EDITOR: Webster
’s Unabridged Dictionary defines democracy as a form of
government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and
exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free
electoral system.
EDITOR:
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines democracy as a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. Upcoming cyberspace elections, using electronic voting machines, can seriously erode our “free electoral system” and, indeed, the very core of our democracy.
As author Jim Hightower observes, “After the hanging-chad debacle of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, spooked national, state and local officials were scrambling for a way to reform the voting system … Wispering the magic word ‘computers’, corporate lobbyists swarmed Capitol Hill with promises that high-tech was the path to true reform, since electronic voting has no chads to hang and, in fact, no paper of any sort to ‘clog’ the machinery of democracy.”
Congress succumbed to the lobbyists and enacted the Help America Vote Act, which throws nearly $4 billion at corporate-designed and -manufactured touch screen voting machines, so all of us can vote electronically. The only problem here is that current touch screen machines don’t provide a paper record of those we vote for or, indeed, validation that we’ve voted at all. “Mere voters are simply expected to ‘trust’ the system and to moo contentedly as they move through the polling booths,” says Hightower.
Using touch screen voting machines in a Washington, Fla., city runoff, 78 of the electronic ballots turned out to be blank. Election official claimed that the 78 voters came to the polls, but failed to vote in the only race on the ballot. In Canal County, Texas, three candidates received the exact, same winning margin of 18,181 votes on touch screen machines.
Problems found in electronic voting machines are no surprise to computer scientists. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University, says, “With these paperless machines, there is nothing that can stop a determined group from achieving large-scale electronic theft. We see no reason why major problems will not occur, including obviously messed-up elections and election of incorrect candidates.”
Studies conducted at Rice University and Johns Hopkins University reached similar conclusions, as did the state of Ohio. Earlier last month computer scientists hired by the state of Maryland to deliberately hack the state’s touch screen voting machines announced they had successfully changed vote tallies, altered ballots and seized control of a central vote-counting computer.
What’s the solution to this nightmare? A paper trail. Every electronic voting machine must provide a paper printout for each voter, much like we receive from our bank ATM. This will allow us to verify our votes before leaving the voting booth, and provide a paper record to be safeguarded by election officials for possible recounts.
California’s secretary of state Kevin Shelley has required that all California electronic voting machines must provide a paper printout – but not until 2006. This isn’t soon enough; we need paper voting receipts for the November presidential election. New Jersey U.S. Representative Rush Holt and 82 co-sponsors have already drafted a bill, H.R. 2239, the Voter Confidence Act, to require printouts now. If you want to safeguard our democracy by helping H.R. 2239 law, contact www.verifiedvoting.org
Jim Gruff, Morgan Hill
