Nothing is Proprietary about the Will of the People

Posted on November 11, 2004 in Accountability

What are bloggers asking about the election? A few “critics” have called our concerns about the election “conspiracy theories” as if ad hominem arguments alone could explain away the discrepancies. But what they don’t get is that we’re asking for our vote the same as what we ask for money we put in the bank: accountability.

When a bank takes a deposit, you receive a receipt. As money accumulates in your account, you receive statements. There’s a rate of interest that you can work out for yourself on any pocket calculator. You can hold your bank accountable in very simple ways.

The problem with the vote right now is that when you use a touchscreen computer, you don’t receive a receipt verifying your tally. That’s one problem. A more serious problem is that the software used to count the vote in the courthouse — not just the touchscreen voting, but also the punch cards and optical scanning — is a corporate secret. Computer security experts have long warned about the ease with which the software used to count the votes can be written to skew election results. No recount can be trusted without a hard look at the software used to deliver us the results. That corporations stonewall us on allowing the public to view the code is, at very best, dissettling to any American who wants to be assured that her or his vote was counted correctly, that the candidate announced as the winner truly got the votes. Given the letters leaked out of Diebold about “delivering Ohio to Bush” from last spring, we are not unjustified in having deeper concerns.

My stand is simply this: there should be no secrets regarding the election. Information about this must be completely free for any member of the public to obtain. Any citizen should be able to go down to the courthouse to watch the votes being tallied as long as he or she retains a respectful silence and does not interfere with the process. Any citizen should be able to go to the courthouse and receive a printout of the software code used to count the vote. There must be nothing outside of the public oversight when it comes to the election. And the distrust coming from the election stems directly from this simple fact. When the Right attempts to dismiss it as conspiracy theories and stonewalls attempts to bring these matters to light, it only deepens suspicions. I do not doubt that in the minds of those who belittle the calls for openness in government there continue to exist fears that we may be on to something. Just remember the paranoic and panicked way they behaved in the weeks before the election. They are revving up for more of the same.