ATTENTION:: Ghost In The Machine - The Little Chip That Steals the Election

[Guest guest]

If you don't read anything else, READ THIS ....CROSS POST EVERYWHERE, MAKE A

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-

>

> Ghost In The Machine

>

> By Thom Hartmann, <http://www.alternet.org>AlterNet

> July 23, 2003

>

> " A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots

> Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for

Republicans, "

> announced the Dallas Morning News in a story on Nov. 7, just a few days

> after the 2002 election. The story added, " Democrats actually won by wide

> margins. "

>

> Republicans would have carried the day had not poll workers become

> suspicious when the computerized vote-reading machines said the Republican

> candidate was trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent in the race for

> County Commissioner. The poll workers were close enough to the electorate

> they were part of the electorate to know their county overwhelmingly

> favored the Democratic incumbent.

>

> A quick hand recount of the optical-scan ballots showed that the Democrat

> had indeed won, even though the computerized ballot-scanning machine kept

> giving the race to the Republican. The poll workers brought the

discrepancy

> to the attention of the County Clerk, who notified the voting machine

company.

>

> " A new computer chip was flown to Snyder [Texas] from Dallas, " County

Clerk

> Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip installed, the

> computer decided that the Democrat had, indeed, won the race. In another

> Texas anomaly, Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth won his race with

> exactly 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel won her state House seat

> with exactly 18,181 votes, and conservative Judge Danny Scheel won his

seat

> with exactly 18,181 votes all in Comal County. Apparently, however, no

poll

> workers in Comal County thought to ask for a new chip.

>

> The Texas incidents happened with computerized machines reading and then

> tabulating paper or punch-card ballots. In Georgia and Florida, where

paper

> had been totally replaced by touch-screen machines in many to most

> precincts during 2001 and 2002, the 2002 election produced some of the

> nation's most startling results.

>

> USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, " In Georgia, an Atlanta

> Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a

> 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss. " Cox News Service,

> based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that,

> " Pollsters may have goofed " because " Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss

> defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46

> percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls

> Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them. "

>

> Just as amazing was the Georgia governor's race. " Similarly, " Cox News

> reported on Nov. 7, " no polls predicted the upset victory in Georgia of

> Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue

> won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll had

> shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a margin of error of

> plus or minus 4 points. "

>

> Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touch-screen

> computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever.

And

> nobody thought to ask for a new chip, although it was noted on Nov. 8 by

> the Atlanta Constitution-Journal that in downtown Atlanta's predominantly

> Democratic Fulton County " election officials said Thursday that memory

> cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots

> cast on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals. "

> Officials added that all but 11 of the memory cards were subsequently

found

> and recorded.

>

> Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in an editorial on Jan.

> 23, 2003, " In one Florida precinct last November, votes that were intended

> for the Democratic candidate for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush,

> because of a misaligned touch screen. How many votes were miscast before

> the mistake was found will never be known, because there was no paper

> audit. " ( " Misaligned " touch screens also caused 18 known machines in

Dallas

> to register Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed:

> it's unknown how many others weren't noticed.)

>

> Apparently, nobody thought to ask for new chips in Florida, either.

>

> In Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported just a few days before the

election

> (Oct. 30, 2002) that, " Dramatic political developments since Sen. Paul

> Wellstone's death Friday have had little effect on voters' leanings in the

> U.S. Senate race, according to a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll taken Monday

> night. Wellstone's likely replacement on the ballot, former Vice President

> Walter Mondale, leads Republican Norm Coleman by 47 to 39 percent close to

> where the race stood two weeks ago when Wellstone led Coleman 47 to 41

> percent. "

>

> When the computerized machines were done counting the vote a few days

> later, however, Coleman had beat Mondale by 50 to 47 percent. If Mondale

> had asked for new chips, would it have made a difference? We'll never

know.

>

> One state where Republicans did ask for a new chip was Alabama. Fox News

> reported on Nov. 8, 2002 that initial returns from across the state showed

> that Democratic incumbent Gov. Don Siegelman had won the governor's race.

