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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Rotten in Denmark (electronic touch screen voting stinks ) Media critic Mark Crispin Miller has been trying to tell us that electronic touch screen voting stinks for years now -- most recently with last fall's publication of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them). He has repeatedly warned us that electronic touch-screen machines are untrustworthy. They are prone to break down. They leave no paper trail. They make fraud almost impossible to detect. And they're manufactured by private vendors with very close ties to the Republican Party, such as Diebold and ES&S. (Waldon O'Dell, the former chief executive of Diebold who was forced to step down this past winter amidst allegations of insider trading, famously told Bush supporters in a 2003 fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.") Miller's theories about widespread systemic voter fraud have not always been kindly received by progressive media outlets (dismissive reviews of his book appeared on Salon and in Mother Jones). So he must have been feeling at least a momentary flush of schaudenfraude when I caught up with him earlier this month. Ohio had just held the first election in which all 88 counties used either touch-screen machines or devices that scan ballots marked by voters. And it had unfolded like a virtual show-and-tell of his key points. Take Cuyahoga County. With over one million registered voters, it's a must-win for any candidate looking to take the state in November. It is also notorious for having accounted for 1,431 of the 4,166 voting irregularities reported for Ohio in the 2004 presidential elections. Last week's glitches were on a smaller scale, but disastrous nonetheless. Some Cuyahoga voting sites never opened because workers didn't show up; others experienced delays because workers couldn't fire up the new machines. But the biggest news was that more than 17,000 votes had to be counted by hand after new Diebold optical-scanning machines produced inconsistent tabulations. The problems didn't end there. Machines with three-prong plugs, but no adaptor, were allocated to the Garden Valley Neighborhood Center on Cleveland's east side, where every outlet in the place is two-prong. (Their U.S. representative had to go to court to have the poll held open later to try to make up for votes lost earlier in the day.) And the day after the election, officials were still searching for memory cards holding votes from 74 polling locations. Two days after the Ohio primaries, Pennsylvania's secretary of state admitted that a "potential security vulnerability" in Diebold machines could let "unauthorized software be loaded on to the system." (Hat tip to the Brad Blog.) In response to the warning he issued, election officials in Schuylkill and Carbon counties promised that all election equipment will be locked up tight until the May 16 primary. Of course, the great irony here is that states purchased these new electronic touch-screen voting machines with funding provided by the federal Help America Vote Act. HAVA, which Congress passed in 2002 in the wake of the 2000 presidential election scandal in Florida, "forbids counties nationwide from using lever machines or paper ballots to conduct federal elections because they are deemed unreliable." (In fact, the Department of Justice cited HAVA when it filed suit against the notoriously blue state of New York this past March for not getting their touch-screen machines in place fast enough.) "Republicans played it beautifully after the 2000 elections," Miller says. "The Democrats were too cowardly in 2000 to say ‘We think you stole this election.' All they would do is say, 'We need electoral reform! We need electoral reform!' So the White House cleverly says 'OK, we need electoral reform,' and they passed a bill that made things much worse." Miller firmly believes that the touch-screen machines' pre-programming flips votes for the Republican Party. "We know of at least 21 states where there were thousands of complaints on Election Day 2004 from people who tried to vote for Kerry and had their votes flipped to Bush," he tells me. "I've looked very hard for examples of would-be Bush voters who had their votes switched to Kerry, and I've found four." As additional evidence, Miller points to the election incident reporting system (EIRS) that logs telephone complaints made by people on Election Day. For the Ohio 2004 election, it shows 80+ complaints about Kerry to Bush flips vs. three regarding Bush to Kerry flips. And then there's whistleblower Clint Curtis, a former Republican now running as a Democrat against Congressman Tom Feeney in Florida. Curtis testified to Congress under oath that while he was still working as a programmer for Wang Enterprises in 2000, Feeney asked him to build a computer program that could, undetected, flip a vote in an election. Curtis also passed a polygraph test with his story in March of 2005. But his story has gone virtually untouched by the media -- "mainstream" or "progressive" -- outside of the blogosphere. Miller's outspoken about not being a Democrat, and he's deeply critical of Kerry's disastrously incompetent campaign in Ohio. Still, he thinks that Kerry won, and that the election was stolen from him through a combination of strategies, some orchestrated from the top (Rove) and others the result of "freelancers" looking to do anything to win. "Remember, machines weren't the only means whereby Bush/Cheney disenfranchised the majority," Miller says. "Disinformation, intimidation, and obstruction tactics -- the classic, Jim Crow stuff -- were also rampant in 2004; and there were countless citizens who never got to vote at all." (In his new book, journalist Greg Palast alleges that 3 million Democratic votes were never counted.) "The point," Miller continues, "is that they used every trick in the book, and also concocted new ones, to 're-elect' themselves. This stuff was by no means restricted to Ohio, and it's set to happen all over again." Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who handily won the Republican gubernatorial primary against an unfunded opponent last week, was one of the architects of voter disenfranchisement in 2004. Just weeks before the presidential election, he asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati to allow GOP challenges to 35,000 voters from mostly urban and minority areas to proceed. He also drew criticism for acting as the state's top election official -- and therefore the leading official in the 2004 recount -- while serving as honorary co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Earlier this month the Ohio Democratic Party requested that Blackwell recuse himself from the probe regarding what went wrong in Cuyahoga County, citing the conflicts of interest he would face as a gubernatorial candidate. Blackwell refused, which means that he will be helping to lead the investigation into an election that handed him a victory. It's enough to make you think that something stinks in Ohio. Nancy Goldstein can be reached at goldstein.nancy@gmail.com.
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