Alarms are sounding across the nation. People are beginning to get the message. Voting machines cannot be trusted. We have no idea whether our votes are being counted properly or not... and by whom. Every race is now in question, even landslide elections, where polling organizations can be used to shape public expectations and bolster rigged election results. With a handful of Republican and foreign-owned corporations controlling most of the technology that counts Americans' votes, our national security has been breached.
When a handful of people count the votes, we are no longer a functioning democracy. We are slipping into fascism.
Some of those who are sounding the alarm still want machines to be part of the process. Requiring voting machines to produce paper ballots or receipts will not give citizens back their right to vote and have their votes counted properly, although much credit should be give to the efforts of Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, and others in bringing to the public's attention the insanity of a paperless voting system.
But their efforts remind one of the Stockholm syndrome... we are prisoners of a election system that denies us the freedom to vote... though we are allowed to decorate our cells with, what will surely be, rarely-to-be-counted paper ballots. If the computer experts strengthen standards for these machines through the IEEE or other quasi official organizations, are they actually collaborating in codifying the theft of voting rights from American public? Do they want that as their legacy?
And for those who think that we as a nation will not "go back" to paper ballots, we already have. Thirty percent of voters in the 2003 California Recall election cast absentee paper ballots. According to ABC news, "In 2000, 14 percent of voters cast absentee ballots or participated in early voting. In some states, just over 50 percent of voters participated before election day. It's a recent trend of late; in 1980, only five percent cast absentee ballots... In 2000, the highest rates of early/absentee voting was in Washington State (52 percent), Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona (each around 35 percent), Tennessee (33 percent), New Mexico and California (22 percent)." In Florida, 9 percent of voters cast absentee/early ballots.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/earlyvoting.html
The problem about absentee voting is, of course, that because the chain of custody cannot be continually observed, those ballots are very vulnerable to tampering. But still, the public is choosing paper in increasing numbers. And that speaks volumes about voting technology.
We need to stick to the fundamentals. Just like pilots don't fly, airplanes do... in America today, voters don't vote, voting machines do. At least a pilot knows if the plane isn't operating properly, whereas the voter has no idea whether their vote is counted or not. U.S. voters are being physically separated from marking, casting, and counting the votes.
Voters have become mere spectators at their own elections. It's much like the rest of life in America, a strategy of divide and conquer is at work.
What constitutes a legal vote? In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court said, "a legal vote is one in which there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter." So what constitutes "hard" evidence of a legal vote? Only when the voter personally puts pen to paper, and that paper gets counted that same day in the full view of citizens and election officials, do we have "hard evidence" of a vote. Voting machines reflect the action of the technology first, and the "intent" of the voter... maybe or maybe not. It is circumstantial evidence at best.
As long as a machine is inside the polling booth, we will never know if the ballot reflects the voter's intent, or if the voter didn't bother to verify the ballot, in which case a technological glitch or fix may effect the outcome of a race. In a report from one California election official, he witnessed many voters who used touchscreens and did not verify their paper receipts.
And it does not matter if private corporations or government officials control voting machines, or if the software is open source, or if the machine produces a paper trail... the effect is the same... to deny voters the right to mark and cast their own ballots and to watch those ballots be counted at their local precinct.
Voting machines introduce concealment to a process that must be transparent.
Voting takes three-steps: marking, casting, and counting the ballot. Only the first step should be private (although for the severely disabled that may not always be possible), but the second two steps to voting must be open to public scrutiny. That is the only way we can ensure that elections are fair and honest. That is the only way for poll watchers to monitor the process, and for Federal Observers to enforce the Voting Rights Act. And that should be the focus of any lawsuit. People don't have x-ray vision, they can't see through machines and determine whether votes are being properly cast and counted.
Considerations of time, convenience, or cost cannot supercede the voters right to have their ballot cast and counted properly. However, as it is, sophisticated technology like touchscreens are more expensive than paper ballots, take longer for the voter to use, and can be easily rigged. Worse yet, there are no federal or state restrictions on who can count America's votes. Even felons and foreigners can manufacture, sell, and service voting machines. And contrary to public perception, there is a long history of technical "glitches" and irregularities involving voting machines.
