A switch to electronic voting might seem innocent enough at first--until you look at who's implementing it, and how. Indeed, the transfer represents the privatization of the voting process into the hands of a select few fervent GOP supporters who have insisted on keeping their operating systems and codes a trade secret--meaning that they enjoy absolute control over the entire voting process, including ballot counting and oversight. There is no paper trail.
One prime example is Diebold Inc., one of the nation's top e-voting machine manufacturers, whose equipment was responsible for the Florida debacle. Diebold already operates more than 40,000 machines in 37 states across the country. Many of these are in Georgia, which last November became the first state to conduct an election entirely with touch-screen machines. Oddly enough, incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes lost to Republican candidate Sonny Perdue, 46 percent to 51 percent, "a swing from as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls," wrote Andrew Gumbel in the Independent. In the same election, incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland likewise lost to Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss, thanks to "a last-minute swing of nine to 12 points." And in and around Atlanta, 77 memory cards went missing or were otherwise temporarily unaccounted for before the votes they'd registered could be counted.
Similar upsets occurred "in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire--all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party," Gumbel continued.
Rebecca Mercuri, voting systems specialist and research fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, told the Independent, "It makes it really hard to show their product has been tampered with if it's a felony to inspect it."
The other top two e-voting machine manufacturers, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S), are equally suspect. Several of their executives have troubling track records of corruption and conflict of interest. All three companies are prominent Republican Party donors.
Sources: "Voting machines gone wild," Mark Lewellen-Biddle, In These Times, December 2003; "All the president's votes?" Andrew Gumbel, Independent, Oct. 13, 2003; "Will Bush backers manipulate votes to deliver GW another election?" Amy Goodman and the staff of "Democracy Now!" Sept. 4, 2003.
See also: How to Rig an Election
Censored 2005 : The Top 25 Censored Stories (Censored)
by Peter Phillips
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
by Greg Palast
Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century
by Bev Harris
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