> But, overnight, " Baldwin County took center stage when election officials

> released results Tuesday night showing Siegelman with 19,070 votes enough

> for a narrow victory statewide. Later, they recounted and reduced

> Siegelman's tally to 12,736 votes enough to give Riley the victory. "

>

> What produced the sudden loss of about 6,000 votes? According to the Fox

> report: " Probate Judge Adrian Johns, a member of the county canvassing

> board, blamed the initial, higher number on 'a programming glitch in the

> software' that tallies the votes. " All parties were not satisfied with

that

> explanation, however. Fox added: " The governor claimed results were

changed

> after poll watchers left. "

>

> It turns out the " glitch in the software " in Alabama was discovered by the

> Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley McCullough, who,

> according to a story by Rachel DiCarlo in the conservative Daily Standard,

> " logged onto the county's municipal website and confirmed that [incumbent

> Democratic Governor] Siegelman had actually only received 12,736 votes not

> the 19,070 the Associated Press projected for him. A computer glitch had

> caused the error. The erroneous tally would have put Siegelman on top by

> 3,582 votes, but the corrected one gave Riley a 2,752-vote edge. "

>

> As the Daily Standard noted, " If it hadn't been for one woman, the

> Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley McCullough,

things

> might have gone terribly wrong for [Republican Gubernatorial candidate]

> Riley. "

>

> Similarly, in Davison County, South Dakota, the Democratic election

auditor

> noticed the machines double counting votes (it's not noted for which side)

> and had a " new chip " brought in.

>

> And this is just the tip of the iceberg of '00 and '02 election

> irregularities, as reported by <http://www.votewatch.us>www.votewatch.us.

> Either the system by which democracy exists broke that November evening,

or

> was hacked, or American voters became suddenly more fickle than at any

time

> since Truman beat Dewey.

>

> Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent

> Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran, was, as

> Republican TV ads suggested, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate, even

> though his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had sat out the Vietnam

> war with a medical deferment. (The BBC summed up Georgia voters' reaction

> in a Nov. 6, 2002 headline: " GEORGIA UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS. " The BBC

echoed

> the confusion of many Georgia voters when they wrote, " Mr. Cleland an army

> veteran who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion during the Vietnam War

> had long been considered 'untouchable' on questions of defense and

national

> security. " )

>

> Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged

> themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly and

> inexplicably decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny Perdue.

>

> Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley,

> and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot

> Republican candidates around the country really did win those states where

> conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few

> election cycles, but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading machines

> showed them winning.

>

> Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a

science

> that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World

> countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States

in

> the past few years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a

> coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around

> the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable

> voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

>

> But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the

> voters' hand to prove it.

>

> You'd think in an open democracy that the government answerable to all its

> citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders

would

> program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the

computers

> that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and

> programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a

> paper trail of the actual hand-cast vote, which could be followed and

> audited if there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed

> with computerized vote counts.

>

> You'd be wrong.

>

> Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel who left his job as head of an

> electronic voting machine company to run as a long-shot candidate for the

> U.S. Senate honestly won all of his elections.

>

> Back when Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his own company's

> computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning and

unexpected

> victories in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington

> Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's " Senate victory against an incumbent

> Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November

> election. " According to Bev Harris, author of the book,

> <http://www.blackboxvoting.com> " Black Box Voting, " Hagel won virtually

> every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had

> never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years

> to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

>

> Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie

Matulka

> in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his Website says, Hagel " was

re-elected

> to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with

83%

> of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history

> of Nebraska. " What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80

> percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines

> put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company.

> Programmed by that company. The chips supplied by that company.

>

> " This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was, " said Hagel's

> Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka

>

(<http://www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm>lancastercountydemocra

ts.org/matulka.htm).

> " They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me. "

>

> Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he

> democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft? Between them, Hagel and

> Chambliss' victories sealed Republican control of the Senate. Odds are

both

> won fair and square, the American way, using huge piles of corporate money

> to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising. But either the

> appearance or the possibility of impropriety in an election casts a shadow

> over American democracy.

>

> " The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all

> other rights are protected, " wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. " To

> take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.. "

>

> That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at

our

> doorstep.

>

> " They can take over our country without firing a shot, " Matulka said,

" just

> by taking over our election systems. "

>

> Revolution by control of computer chips? Is that really possible in the

USA?

>

> " Imagine it's Election Day 2004, " says U.S. Congressman Rush Holt, also a

> scientist with a Ph.D. in physics who knows more than a little bit about

> both politics and computers. " You enter your local polling place and go to

> cast your vote on a brand new touch screen voting machine. The screen says

> your vote has been counted. As you exit the voting booth, however, you

> begin to wonder. How do I know if the machine actually recorded my vote? "

>

> It's a question that probably hasn't occurred to many Americans, even

those

> who used the touch-screen machines particularly notable in states where

> there were " upsets " and " glitches " in the 2002 election. But it occurred

to

> Congressman Holt, and after looking at the law, the voting machines, and

> the companies that produce them, he concluded that, " The fact is, you

don't

> [know if the machine actually recorded your vote]. "

>

> Bev Harris has looked into the situation in depth and thinks both

> Congressman Holt and candidate Matulka may be on to something. The company

> tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public

> about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide

> votes. (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her

website

> and send a press release to 4,000 editors, inviting them to check it out.)