Americans have used voting machines since 1892. We've paid a terrible price for surrendering our right to vote to a machine. Most of the world uses the paper ballot. Most of the developed world has universal health care and a wide range of social services unheard of in the U.S.. Most of the world votes in far greater numbers than Americans do. Most of the world thinks we're lost our collected minds. And we have.
What to do? There are three things I can recommend: 1) Vote absentee until the machines are gone. There are real concerns of vote tampering using this method, but under the circumstances, it beats allowing your vote to disappear into the electronic ether, 2) Advocate for a return to only a paper ballot and local hand-count, see Canada's excellent voting system, http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachines-LegalVoting.htm and 3) File suit in federal court against the Department of Justice for failing to enforce the Voting Rights Act, see Constitutional & Legal Issues. http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachines-ConstitutionalIssues&FederalLaw.htm
Also, stop the stupid marching. Can you imagine George Washington asking for a permit to march for independence? "They" are not going to give us back our right to vote. We're going to have to take it back. So, show up when you're least expected. Don't let them know you're coming. Start swarming. Get in their face.
And get ready to rumble. There's nothing free about freedom.
http://www.why-war.com/features/read.php?id=4
Lynn Landes
http://www.ecotalk.org
Please also see:
Corruptible Voting Machines - Why the Silence?;
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/031211Vaidhyanathan.shtml
Diebold e-mail discusses price gouging Maryland;
http://www.gazette.net/200350/princegeorgescty/state/192070-1.html
Please read the following message from FAIR.
ABC Narrows the Field:
Did Kucinich's criticism of Koppel influence decision?
December 11, 2003
A day after ABC's Ted Koppel moderated a debate between the Democratic presidential contenders, the network decided to withdraw three off-air producers from the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun and
Rev. Al Sharpton.
ABC's decision was attributed to the fact that these candidates are perceived to have a slim chance of winning the Democratic nomination. An ABC spokesperson explained (Boston Globe, 12/11/03) that "as we prepare for Iowa and New Hampshire, we are putting more resources toward covering those events." Appearing on CNBC with Kucinich (12/10/03), Time reporter Jay Carney suggested that the decision could be due to the fact that "all of the media organizations have limited resources. It's actually, I think, pretty impressive that they had somebody on your campaign day by day by day."
Somehow it's hard to believe that the "limited resources" of the Disney corporation (2003 revenues: $27 billion) explains ABC's call. ABC's decision does seem to mirror the opinions of Koppel, who seemed frustrated that these candidates were included in the debate at all. According to the New York Times (12/7/03), Koppel "said he would have preferred a slugfest among the six leading candidates." Koppel was quoted: "You can't have a debate among nine people.... There is no such thing. It's called a food fight."
"How did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun get into this thing?" Koppel was quoted in the Washington Post (12/10/03). "Nobody seems to know. Some candidates who are perceived as serious are gasping for air, and what little oxygen there is on the stage will be taken up by one-third of the people who do not have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the nomination."
Koppel's dismissive attitude towards those three candidates carried over into the debate itself, as evidenced by this question:
"This is question to Ambassador Braun, Rev. Sharpton, Congressman Kucinich. You don't have any money, at least not much. Rev. Sharpton has almost none. You don't have very much, Ambassador Braun. The question is, will there come a point when polls, money and then ultimately the actual votes that will take place here, in places like New Hampshire, the caucuses in Iowa, will there come a point when we can expect one or more of the three of you to drop out? Or are you in this as sort of a vanity candidacy?"
Kucinich's response to that question generated perhaps the most media coverage his campaign has received so far:
"Ted, you know, we started at the beginning of this evening talking about an endorsement. Well, I want the American people to see where the media takes politics in this country. To start with endorsements, to start talking about endorsements. Now we're talking about polls. And then we're talking about money. Well, you know, when you do that, you don't have to talk about what's important to the American people.
"Ted, I'm the only one up here that actually, on the stage, that actually voted against the Patriot Act. And voted against the war. The only one on this stage. I'm also one of the few candidates up here who's talking about taking our healthcare system from this for-profit system to a not-for-profit, single-payer, universal health care for all. I'm also the only one who has talked about getting out of NAFTA and the WTO and going back to bilateral trade conditioned on workers rights, human rights and the environment. Now, I may be inconvenient for some of those in the media, but I'm, you know, sorry about that."
