In the days preceeding the election, it was pretty common to find cries of "Diebold" as to how the Republicans were going to steal the election. And while electronic theft may be supremely easy, it apparently cannot be used alone. In order to steal 2000, 2002 and 2004, the Republicans had to unleash a full court press against every aspect of the voting system.
More on the flip.
The effort to steal those elections began with the corruption of the Secretary of State position. From there, they used the authority inherent in the office to prevent voters from registering and used various ruses to encourage county authorities to disenfranchise legally registered voters. We see actions by the local Republican parties to challenge the registrations of legally registered voters, forcing some citizens in Washington to take the day off work in order to appear at the court house in an effort to have their voting privileges rightfully reinstated. On to election day, where the counties engaged in a pattern of discrimination in voting booth distribution. At the very least, voters in Florida ad Ohio saw widely varying numbers of voting booths available for local voters. We again see efforts by the party using phone jamming to prevent Democratic voters from getting rides to the polls. At the polls themselves, we find inadequate numbers of provisional ballots available thereby robbing wrongly disenfranchised voters of the opportunity to vote. And lastly, we have the ugly spectacle of Democrats being forbidden from observing or participating in the vote count.
Now, obviously, this is a very short summary of what went wrong in 2000 and 2004. One of the points I really want to make is that did not do it with electronic voting alone. If they could simply rely on fraudulent vote totals to win, they would not have taken the time and spent the money and run the risks that they did with all those other actions. Stealing an election is not as simple as inserting a memory card - that's only one aspect of a full court press. Think of all the actions the Republicans took against Kerry in Ohio and yet with all of that, Bush's final vote total was only 5% ahead of Kerry.
That, my friends, is the good news. We can stop a lot of this and have more honest elections. Even better, the actions necessary to safeguard the election have bi-partisan appeal. They do not favor Democrats in any way (well, other than the obvious).
Here's a list of actions that can help safeguard our elections for everyone.
- A standardized number of voting booths per registered voter in each precinct. Ohio and Florida both saw radically different levels of voting booth distribution with precincts that were likely to heavily for Kerry recieving substantially fewer voting booths than precincts that were likely to go heavy for Bush. In some cases, the county still had dozens of undistributed voting booths locked away.
- Paper ballots that print out the voter's selections on the paper and are left in the ballot box.
- Random audits of precincts to verify that the paper tally matches the electronic tally. Precincts to be audited are selected by the candidates after the count is finished.
- All ballot counting must be observed by representatives of the candidates. In Ohio and Florida, we saw ballots counted behind locked doors with no independent observation. Parties are allowed to station an observer behind each ballot counter to ensure fairness as is done in Britain.
- The Secretary of State (or whoever oversees the election) must be a non-partisan position. Bush's contested wins in both Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 saw the state's election chief function as Bush's campaign chair as well.
- Any challenges to a voter's registration must be accompanied by an affidavit that the challenger has personal knowledge that the voter no longer lives at that address, and fraudulent challenges are punishable with jail time. 2004 saw the Republican party issuing mass challenges to registrations in Democratic neighborhoods, requiring voters to take time off during the week and appear at the county seat to straighten out their registration.
- Standarized protocol for updating voter registration rolls so that legally registered voters are not disenfranchised in pursuit of other goals. Disenfranchising legally registered voters to ensure felons don't vote is not acceptable.
- All software must be open source and available for examination by the parties and the candidates.
- Security procedures must be put in place to guard against hacking before, during, and after the election.