eVoting And You!
Originally published 2 Nov, 18.08 Eastern
On Tuesday 7 November, Americans head to the polls for mid-term elections. And a third of us will be using technology that is being deployed in a general election for the first time. Most voters are unaware of the risks associated with electronic voting. A 21 October 2005 GAO report about security problems surrounding electronic voting in the 2004 election was thoroughly ignored by the mainstream media.
If you have a problem voting, call The Election Integrity Response System at 1-866-OUR-VOTE
If you see news stories about voting problems in your state, please note in a comment here or record it at wikipedia
Want to know what voting technology is used in your state? Check out this guide. Also, here is background on the primary voting systems in use in the United States: in 2004, more than half relied on software to count the votes -- software that computer scientists believe, in many cases, is vulnerable to manipulation. Today it's almost 90 percent.
And how do these electronic machines get to the polls? In San Diego (CA) County ... by 1,650 poll workers, who have taken the machines home with them!
If your polling place has electronic voting machines that do not have a voter-verified paper trail (most don't) ... do not use the machine! Ask for a paper (usually absentee) ballot instead. Don't take "No" for an answer, either.
Global Research reports from the October 5th, 2006 issue of "Rolling Stone" magazine:
The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised - by people inside, and outside, the companies.
Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004.
If eVoting is in force in your municipality, be sure to tune in to HBO: Bev Harris, of Black Box Voting, is featured in a documentary, Hacking Democracy. (The schedule shows you have other chances to see this before Tuesday.)
What systems were in place at your polling place? Did everything go smoothly?
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