One has to wonder whether Kucinich's rebuke of Koppel, and his criticism of the priorities of the media, had something to do with ABC's decision to limit coverage of these candidates. No matter what the rationale, this does raise a concern that ABC is making an early call on the election of 2004-- weeks before any votes have been cast.
For the record, before ABC's decision to cut back coverage, Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun had been mentioned a combined total of ten times this year on ABC's World News Tonight, according to a search of the Nexis database. Only one of those mentions referred to the candidate's position on a policy.
ACTION: Contact ABC and ask them why they have decided to limit their coverage of Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun. Encourage ABC to let voters, not pundits, decide who they want to select as a presidential nominee.
CONTACT:
ABC News
World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
mailto:PeterJennings@abcnews.com
Nightline
202-222-7000
mailto:nightline@abcnews.com
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
Feel free to respond to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can't reply to everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate documented examples of media bias or censorship. And please send copies of your email correspondence with media outlets, including any responses, to fair@fair.org.
FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
http://www.fair.org
When a handful of people count the votes, we are no longer a functioning democracy. We are slipping into fascism.
Some of those who are sounding the alarm still want machines to be part of the process. Requiring voting machines to produce paper ballots or receipts will not give citizens back their right to vote and have their votes counted properly, although much credit should be give to the efforts of Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, and others in bringing to the public's attention the insanity of a paperless voting system.
But their efforts remind one of the Stockholm syndrome... we are prisoners of a election system that denies us the freedom to vote... though we are allowed to decorate our cells with, what will surely be, rarely-to-be-counted paper ballots. If the computer experts strengthen standards for these machines through the IEEE or other quasi official organizations, are they actually collaborating in codifying the theft of voting rights from American public? Do they want that as their legacy?
And for those who think that we as a nation will not "go back" to paper ballots, we already have. Thirty percent of voters in the 2003 California Recall election cast absentee paper ballots. According to ABC news, "In 2000, 14 percent of voters cast absentee ballots or participated in early voting. In some states, just over 50 percent of voters participated before election day. It's a recent trend of late; in 1980, only five percent cast absentee ballots... In 2000, the highest rates of early/absentee voting was in Washington State (52 percent), Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona (each around 35 percent), Tennessee (33 percent), New Mexico and California (22 percent)." In Florida, 9 percent of voters cast absentee/early ballots.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/earlyvoting.html
The problem about absentee voting is, of course, that because the chain of custody cannot be continually observed, those ballots are very vulnerable to tampering. But still, the public is choosing paper in increasing numbers. And that speaks volumes about voting technology.
We need to stick to the fundamentals. Just like pilots don't fly, airplanes do... in America today, voters don't vote, voting machines do. At least a pilot knows if the plane isn't operating properly, whereas the voter has no idea whether their vote is counted or not. U.S. voters are being physically separated from marking, casting, and counting the votes.
Voters have become mere spectators at their own elections. It's much like the rest of life in America, a strategy of divide and conquer is at work.
What constitutes a legal vote? In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court said, "a legal vote is one in which there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter." So what constitutes "hard" evidence of a legal vote? Only when the voter personally puts pen to paper, and that paper gets counted that same day in the full view of citizens and election officials, do we have "hard evidence" of a vote. Voting machines reflect the action of the technology first, and the "intent" of the voter... maybe or maybe not. It is circumstantial evidence at best.
As long as a machine is inside the polling booth, we will never know if the ballot reflects the voter's intent, or if the voter didn't bother to verify the ballot, in which case a technological glitch or fix may effect the outcome of a race. In a report from one California election official, he witnessed many voters who used touchscreens and did not verify their paper receipts.
And it does not matter if private corporations or government officials control voting machines, or if the software is open source, or if the machine produces a paper trail... the effect is the same... to deny voters the right to mark and cast their own ballots and to watch those ballots be counted at their local precinct.
Voting machines introduce concealment to a process that must be transparent.
Voting takes three-steps: marking, casting, and counting the ballot. Only the first step should be private (although for the severely disabled that may not always be possible), but the second two steps to voting must be open to public scrutiny. That is the only way we can ensure that elections are fair and honest. That is the only way for poll watchers to monitor the process, and for Federal Observers to enforce the Voting Rights Act. And that should be the focus of any lawsuit. People don't have x-ray vision, they can't see through machines and determine whether votes are being properly cast and counted.