>

> " I suspect they're getting ready to do this across all the states, "

Matulka

> told me. " God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the

> country, " he added, " because they leave no paper trail. These corporations

> are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting

> machines. " Further frustrating Mutalka's efforts to get a recount, he says

> Nebraska Republicans passed a law after the 2002 election that bars state

> officials from examining any remaining paper ballots. Other states are

> looking at similar bills.

>

> In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of

> business, and the news arms of the huge multinational corporations that

own

> our networks are suggesting the days of exit polls are over. Virtually

none

> were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling silence that caused

> unease for the many American voters who had come to view exit polls as

> proof of the integrity of their election systems.

>

> As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians are

> wondering if it's a good idea for corporations to be so involved in the

> guts of our voting systems. The whole idea of a democratic republic was to

> create a common institution (the government itself) owned by its citizens,

> answerable to its citizens, and authorized to exist and continue existing

> solely " by the consent of the governed. "

>

> However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite

direction,

> with governments turning administration of our commons over to

corporations

> answerable only to profits. The result is the enrichment of corporations

> and the appearance that democracy in America has started to resemble its

> parody in banana republics.

>

> Further frustrating those concerned with the sanctity of our vote, the

> corporations selling and licensing voting machines and voting software

> often claim Fourth Amendment rights of privacy and the right to hide their

> " trade secrets " - how their voting software works and what controls are

> built into it - from both the public and the government itself.

>

> " If you want to make Coca Cola and have trade secrets, that's fine, " says

> Harvard's Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D., one of the nation's leading experts on

> voting machines who writes at

> <http://www.notablesoftware.com>www.notablesoftware.com. " But don't try to

> claim trade secrets when you're handling our votes. "

>

> And the window into who owns whom among the various companies most of

which

> are not publicly traded is equally opaque. One voting machine company was

> partially funded at startup by wealthy Republican philanthropists who

> belong to an organization that believes the Bible instead of the

> Constitution should govern America. Another is partly owned by a defense

> contractor, and Arab businessmen apparently own a large part of a third.

> Even the reincarnation of a company that helped Enron cook their books has

> gotten into the act.

>

> " There are several issues here, " says reporter Lynn Landis, whose writing

> about voting machines are available at

> <http://www.ecotalk.org>www.ecotalk.org. " First, there's the issue that

the

> Voting Rights Act requires that poll watchers be able to observe the vote.

> But with computerized voting machines, your vote vanishes into a computer

> and can't be observed. "

>

> To solve this, many are calling for a return to paper ballots that are

> hand-counted. It may be slower, but temp-help precinct workers may even

> cost less than electronic voting machines (which are a

multi-billion-dollar

> boon for corporate suppliers), and will ensure that real humans are

> tabulating the vote.

>

> " Second, " says Landis, " there's the issue of who controls the information.

> Of all the functions of government that should not be privatized, handling

> our votes is at the top of the list. This is the core of democracy, and

> must be open, transparent, and available to both the public and our

> politicians of all parties for full and open inspection. "

>

> Although Rush Holt is suggesting there be stringent standards, he hasn't

> gone so far as to say corporations shouldn't process our votes. But why

> not? Most government functions - from our courts to our fire departments -

> run rather smoothly, despite carping from the extreme right wing.

> Increasingly, people across America are demanding that like in other

> democracies around the world our system of voting should be publicly

owned.

>

> Another point that Dr. Rebecca Mercuri raises is that the Help America

Vote

> Act (HAVA) passed after the 2000 election calls for the President to

> appoint, as the Act states, " with the advice of the Senate, " members to

" an

> independent entity, the Election Assistance Commission. " The commission is

> then to create " the Election Assistance Commission Standards Board, the

> Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors, " " and the Technical

> Guidelines Development Committee " to establish standards and oversee

> compliance of the law by voting machine companies.

>

> " But the commission has not yet been established, " said Mercuri, even

> though billions in federal dollars have been allocated under HAVA for

> states to buy electronic voting machines and license their software from

> private corporations. " As a result, " Mercuri points out, " there are

> currently no meaningful federal standards for voting machines. Many of the

> machines used in 2002 were built to industry guidelines that many question

> and were established in 1990. "

>

> And those standards are problematic. For example, in the course of

> researching " Black Box Voting, " Harris did a Google search on one of the

> voting machine companies, and found it maintained an open FTP site on the

> internet apparently through the 2002 election. In it, she located computer

> code used to tabulate elections and, apparently, actual vote count files

> that could be downloaded or even replaced by any visiting hacker.

