A brave new world of voting

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Michael I. Niman

manipulating election votes, the act of stealing an American election, used to sound far fetched. While many people weren't always confident that voters would make fully informed decisions, it was always assumed that each vote would at least be counted. Then came Florida--and the whole quaint notion of elections got tossed out the window. The final 2000 election recount showed that George W. Bush didn't win but he came close enough to move in for the kill.

With calls to remediate the nation's patchwork of antiquated election systems, Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, providing $3.9 billion in funding to put new electronic voting machines in place by the 2006 election. Like the USA PATRIOT Act, HAVA passed on a knee jerk vote by congressional representatives who had little understanding of the ultimate ramifications of their vote.

Critics now say HAVA, because it is so flawed, could usher in the end of democracy in the United States. Here's the problem: with HAVA mandating new voting technology, most states are turning to computerized voting machines as the panacea for past elections woes. The new machines, however, make the 2000 election's hanging chads look like litter in a toxic landfill.

The problem isn't that the new voting machines are computers. The problem is that many of them don't create any auditable trail for recounts. Worse, the software that runs them has been ruled in court to be the private property of the corporations that built the machines; hence, it cannot be examined to see if intentional of unintentional glitches are skewing the vote count.

It gets worse. Many of the new elections contracts give the responsibility for counting the votes not to election officials but to the companies which built and maintain the machines. In other words, the most sacred and tenuous process in U.S. democracy, counting the votes, has been outsourced.

Historically, Americans have never trusted each other to count votes. This was evidenced in the Florida debacle as teams of inspectors from both the elephant and donkey factions pried over hanging, pregnant, and dimpled chads. Most elections are carefully supervised by inspectors from both major parties. The Democrats might control a city or state budget but they cannot quite be trusted to honor U.S. democracy and not outright steal an election. Likewise, the Republicans might control the military budget and the Justice Department but can't be trusted not to vote twenty-seven times, given the chance. This mistrust of each other, ill founded or not, is simply one more example of the checks and balances inherent in our system.

Here's where the current corporate culture takes on mystic proportions. While the two political parties will never quite come to trust each other, they apparently have no qualms about tossing the whole system of checks and balances out the window and outsourcing elections to corporations operating without oversight.

The obvious question is, who are these corporations in which deity-like trust is placed? The answer is quite scary, unless of course you're an unpopular Republican president with a disdain for democracy and rapidly diminishing prospects for "re"-election.

The nation's largest election management company, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), grew out of a merger of electronic elections pioneer American Information Systems (AIS) and other information companies. In the early 1990s Nebraska's current Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, headed AIS. In 1996, with AIS holding the contract to count over 80 percent of Nebraska's votes, Hagel ran for the U.S. Senate. One of AIS' principle investors served as Hagel's campaign finance chair. Hagel was an underdog in both the primary and general elections but went on to win upset victories in both races, becoming the first Republican elected to the Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years.

Hagel not only won but won big, receiving a majority of the vote from every major demographic group in the state--including core Democrats such as Nebraska's black population, which had never voted Republican in modern times.

In 2002 the entrenched Hagel won a landslide victory against Democrat Charlie Matulka. Questioning the size of Hagel's victory, Matulka called for a recount. This wasn't possible, however, since the state's contract with ES&S/AIS forbade examining the software on the machines and the machines themselves created no auditable paper trail. Hagel's company, in essence, maintained the sole power to manage the election and certify his victory.

ES&S' primary competitor, Diebold, Inc., is the second largest and the fastest growing election management company in the United States. Diebold's CEO is Republican fundraiser and Bush confidant Wally O'Neil, a recent visitor to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. According to investigative reporter Bev Harris, O'Dell and Diebold Director W.H. Timken are both members of Bush's inner circle, serving on his "Pioneers" fundraising group.

It was in this capacity as a Republican Party honcho that O'Neil, according to the Cleveland, Ohio, Plain Dealer, exclaimed that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." Democrats found the comment disturbing in light of the fact that O'Neil's company is currently bidding on a contract to manage Ohio's elections infrastructure.