking that would ensue should iPad voting be extended to the entire state.
- In 2010, the Washington D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics tried out a new online voting site and encouraged hackers to try and crack the codes. By midday the hackers had succeeded and the online voting site for D.C. was tanked.
OTHER INTERESTING TIDBITS FROM THE LAST DECADE OF VOTING:
- Former Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel owned stock in American Information Systems Inc., the very company hired in his state to provide 80% of the electronic voting machines. He was also the company’s former Chairman and CEO but he did not disclose his involvement with the company until someone basically forced him to fess up.
- In 2000, voters in California voted to supply $200 million in funds for electronic voting machines, throwing out the punch card ballots.
- In 1998, North Carolina Election Director, Bill Culp, was sentenced 30 months for taking 122 bribes from Ed O’Day, president of United American Election Supply Co. and independent sales representative for MicroVote of Indianapolis, and a man named Gene Barnes. After being convicted, Ed O’Day turned around in 2004 and sponsored a hospitality room for Georgia State Election Officials.
- In 2002, Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to felony charges that he took bribes, evaded taxes and accepted kickbacks involving Business Records Corp. (now a part of ES&S voting).
-------------------------------
What these national and multi-national companies do is shape our futures and our history with no accountability and we’re supposed to just trust they and their employees will do the right thing? If our system was set up in way that you had to walk up to a voting booth and tell a complete stranger who you’d like to vote for while they wrote it down (but you weren’t allowed to verify they recorded the correct information), would you do it? That’s virtually what the touch screen voting machines are asking you to do. We are putting all of our trust in information that in no way can be verified.
Since touch screen voting machines are considered “proprietary,” the public is not allowed to know the content of codes being used to create and process our votes. This sounds reasonable to an extent but the other side of that is only a few actually know what’s going into creating these programs. What type of people are creating these programs anyway and how much security goes into making sure every single person and every single code written is on the up and up?
Last month voter watchdog group, Blackboxvoting.org, discovered a San Diego Craigslist ad from the business, “Everyone Counts.” Not that people seeking jobs on Craigslist can’t be credible, qualified people but to have our elections come down to a half page typed ad offering a casual work environment is ludicrous.
With the many malfunctions of touch screen electronic voting machines, how can we ever trust our votes are being counted? There’s no way to conduct an impartial recount because the computer only knows what it knows. You could press the recount button on a machine a million times and it will produce the exact same results. Our votes have been vanishing into thin air, leaving no paper trail, not even a hanging chad to debate. So while the Republicans are bellowing over supposed rampant voter fraud, not one solid effort has been made to correct the havoc touch screen voting machines are imposing on our entire election process. Democrats in office have done no better in bringing attention to this abomination and should be called out for their lack of concern as well.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
We the taxpayers paid for these machines and as a result we have essentially paid for a complete loss of transparency in our voting process. So what can we do to demand more transparent, safe, and honest elections? Here are some suggestions:
- Know your state's voting laws. When is the last day to register for early voting? What, if any, identification is needed to vote? Are you signed up to vote in the correct precinct? How will you educate others in the voting process?
- 866ourvote.org, a nonpartisan Election Protection coalition, urge voters to call-in or forward their stories of voting irregularities. If you feel your vote has been compromised or you see irregularities at the polls, call 866-OUR-VOTE, and file a report.
- SPEAK OUT against touch screen electronic voting machines!
- Demand poll workers be better informed and trained. Most workers are unable to recognize computer malfunctions and cannot properly monitor the machines.
- Know your rights on absentee voting.
- Information on video recording or picture taking the of end-of-night tally tapes at your precinct.
- Daily Kos’ extensive list of national and international voting advocacy groups.
Elections in a democracy should be run by the People, not a secretive, private entity. Increasingly this is not the case and it is up to us to change the system. We cannot afford to allow multi-billion dollar private companies to control our present lives or to change the course of our history.
Thank you for reading this diary. The problems are very real and are in need of repair. I hope you will all share and speak loudly to the concerns of black box voting. Thanks again.