The folks at SoundPolitics.com made fun of me for my election night lament that “I cannot imagine being convinced that this was a free and fair election.”
First of all, considering our national electoral catastrophe, I believe we all deserve a little time off to sit shiva for our democracy. Second, considering our nation’s documented history of voter intimidation and electoral fraud, I don’t believe my lament was all that nutty. (They called me “aluminum hat boy.”)
Remember, you’re not paranoid if everybody really is against you.
And so I point you to a piece by investigative reporter Greg Palast, a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine: “Kerry Won…”
Palast documents what I’ve been privately ranting about to family, friends and complete strangers the past couple days, that the gap between Ohio’s exit polls and the votes tallied was too large to be explained by survey errors. 53% of Ohio women and 51% of men thought they had voted for Kerry. And yet Bush managed to win 51% to 49%.
How is this possible? As Palast explains, thousands of ballots cast simply were not recorded. And the majority of these came from African Americans.
Scary. Depressing. But not surprising.
Goldy–I assure you, you’re not nutty. All you need is electronic voting without a paper trail. I’m listening to Science Friday right now and the discrepancy in Ohio is one of the topics. To me one clue is that I heard a new report in which a voter in Ohio was interviewed and she stood in line nine hours to vote!!! NINE HOURS–what the heck–this has to point to probability that there was something wrong here.
I sent a letter to the Washington Secretary of State after the 2000 election suggesting that all ballots need to be randomly numbered and be in duplicate. Then each county’s ballots need to be posted on the internet in random number sequence that shows the vote on each ballot. This way every voter could check to see that their vote was counted, and counted correctly, and if it wasn’t they can take their duplicate to their courthouse and find out why. The Secretary of State office gave me this bogus reason why this could not be done–“you ballot would no longer be secret”–I tried to explain to them that the only person that would know who cast the numbered ballot would be the voter, but I got nowhere. I have voted since I was 21 (now you know how old I am–you had to be 21 to vote when I first registered) and after the ballot left my hands I have no idea if any of them were ever counted.
Bennington, yours is a an interesting idea, but I have a pretty weird one to safeguard a free and fair election. We need to move exclusively to internet voting. But the software must be open source.
See, the problem with all these voting machines, even the optical scanners and punch card readers, is that they are proprietary — sold by for profit enterprises — and thus contain proprietary software. If you move to internet voting, you eliminate the proprietary machines. And the software that runs the internet voting system… is controlled by an open source software foundation.
It would be very hard to fix an election when the software and the data used to program it are all freely available for download for anybody to inspect. And open source software is always the most secure because you have thousands of people looking for weaknesses all the time, and tweaking it to make it better.
Imagine an Ohio with open source software… how many computer geeks would be hacking away right now looking for how they stole the election.
Just a thought.
Goldy–yes, but what about the vast number of US citizens that are not computer savvy, and there are tons of ’em–especially senior citizens, and they turn out to vote the most. I believe that computer voting is definitely the wave of the future, but until that time you have to allow for various ballot forms. Besides how would you know that your ballot had been counted if you vote by computer? I like Oregon’s way of voting by mail except for one thing, I don’t trust the managers of the snail mail system. I called a lot of absentee voters right before election day to remind them to post mark their ballot by 2 November, and many of them said, “I’m returning my ballot in person,” so I guess I’m not the only person in CONUS that has misgivings about our postal system. Heck, look at all those thousands of people that didn’t get their absentee ballot through the mail.
I’d also do one more thing to change national election day–I’d make it a holiday, and if you could prove that you voted you’d get paid time and a half–if you don’t vote you’d just get paid straight time. For people that have jobs that don’t allow a day off you’d get paid time and a half and your regular daily wage which would equal double time and a half. I wouldn’t change the day of the week the elections are held–because if it were on a Monday or a Friday too many people would be tempted to take the three day weekend and skip the voting.
Internet voting doesn’t mean you don’t have polling places… you’ll need them for those who don’t have internet access. And these polling places would have terminals with touchscreens. It’s just that none of the hardware would be proprietary, and all the software would be open source.
In the end, it’s the open source software that is the most important part of the equation, whether it is internet voting, or tabulating mail-in ballots.
As to election day a holiday… well, I just think we should the early voting we’ve seen in some states. The polling places should open on Sunday morning, and close on Tuesday night at 9PM Eastern, nationwide.
Sorry, Goldy, gotta disagree with you on this one. Palast took silvers of data and tried to extrapolate (wrongly) the results. My apologies for quoting the following at length (the whole post is at http://www.captainsquartersblo.....003012.php). I would be curious to hear your reasoned comments! (I may disgree with you from time to time, but you always make good arguements.)
“First, even supposing the exit-poll numbers are what Palast claims (and they’re not), which sample provides the better accuracy: interviews with 1,000 voters at a few random precincts — likely all in accessible urban areas — or 6,000,000 ballots? Based on the larger sample, one would expect the questionable 450,000 ballots to break along the lines of the 6,000,000. Kerry would have to win 293,000 to 157,000, almost a 2-1 margin. Even based on the exit polling, where Kerry was up by four or five points, you’d expect the remainder to split 237K-213K, only taking 24,000 off of Bush’s lead.”
Further:
“…Palast is being intellectually dishonest. He doesn’t care about spoilage, or else he’d be checking Wisconsin, where pre-election polling put Bush ahead, or Iowa, or even Pennsylvania, where the margin of votes putting Kerry up on Bush was even smaller than Ohio (127,000 votes). He’s using statistically suspect exit polling and intellectually bankrupt arguments about mishandled ballots because his candidate lost.”
Exit polling is bunk and should be treated as such.
I completly agree with Goldy (gasp) on the comment about open source electronis voting software. What I find sickening is that we can put remote control video cameras on wheels on Mars…but not devise something to accurately count 1 to 1!
But i’mnot supprosed, considering we suppress any development that goes against the incumbants. I.E., hydrogen fuel cells. Of course, after two hundred years, how are we expected to count correctly when were too busy forcing other countries do it our way?