http://www.alternet.org/story/20458/
The Nation
10 November 2004
Going Down the Stolen Election Road?
By David Corn
Before the vote-counting was done, the e-mails started arriving. The
election's been stolen! Fraud! John Kerry won! In the following days,
these charges flew over the Internet. The basic claim was that the early
exit polls – which showed Kerry ahead of George W. Bush – were right; the
vote tallies were rigged. Could this be? Or have ballot booths with
electronic voting machines become the new Grassy Knoll for conspiracy
theorists?
Anyone who questioned the integrity of the nation's voting system – before
the election or after – has had good reason to do so. Electronic voting
that does not produce an auditable paper trail is worrisome – as is the
possibility that the machines can be hacked. The proponents of these
systems claim there are sufficient safeguards. But in this election there
were numerous reports of e-voting gone bad. Votes cast for one candidate
were registered for another. In Broward County, Fla., software subtracted
votes rather than added them. In Franklin County, Ohio, an older
electronic machine reported an extra 3,893 votes for Bush. Local election
officials caught that error. But when I asked Peggy Howell, one of those
officials, why the mistake occurred, she replied, "We really don't know."
Were these errors statistically insignificant glitches that inevitably
happen in any large system? "It gives us the uneasy feeling that we're
only seeing the tip of the iceberg," Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, which is part of the Election Protection Coalition, told
Reuters. "What has most concerned scientists are problems that are not
observable," David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California, explained to the Associated Press. "The
fact that we had a relatively smooth election ... does not change at all
the vulnerability these systems have to fraud or bugs." And the 2000
fiasco in Florida demonstrated that non-electronic voting can also have
serious problems, which often disproportionately affect low-income
counties.
Then there's the issue of who is running the show. Only a few companies
manufacture electronic voting machines. They are not transparent. They do
not use open-source code. Last year, Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold, a
leading manufacturer of touch-screen machines, declared in a fundraising
letter for the Ohio Republican Party that he was "committed to helping
Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." That hardly
inspired confidence. And across the country, oversight of voting is
conducted by partisan officials. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell, a Republican and conservative activist, oversaw the voting. On
his watch, the polling place for Kenyon College was equipped with only two
voting machines. Yet about 1,100 people – mostly students – wanted to vote
there. These voters (and you can guess whom they preferred) had to wait up
to nine hours. It doesn't require much cynicism to suspect that this was
no accident.
But did something more foul than minor slip-ups and routine political
chicanery occur? Those who say yes – at this point – are relying more on
supposition than evidence. They cite the exit polls to claim the vote
count was falsified to benefit Bush. The pollsters say they oversampled
women, that their survey takers were not allowed to get close enough to
the polls and that Kerry supporters may have been more willing to
cooperate with the pollsters than Bush backers. Impossible, huffs
pollster/consultant Dick Morris: "Exit polls are almost never wrong." But
Morris argues that the faulty exit polls are not a sign the vote count was
off but an indication that the pollsters deliberately produced pro-Kerry
results "to try to chill the Bush turnout." (Talk about conspiracy
theory.) The screwy exit polls do raise questions, but they are not proof
of sabotage. And left-of-center accusers have promoted contradictory
theories. Many suggest Diebold and other vendors put in the fix via the
paperless touch-screen machines. But other critics – including progressive
talk show host and author Thom Hartmann – also point to a spreadsheet
created by an activist named Kathy Dopp that shows what she considers
anomalous pro-Bush results in Florida counties that used optical-scan
voting, not electronic touch-screen voting. (The optical-scan machines
were manufactured by Diebold and the other firms that produce the
touch-screen machines.) But Walter Mebane, a Cornell professor, and
colleagues at Harvard and Stanford examined this allegation of fraud and
concluded that it is "baseless." They note that the counties in question
are mostly in the conservative Florida Panhandle and "have trended
strongly Republican over the past twelve years."
Making a different we-wuz-robbed claim, journalist Greg Palast, in an
article bluntly titled "Kerry Won," contends the Democrat would have
definitely triumphed in Ohio had the final tally included the uncounted
ballots – by which he means 92,672 ballots that did not register a vote
when run through a counting machine – and the 155,000 provisional ballots.
Palast wrongly assumes that an overwhelming majority of these ballots
contain votes for Kerry, who lost by 136,000 votes. Not all of the
provisional ballots, however, would pass legal muster. (Ohio Democrats
estimated less than 90 percent would be valid.) And more important, the
92,672 other ballots, if hand-counted, probably would not have produced a
major vote gain for Kerry. After the Florida 2000 mess, I examined almost
a third of the 10,500 uncounted votes in Miami-Dade County. Of those, only
a few hundred contained a discernible vote. Tallying them produced merely
a five-vote edge for Al Gore. It is highly improbable that the pool of
uncounted and provisional ballots in Ohio could have yielded Kerry a net
gain of more than 136,000 votes.
Clear away the rhetoric, and what's mainly left are the odd early exit
polls (which did show Kerry's lead in Ohio and Florida declining as
Election Day went on and which ended up with the current national
Bush-Kerry spread), troubling instances of bad electronic voting, and
curious – or possibly curious – trends in Florida. This may be the
beginning of a case; it is not a case in itself. Investigative reporter
Robert Parry observes, "Theoretically, at least, it is conceivable that
sophisticated CIA-style computer hacking – known as 'cyber-warfare' –
could have let George W. Bush's campaign transform a
three-percentage-point defeat, as measured by exit polls, into an official
victory of about the same margin. Whether such a scheme is feasible,
however, is another matter, since it would require penetration of hundreds
of local computer systems across the country, presumably from a single
remote location. The known CIA successes in cyber-war have come from
targeting a specific bank account or from shutting down an adversary's
computer system, not from altering data simultaneously in a large number
of computers."
The skeptics – correct or not in their claims of fraud – are right to be
concerned in general about the vote-counting system. Reps. John Conyers,
Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler have asked the Government Accountability
Office (formerly the General Accounting Office) to investigate the "voting
machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election."
Blackboxvoting.org – a group that has long decried electronic voting and
now claims that "fraud took place in the 2004 election" – has filed
Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain internal computer logs and
other documents from 3,000 counties and localities, in an attempt to audit
the election. The public does deserve any information that would allow it
to evaluate vote-counting. Beyond that, extensive election reform is
necessary. Electronic voting ought to produce a paper trail that can be
examined. There should be national standards for voting systems and for
verifying vote tallies. And vote counters should be nonpartisan public
servants, not secretive corporations or party hacks. The system ought to
be so solid that no one would have cause even to wonder whether an
election has been stolen.