>

> While corporate bungles or the potential for outright vote fraud are a

> concern of many opposed to electronic voting machines, another issue of

> concern is the concentration of voter rolls in the hands of partisan

> politicians instead of civil servants.

>

> In most states, local precincts or counties maintain their own voter

rolls.

> Florida, however, had gone to the trouble before the 2000 election to

> consolidate all its voter rolls at the state level, and put them into the

> custody and control of the state's elected Secretary of State, Katherine

> Harris, who was also the chairman of the Florida campaign to elect George

> W. Bush.

>

> Harris, in an act described in disturbing detail in the documentary

> " Unprecedented " (<http://www.unprecedented.org>www.unprecedented.org) and

> in Greg Palast's book " The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, " spent millions

to

> hire a Texas company to clean up the Florida list by purging it of all

> convicted felons using a list of felons who lived in the State of Texas.

>

> As Harris apparently knew, one of the legacies of slavery is that a large

> number of African Americans share the same or similar names, and, sure

> enough, when the Texas felon list was compared with the Florida voter list

> over 94,000 matches or near-matches were found. Those registered Florida

> voters about half of them African Americans (who generally vote

Democratic)

> with names identical or even similar to Texas felons were deleted from the

> Florida voter rolls, and turned away from the polls when they tried to

vote

> in 2000 and in 2002.

>

> Now, under the HAVA act, states across the nation are consolidating their

> voter lists and handing them over to Harris's various peers to be cleaned

> and maintained.

>

> Another concern is internet voting. While it may be fine for the straw

> polls like the one taken by moveon.org, when the stakes are truly high

it's

> impossible to ensure the accuracy of internet voting. Imagine if all the

> time a voting machine was being used, it also had its back door open and

an

> unlimited number of technicians and hackers could manipulate its innards

> before, during, and after the vote.

>

> Activists suggest this is one of the reasons it's dangerous that so many

> electronic voting machines today are connected to company-access modems,

> but it's an even stronger argument against the very core of democracy the

> vote being handled out in the public of cyberspace.

>

> Nonetheless, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to have a private

> corporation conduct internet voting for overseas GIs in 2004, and many

fear

> it'll be used as a beta test for more widespread internet voting across

the

> nation. While many Americans think the ability to vote from home or office

> over the computer would be wonderfully convenient, the results could be

> disastrous: Even the CIA hasn't been able to prevent hackers from

> penetrating parts of its computer systems attached to the internet.

>

> To further complicate matters, the last week of February 2003, New York's

> Newsday reported that, " Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up

> scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel

in

> the 2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an

> investment group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to

company

> correspondence. "

>

> While there are unconfirmed reports that the Saudis are no longer

involved,

> the reality is that anybody from any nation can buy controlling interest

of

> a for-profit corporation and end up owning part of the apparatus by which

> the President of the United States is elected. Even a felon who can't

> legally vote in Florida can legally own and control software that runs

> voting machines in that state.

>

> On most levels, privatization is only a " small sin " against democracy.

> Turning a nation's or community's water, septic, roadway, prisons,

> airwaves, or health care commons over to private corporations has so far

> demonstrably degraded the quality of life for average citizens and

enriched

> a few of the most powerful campaign contributors. But it hasn't been the

> end of democracy (although some wonder about what the FCC is up to - but

> that's a separate story).

>

> Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and

> maintenance of voting over to corporations that can share their profits

> openly with politicians (or, like Hagel, become the politicians), puts

> democracy itself at peril.

>

> A growing number of Americans are saying our votes are too sacred to

reside

> only on " chips, " and that it's critical that we kick corporations out of

> the commons of our voting, and that we make sure we have a

human-verifiable

> vote paper trail that goes all the way back to the original hand of the

> original voter.

>

> If there are chips involved in the voting process, these democracy

> advocates say, government civil service employees who are subject to

> adversarial oversight by both parties must program them in an open-source

> fashion, and in a way that produces a voter-verified paper trail.

>

> Anything less, and our democracy may vanish as quickly as a network of

> modem-connected computers can reboot.

>

> <http://www.thomhartmann.com>Thom Hartmann is a nationally syndicated

daily

> talk show host and the author of " Unequal Protection " and " The Last Hours

> of Ancient Sunlight, " among other books.

>

> http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16474

>

[Guest guest]

This is off topic, but is so important to fundamental democracy that is has to

be aired far and wide.

