There Will Be No Vote Recount in Florida This November…
…because there will be no paper trail (in the 15 precincts doing electronic voting anyway). Here’s a random smattering of articles that make me worry that the election debacle in Florida in 2000 was just a warm-up for what’s coming this November:
- Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program - this article describes how the Diebold vote counting software seems like it’s designed to allow tampering. And here’s another article by the same investigator describing how data and software updates for it were available for anonymous download (and upload!) on an unprotected FTP site. For me, it’s disturbing enough that it relies on a Microsoft Access database ;-). And the fact that Diebold’s CEO said in a fundraising letter that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president” also doesn’t make me sleep any easier. How do we solve these software problems and apparent conflicts of interest? Easy - require voting machines and their manufacturers to meet standards at least as good as Nevada’s slot machines.
- Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century and The Verified Voting Foundation closely track concerns related to voting technology.
- Fear of Fraud, Florida Faces Election Fracas and Florida scraps felon vote list - a lawsuit by CNN resulted in a judge’s order that forced the recent revelation of Florida’s list of convicted felons that were to be removed from the voter registration rolls. It turned out to be deeply flawed, despite prior assurances from Florida’s Division of Elections that “We run each name through a whole series of algorithms now. If a name doesn’t meet a certain threshold it is not purged.” It turns out that they utterly bungled the process: thousands of African-Americans (who tend to vote Democratic) were incorrectly put on the list, and there was only a small fraction of the expected number of Hispanics on the list (in Florida, this mostly means Cubans, who tend to vote Republican). The only way you get there is either gross incompetence or outright fraud, and neither explanation gives me hope for fair and reliable voting procedures in Florida this November. Meanwhile, as Jeb Bush was reassuring Floridians that the new electronic voting machines were reliable, the GOP was telling Florida Republicans to vote via absentee ballot because the “new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote…”
- Democrats blast GOP lawmaker’s ’suppress the Detroit vote’ remark - A Republican state senator in Michigan said the GOP would fare poorly in the upcoming election if it failed to “suppress the Detroit vote.” If he had said just that, I would have accepted that maybe it was just a slip of the tongue or some weird daydreaming, but his subseqeunt clarification didn’t help his case: “In the context that we were talking about, I said we’ve got to get the vote up in Oakland [County] and the vote down in Detroit. You get it down with a good message. I don’t know how we got from there to ‘racist’” [Detroit is 83% black]. A “good message” from the GOP will inspire African-Americans in Detroit to not vote? Huh?
