How to Defraud the Voters

Posted on October 16, 2003 in Campaign 2004

Body and Soul explores the issue of computerized voting machines today. You can reduce the worthy objection to the art to this: computers can be rigged to cheat.

This test set up by Teresa Hommel shows how no matter how you vote, you will end up with the candidate of the operator’s choosing. Hommel spearheads a demand for voter verifiability:

Something that’s printed after the election is over can’t provide security, because the voter is no longer present to confirm that the printout is correct. Unless the voting machine programmers are completely incompetent, all POST-ELECTION printouts will agree with the machine’s final vote counts–whether those counts are correct or wrong.

We’re at a turning point of faith in our system. When I was out in Utah on my vacation, I kept running into Californians who’d timidly ask how I felt about the Recall. “I voted against it, of course,” was my response and the response would invariably be a sigh of relief. “Me, too.” One man I met called it the Wreck-All.

A couple from Berkeley told me that they’d voted on a touch-screen machine in the office of the Registrar of Voters. If this is so, voting machines have come to California and may have influenced the election. If we see a major swing to Schwarzenegger in Berkeley, then we have reason to question the machines in Alameda County, an area with a large enough population to swing a statewide election.

There are plenty of reasons to distrust touch-screen voting machines. The first is that you cannot verify the results for yourself after the election. There’s no slip of paper given to you like at the bank after you vote, no means of auditing the audit. The second is that the program used to count the ballots is a matter of proprietary interest and therefore out of the public domain of necessary control. In other words, if you want to run the machine through a check, you can’t get a copy of the program, you can’t have an independent programmer check the code because it is a “trade secret”.

It is a matter of national security that the method used to count ballots and the ballots themselves be subject to voter scrutiny at all times. The results must be preserved ballot by ballot in a place other than a computer’s memory. The programs must be viewable by the general public. The press should assign technical writers to the task of examining the code and demanding access. And no private company should have proprietary interest in the management of our democracy. If you can’t vote the bastards out, then they should have no part.

If people stop believing in elections and want change, what will they do? I have said for years that our country is becoming Latin-Americanized, meaning that there is a growing rift between what the People want and what the Government delivers. A Right-Wing elite has arisen — not a principled one, but one based on greed and hedonism. When elections fail to check corrupt government, a bad thing happens: armed revolution. People dead. Prisons filled with dissidents put there on trumped up charges. A nation wounded and unable to know peace.