 

Frank

 

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16474

 

 

 

 

 

Ghost In The Machine

 

By Thom Hartmann, <http://www.alternet.org>AlterNet

July 23, 2003

 

" A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots

Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans, "

announced the Dallas Morning News in a story on Nov. 7, just a few days after

the 2002 election. The story added, " Democrats actually won by wide margins. "

 

Republicans would have carried the day had not poll workers become suspicious

when the computerized vote-reading machines said the Republican candidate was

trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent in the race for County Commissioner.

 

The poll workers were close enough to the electorate

they were part of the electorate to know their county overwhelminglyfavored the

Democratic incumbent.

 

A quick hand recount of the optical-scan ballots showed that the Democrat had

indeed won, even though the computerized ballot-scanning machine kept

giving the race to the Republican.

 

The poll workers brought the discrepancy

to the attention of the County Clerk, who notified the voting machine company.

 

" A new computer chip was flown to Snyder [Texas] from Dallas, " County Clerk

Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip installed, the computer

decided that the Democrat had, indeed, won the race.

 

In another Texas anomaly, Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth won his race

with exactly 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel won her state House seat

with exactly 18,181 votes, and conservative Judge Danny Scheel won his seat with

exactly 18,181 votes all in Comal County.

 

Apparently, however, no poll workers in Comal County thought to ask for a new

chip.

 

The Texas incidents happened with computerized machines reading and then

tabulating paper or punch-card ballots.

 

In Georgia and Florida, where paper had been totally replaced by touch-screen

machines in many to most

precincts during 2001 and 2002, the 2002 election produced some of the nation's

most startling results.

 

USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, " In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution

poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican

Rep. Saxby Chambliss. " Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after

the election (Nov. 7) that,

" Pollsters may have goofed " because " Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated

incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent.

 

The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday

showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them. "

 

Just as amazing was the Georgia governor's race. " Similarly, " Cox News reported

on Nov. 7, " no polls predicted the upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny

Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes.

 

Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll had

shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a margin of error of plus or

minus 4 points. "

 

Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touch-screen

computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever.

 

 

And nobody thought to ask for a new chip, although it was noted on Nov. 8 by the

Atlanta Constitution-Journal that in downtown Atlanta's predominantly Democratic

Fulton County " election officials said Thursday that memory

cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on

those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals. "

 

 

Officials added that all but 11 of the memory cards were subsequently found and

recorded.

 

Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in an editorial on Jan. 23,

2003, " In one Florida precinct last November, votes that were intended for the

Democratic candidate for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush,

because of a misaligned touch screen. How many votes were miscast before the

mistake was found will never be known, because there was no paper audit. "

( " Misaligned " touch screens also caused 18 known machines in Dallas

to register Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed: it's

unknown how many others weren't noticed.)

 

Apparently, nobody thought to ask for new chips in Florida, either.

 

In Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported just a few days before the election

(Oct. 30, 2002) that, " Dramatic political developments since Sen. Paul

Wellstone's death Friday have had little effect on voters' leanings in the

U.S. Senate race, according to a Star Tribune Minnesota Poll taken Monday night.

Wellstone's likely replacement on the ballot, former Vice President Walter

Mondale, leads Republican Norm Coleman by 47 to 39 percent close to where the

race stood two weeks ago when Wellstone led Coleman 47 to 41 percent. "

 

When the computerized machines were done counting the vote a few days later,

however, Coleman had beat Mondale by 50 to 47 percent. If Mondale had asked for

new chips, would it have made a difference? We'll never

know.

 

One state where Republicans did ask for a new chip was Alabama. Fox News

reported on Nov. 8, 2002 that initial returns from across the state showed

that Democratic incumbent Gov. Don Siegelman had won the governor's race.

 

 

But, overnight, " Baldwin County took center stage when election officials

released results Tuesday night showing Siegelman with 19,070 votes enough for a

narrow victory statewide. Later, they recounted and reduced Siegelman's tally to

12,736 votes enough to give Riley the victory. "

 

What produced the sudden loss of about 6,000 votes? According to the Fox report:

" Probate Judge Adrian Johns, a member of the county canvassing board, blamed the

initial, higher number on 'a programming glitch in the

software' that tallies the votes. " All parties were not satisfied with that

explanation, however. Fox added: " The governor claimed results were changed

after poll watchers left. "

 

It turns out the " glitch in the software " in Alabama was discovered by the

Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley McCullough, who,

according to a story by Rachel DiCarlo in the conservative Daily Standard,

" logged onto the county's municipal website and confirmed that [incumbent

Democratic Governor] Siegelman had actually only received 12,736 votes not the

19,070 the Associated Press projected for him. A computer glitch had caused the

error. The erroneous tally would have put Siegelman on top by 3,582 votes, but

the corrected one gave Riley a 2,752-vote edge. "

 

As the Daily Standard noted, " If it hadn't been for one woman, the Republican

National Committee's regional director Kelley McCullough, things might have gone

terribly wrong for [Republican Gubernatorial candidate]

Riley. "

 

Similarly, in Davison County, South Dakota, the Democratic election auditor

noticed the machines double counting votes (it's not noted for which side)

and had a " new chip " brought in.

