Thomas Paine wrote over 200 years ago: "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
It is our belief that there is nothing more fundamental to the preservation of our republic than fair, open, and honest elections utilizing a secret ballot with one, and only one vote for each eligible citizen. However, it is historical fact that election fraud has existed since the inception of our country, and those motivated by malice and greed can be expected to continue their attempts to rig elections into the forseeable future. The basic techniques are outlined in the Chicago Rules Of Election Fraud. Or see a demonstration of how a computer can control an election at WheresThePaper. In the test election there you get honest results but Mary Smith always wins in the "real" election no matter how many votes you give John Doe.
Of course, if you want to play with real election software you can learn how to rig or edit any election here that uses Diebold voting equipment. You'll need to download and install the Diebold vote-tally software and you'll need Microsoft Access, which comes with Microsoft Office. Most any teenager can do this.
It should never be forgotten that murder and intimidation have always been a part of American elections. Some examples:
? In April 2002 a candidate for sheriff in Pulaski County, Kentucky, killed the incumbent, his political opponent, before the election.
? In 2000, a man Tennessee prosecutors said was consumed by a thirst for political power was sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 shooting death of his election opponent, a state senator.
? In Georgia, former DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey is accused of ordering the 2000 murder of the man who defeated him for re-election. Prosecutors say four men carried out the murder on Dorsey's orders.
However, one need not propose a massive conspiracy to rig an election in order to suggest that all reasonable precautions must be taken to protect the integrity of our elections. Most of the precautions and procedures one finds in elections today were put in place as a result of hard-won experience with fraud and intimidation. After all, the classical dirty political machines, e.g., Tammany Hall in New York, Daley in Chicago, LBJ in Texas, gained, or remained in power by relying on the local ward bosses to somehow stuff the ballot box as needed. It would be foolish in the extreme to suggest that simply switching to computer voting will automatically eliminate, or even reduce such election fraud. In fact, all the evidence suggests that computer voting will make election fraud possible with an ease and scale heretofore impossible to achieve.
The idea that a well funded adversary such as the intelligence service of a foreign government would be interested in tampering with the results of a U.S. election should not be lightly dismissed. Such an effort would be cheaper than the rent on the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House and more sure of a "positive" result than the $500,000 the Chinese are reported to have donated to the Clinton campaign.
Since the problems of the presidential election of 2000 there has been an accelerating movement towards the use of computers in elections for a multitude of functions including voter registration, ballot generation, ballot counting, transmittal of election results, and etc. That movement has been fueled by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, or HAVA, that has authorized $3.9 billion to be spent over three years to help state and local governments upgrade their election equipment. These billions of dollars have voting machine manufacturers slobbering at the public trough with little regard to the future of our democracy.
In working with IEEE to establish national standards for voting equipment I have also been struck by the lack of any cost-benefit analysis for these systems. Present Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines are little more than very expensive toys. As that has become ever more apparent, there has been a growing national demand that these toys print out a paper backup that voters can verify and canvass boards and poll watchers can audit. What benefit is there then to placing very expensive DRE's with ballot printers (~$4,000 each with a design life of twenty elections), and say a minimum of five DRE's per precinct, to replace paper ballots? Further, paper ballots are still needed for absentee voters.
Other than some possible convenience for county clerks, I have yet to see any advantage to thousands of very expensive ballot printers located in every precinct over centrally printing paper ballots and distributing those paper ballots to the precincts. And paper ballots require very little in the way of technical and computer expertise, commodities woefully short in most county clerk's offices.
Further, a Caltech/MIT study undertaken after the contentious presidential election in 2000 found that hand-counting paper ballots was the most accurate of the four methods (hand counting, optical scan, DRE, punch card) evaluated. DRE's were among the least accurate.
It is also quite clear that the classical Congressional approach of throwing money at a problem under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was completely backwards from the methods that should have been used when the issue is as basic to our democracy as voting. Under HAVA $3.9 billion was allocated to purchase voting equipment but virtually nothing was appropriated for research, testing, and development. Thus, instead of a period of testing equipment and developing standards prior to deployment, election officials have now spent billions on electronic voting equipment for which no standards exist and which have undergone only fragmentary testing. As a result both the manufacturers and election officials are extremely defensive about their actions and products, which clearly lack the features and security the evolving standards will require.
Also, what has been swept under the carpet is the fact that the traditional functions of poll watchers and citizen election judges in monitoring ballot counting have been completely eliminated with electronic voting. Voters touch a screen and everyone "trusts" the machine does the count accurately or, at best, the voter feeds a ballot into a black box and "trusts" the machine to count accurately. However, in practice there is virtually no way for election judges or poll watchers to verify the numbers produced by computer voting machnes.
In addition, the amount, and cost, of training and expertise demanded of local election officials to competently run electronic elections has been totally neglected. From my perspective it would seem that a cost-benefit analysis of electronic elections is still required and quite likely to show computer voting is not an effective or safe method.
Computer security
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Voting by computers is based on the premise that the average county clerk can maintain a computer system and network that is more secure and error-free than anything the United States Department of Defense has been able to establish. And those who know the least about computers appear to be most in favor of their use in elections, i.e., if you don't know a bit from a byte or a gate from a flip-flop then the government will give you billions to buy voting computers. Realistically, however, most county and parrish clerks are as familiar with computers as they are with handling nitroglycerin and it is probably safer to give them the nitro as they are likely to be more careful with it.
As the premise that county clerks are generally aware of and capable of providing secure computer facilities is obviously fallacious, wondrous new opportunities have been opened up for the mass rigging of elections. Computer technology provides numerous opportunities that were previously forestalled simply by the logistics of handling and counting paper ballots at individual precincts. It is as though we are not only giving these clerks nitroglycerin, we have partially frozen it first.
There is also a correlation between election districts that are rushing into computer voting and voting irregularities. At present it is unknown whether the election problems are associated with the voting machines or the election officials. Of course, in these times, the blame will be placed on the computers and technicians as it would be unthinkable for incompetence in a public official to be admitted.
It is also our experience that when vendors of computer voting equipment, e.g., Diebold, are queried they have two standard responses: (a) the enquiry must be from someone who is technologically ignorant, or (b) if the technical qualifications of the enquirer are unquestionable they are met with silence or outright rejection.
On August 14, 2003, Walden O'Dell (Figure 1) told Republicans in a fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." That prompted Ohio Democrats, among others, to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election as well as a clever satire of Diebold Election Systems.