 

 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of '00 and '02 election irregularities,

as reported by www.votewatch.us " >http://www.votewatch.us>www.votewatch.us.

 

 

Either the system by which democracy exists broke that November evening,or was

hacked, or American voters became suddenly more fickle than at anytime since

Truman beat Dewey.

 

Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent

Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran, was, as Republican

TV ads suggested, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate, even

though his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had sat out the Vietnam war

with a medical deferment.

 

(The BBC summed up Georgia voters' reaction in a Nov. 6, 2002 headline: " GEORGIA

UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS. " The BBC

echoed the confusion of many Georgia voters when they wrote, " Mr. Cleland an

army veteran who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion during the Vietnam War

had long been considered 'untouchable' on questions of defense and

national security. " )

 

Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged themselves

to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly and inexplicably

decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny Perdue.

 

Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a

small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican

candidates around the country really did win those states where

conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election

cycles, but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading machines showed them

winning.

 

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that

it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World countries, it

really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States

in the past few years and just won't work here anymore.

 

Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls

happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled,

modem-capable

voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

 

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters'

hand to prove it.

 

You'd think in an open democracy that the government answerable to all its

citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders would

program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the

computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and

programming available for public scrutiny.

 

You'd think there would be a paper trail of the actual hand-cast vote, which

could be followed and

audited if there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with

computerized vote counts.

 

You'd be wrong.

 

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel who left his job as head of an electronic

voting machine company to run as a long-shot candidate for the U.S. Senate

honestly won all of his elections.

 

Back when Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his own company's

computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning and unexpected

victories in both the primaries and the general election.

 

The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's " Senate victory against an

incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November

election. "

 

According to Bev Harris, author of the book,

> <http://www.blackboxvoting.com> " Black Box Voting, " Hagel won virtually every

demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never

before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a

Senate seat in Nebraska.

 

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in

2002, and won in a landslide.

 

As his Website says, Hagel " was re-elected

to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of

the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history

of Nebraska. " What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of

those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by

the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company.

Programmed by that company. The chips supplied by that company.

 

" This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was, " said Hagel's Democratic

opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka

 

(<http://www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm>lancastercountydemocra

ts.org/matulka.htm).

" They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me. "

 

 

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's

proverbial canary in the mineshaft? Between them, Hagel and Chambliss' victories

sealed Republican control of the Senate. Odds are

both won fair and square, the American way, using huge piles of corporate money

to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising.

 

But either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety in an election casts

a shadow over American democracy.

 

" The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other

rights are protected, " wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. " To take away this

right is to reduce a man to slavery.. "

 

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our

doorstep.

 

" They can take over our country without firing a shot, " Matulka said, " just by

taking over our election systems. "

 

Revolution by control of computer chips? Is that really possible in the USA?

 

" Imagine it's Election Day 2004, " says U.S. Congressman Rush Holt, also a

scientist with a Ph.D. in physics who knows more than a little bit about both

politics and computers. " You enter your local polling place and go to

cast your vote on a brand new touch screen voting machine. The screen says your

vote has been counted. As you exit the voting booth, however, you

begin to wonder. How do I know if the machine actually recorded my vote? "

 

It's a question that probably hasn't occurred to many Americans, even those who

used the touch-screen machines particularly notable in states where there were

" upsets " and " glitches " in the 2002 election. But it occurred

to Congressman Holt, and after looking at the law, the voting machines, and the

companies that produce them, he concluded that, " The fact is, you don't [know if

the machine actually recorded your vote]. "

 

Bev Harris has looked into the situation in depth and thinks both Congressman

Holt and candidate Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel

even threatened her with legal action when she went public about his company

having built the machines that counted his landslide votes. (Her response was to

put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release to

4,000 editors, inviting them to check it out.)

 

" I suspect they're getting ready to do this across all the states, " Matulka told

me. " God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country, " he

added, " because they leave no paper trail. These corporations

are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting

machines. "

 

Further frustrating Mutalka's efforts to get a recount, he says Nebraska

Republicans passed a law after the 2002 election that bars state officials from

examining any remaining paper ballots.

 

Other states are looking at similar bills.

 

In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of business,

and the news arms of the huge multinational corporations that own our networks

are suggesting the days of exit polls are over. Virtually

none were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling silence that caused

unease for the many American voters who had come to view exit polls as

proof of the integrity of their election systems.

 

As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians are

wondering if it's a good idea for corporations to be so involved in the guts of

our voting systems. The whole idea of a democratic republic was to

create a common institution (the government itself) owned by its citizens,

answerable to its citizens, and authorized to exist and continue existing solely

" by the consent of the governed. "

 

However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite direction, with

governments turning administration of our commons over to corporations

answerable only to profits. The result is the enrichment of corporations and the

appearance that democracy in America has started to resemble its parody in

banana republics.

 

Further frustrating those concerned with the sanctity of our vote, the

corporations selling and licensing voting machines and voting software often

claim Fourth Amendment rights of privacy and the right to hide their " trade

secrets " - how their voting software works and what controls are built into it -

from both the public and the government itself.

 

" If you want to make Coca Cola and have trade secrets, that's fine, " says

Harvard's Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D., one of the nation's leading experts on voting

machines who writes

at<www.notablesoftware.com " >http://www.notablesoftware.com>www.notablesoftware.c\

om.

 

" But don't try to

claim trade secrets when you're handling our votes. "

 

And the window into who owns whom among the various companies most of which are

not publicly traded is equally opaque. One voting machine company was

partially funded at startup by wealthy Republican philanthropists who belong to

an organization that believes the Bible instead of the Constitution should

govern America.

 

Another is partly owned by a defense contractor, and Arab businessmen apparently

own a large part of a third.

Even the reincarnation of a company that helped Enron cook their books has

gotten into the act.

 

" There are several issues here, " says reporter Lynn Landis, whose writing about

voting machines are available at

> <www.ecotalk.org " >http://www.ecotalk.org>www.ecotalk.org.

 

" First, there's the issue that the Voting Rights Act requires that poll watchers

be able to observe the vote.

But with computerized voting machines, your vote vanishes into a computer and

can't be observed. "

 

To solve this, many are calling for a return to paper ballots that are

hand-counted. It may be slower, but temp-help precinct workers may even cost

less than electronic voting machines (which are a multi-billion-dollar boon for

corporate suppliers), and will ensure that real humans are tabulating the vote.

 

" Second, " says Landis, " there's the issue of who controls the information. Of

all the functions of government that should not be privatized, handling our

votes is at the top of the list. This is the core of democracy, and

must be open, transparent, and available to both the public and our politicians

of all parties for full and open inspection. "

 

Although Rush Holt is suggesting there be stringent standards, he hasn't gone so

far as to say corporations shouldn't process our votes. But why not? Most

government functions - from our courts to our fire departments -

run rather smoothly, despite carping from the extreme right wing.

 

 

Increasingly, people across America are demanding that like in other democracies

around the world our system of voting should be publicly owned.

 

Another point that Dr. Rebecca Mercuri raises is that the Help America Vote Act

(HAVA) passed after the 2000 election calls for the President to appoint, as the

Act states, " with the advice of the Senate, " members to

" an independent entity, the Election Assistance Commission. " The commission is

then to create " the Election Assistance Commission Standards Board, the

Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors, " " and the Technical Guidelines

Development Committee " to establish standards and oversee compliance of the law

by voting machine companies.

 

" But the commission has not yet been established, " said Mercuri, even though

billions in federal dollars have been allocated under HAVA for states to buy

electronic voting machines and license their software from

private corporations. " As a result, " Mercuri points out, " there are currently no

meaningful federal standards for voting machines.

 

Many of the machines used in 2002 were built to industry guidelines that many

question and were established in 1990. "

 

And those standards are problematic. For example, in the course of researching

" Black Box Voting, " Harris did a Google search on one of the voting machine

companies, and found it maintained an open FTP site on the internet apparently

through the 2002 election. In it, she located computer code used to tabulate

elections and, apparently, actual vote count files that could be downloaded or

even replaced by any visiting hacker.

 

While corporate bungles or the potential for outright vote fraud are a concern

of many opposed to electronic voting machines, another issue of concern is the

concentration of voter rolls in the hands of partisan

politicians instead of civil servants.

 

In most states, local precincts or counties maintain their own voter rolls.

Florida, however, had gone to the trouble before the 2000 election to

consolidate all its voter rolls at the state level, and put them into the

custody and control of the state's elected Secretary of State, Katherine Harris,

who was also the chairman of the Florida campaign to elect George W. Bush.

 

Harris, in an act described in disturbing detail in the documentary

" Unprecedented " (<http://www.unprecedented.org>www.unprecedented.org) and in

Greg Palast's book " The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, " spent millions

to hire a Texas company to clean up the Florida list by purging it of all

convicted felons using a list of felons who lived in the State of Texas.

 

As Harris apparently knew, one of the legacies of slavery is that a large number

of African Americans share the same or similar names, and, sure enough, when the

Texas felon list was compared with the Florida voter list

over 94,000 matches or near-matches were found. Those registered Florida voters

about half of them African Americans (who generally vote Democratic) with names

identical or even similar to Texas felons were deleted from the Florida voter

rolls, and turned away from the polls when they tried to vote in 2000 and in

2002.

 

Now, under the HAVA act, states across the nation are consolidating their voter

lists and handing them over to Harris's various peers to be cleaned and

maintained.

 

Another concern is internet voting. While it may be fine for the straw polls

like the one taken by moveon.org, when the stakes are truly high it's impossible

to ensure the accuracy of internet voting. Imagine if all the

time a voting machine was being used, it also had its back door open and an

unlimited number of technicians and hackers could manipulate its innards before,

during, and after the vote.

 

Activists suggest this is one of the reasons it's dangerous that so many

electronic voting machines today are connected to company-access modems, but

it's an even stronger argument against the very core of democracy the

vote being handled out in the public of cyberspace.

 

Nonetheless, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to have a private

corporation conduct internet voting for overseas GIs in 2004, and many fear

it'll be used as a beta test for more widespread internet voting across

the nation. While many Americans think the ability to vote from home or office

over the computer would be wonderfully convenient, the results could be

disastrous: Even the CIA hasn't been able to prevent hackers from penetrating

parts of its computer systems attached to the internet.

 

To further complicate matters, the last week of February 2003, New York's

Newsday reported that, " Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up

scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel

in the 2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an

investment group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to company

correspondence. "

 

While there are unconfirmed reports that the Saudis are no longer involved, the

reality is that anybody from any nation can buy controlling interest of a

for-profit corporation and end up owning part of the apparatus by which the

President of the United States is elected. Even a felon who can't legally vote

in Florida can legally own and control software that runs voting machines in

that state.

 

On most levels, privatization is only a " small sin " against democracy. Turning a

nation's or community's water, septic, roadway, prisons, airwaves, or health

care commons over to private corporations has so far demonstrably degraded the

quality of life for average citizens and enriched a few of the most powerful

campaign contributors. But it hasn't been the end of democracy (although some

wonder about what the FCC is up to - but

that's a separate story).

 

Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance of

voting over to corporations that can share their profits

openly with politicians (or, like Hagel, become the politicians), puts democracy

itself at peril.

 

A growing number of Americans are saying our votes are too sacred to reside only

on " chips, " and that it's critical that we kick corporations out of

the commons of our voting, and that we make sure we have a human-verifiable vote

paper trail that goes all the way back to the original hand of the original

voter.

 

If there are chips involved in the voting process, these democracy advocates

say, government civil service employees who are subject to adversarial oversight

by both parties must program them in an open-source

fashion, and in a way that produces a voter-verified paper trail.

 

Anything less, and our democracy may vanish as quickly as a network of

modem-connected computers can reboot.

 

<http://www.thomhartmann.com>Thom Hartmann is a nationally syndicated daily

talk show host and the author of " Unequal Protection " and " The Last Hours

of Ancient Sunlight, " among other books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

There are not enough superlatives to describe Thom Hartman. He has a show --

" Uncomomn Sense From the Radical Middle " -- on I.E. America every weekday

morning, Noon to 3 PM. I listen to it using iTunes, real player or streaming

audio from <http://www.ieamericaradio.com> and <http://www.radiopower.org>.

Everyone should listen to him.

 

Also on I.E. America is Mike Malloy, " Conservative's Greatest Fear, a Liberal

with a Microphone! " It is on each night from 9 PM to 1 PM EDT. You owe it to

yourselves to listen! I decided not to watch TV anymore and needed something to

fill the void at night time. Mike does this and much more!

 

Also, there is a new " All American Talk Show " on i.e.a. from 7 to 9 pm which is

certainly worth a listen.

 

>If you don't read anything else, READ THIS ....CROSS POST EVERYWHERE, MAKE A

>DIFFERENCE BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE ...

>

>

>-

>>

>> Ghost In The Machine

>>

>> By Thom Hartmann, <http://www.alternet.org>AlterNet

> > July 23, 2003

>>

[snip]

--

Neil Jensen: neil

The WWW VL: Sumeria http://www.sumeria.net/

" Dragons is sooooo stupid! " -- Yosemite Sam