Considerations of time, convenience, or cost cannot supercede the voters right to have their ballot cast and counted properly. However, as it is, sophisticated technology like touchscreens are more expensive than paper ballots, take longer for the voter to use, and can be easily rigged. Worse yet, there are no federal or state restrictions on who can count America's votes. Even felons and foreigners can manufacture, sell, and service voting machines. And contrary to public perception, there is a long history of technical "glitches" and irregularities involving voting machines.
Americans have used voting machines since 1892. We've paid a terrible price for surrendering our right to vote to a machine. Most of the world uses the paper ballot. Most of the developed world has universal health care and a wide range of social services unheard of in the U.S.. Most of the world votes in far greater numbers than Americans do. Most of the world thinks we're lost our collected minds. And we have.
What to do? There are three things I can recommend: 1) Vote absentee until the machines are gone. There are real concerns of vote tampering using this method, but under the circumstances, it beats allowing your vote to disappear into the electronic ether, 2) Advocate for a return to only a paper ballot and local hand-count, see Canada's excellent voting system, http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachines-LegalVoting.htm and 3) File suit in federal court against the Department of Justice for failing to enforce the Voting Rights Act, see Constitutional & Legal Issues. http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachines-ConstitutionalIssues&FederalLaw.htm
Also, stop the stupid marching. Can you imagine George Washington asking for a permit to march for independence? "They" are not going to give us back our right to vote. We're going to have to take it back. So, show up when you're least expected. Don't let them know you're coming. Start swarming. Get in their face.
And get ready to rumble. There's nothing free about freedom.
http://www.why-war.com/features/read.php?id=4
Lynn Landes
http://www.ecotalk.org
Please also see:
Corruptible Voting Machines - Why the Silence?;
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/031211Vaidhyanathan.shtml
Diebold e-mail discusses price gouging Maryland;
http://www.gazette.net/200350/princegeorgescty/state/192070-1.html
Please read the following message from FAIR.
ABC Narrows the Field:
Did Kucinich's criticism of Koppel influence decision?
December 11, 2003
A day after ABC's Ted Koppel moderated a debate between the Democratic presidential contenders, the network decided to withdraw three off-air producers from the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun and
Rev. Al Sharpton.
ABC's decision was attributed to the fact that these candidates are perceived to have a slim chance of winning the Democratic nomination. An ABC spokesperson explained (Boston Globe, 12/11/03) that "as we prepare for Iowa and New Hampshire, we are putting more resources toward covering those events." Appearing on CNBC with Kucinich (12/10/03), Time reporter Jay Carney suggested that the decision could be due to the fact that "all of the media organizations have limited resources. It's actually, I think, pretty impressive that they had somebody on your campaign day by day by day."
Somehow it's hard to believe that the "limited resources" of the Disney corporation (2003 revenues: $27 billion) explains ABC's call. ABC's decision does seem to mirror the opinions of Koppel, who seemed frustrated that these candidates were included in the debate at all. According to the New York Times (12/7/03), Koppel "said he would have preferred a slugfest among the six leading candidates." Koppel was quoted: "You can't have a debate among nine people.... There is no such thing. It's called a food fight."
"How did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun get into this thing?" Koppel was quoted in the Washington Post (12/10/03). "Nobody seems to know. Some candidates who are perceived as serious are gasping for air, and what little oxygen there is on the stage will be taken up by one-third of the people who do not have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the nomination."
Koppel's dismissive attitude towards those three candidates carried over into the debate itself, as evidenced by this question:
"This is question to Ambassador Braun, Rev. Sharpton, Congressman Kucinich. You don't have any money, at least not much. Rev. Sharpton has almost none. You don't have very much, Ambassador Braun. The question is, will there come a point when polls, money and then ultimately the actual votes that will take place here, in places like New Hampshire, the caucuses in Iowa, will there come a point when we can expect one or more of the three of you to drop out? Or are you in this as sort of a vanity candidacy?"
Kucinich's response to that question generated perhaps the most media coverage his campaign has received so far:
"Ted, you know, we started at the beginning of this evening talking about an endorsement. Well, I want the American people to see where the media takes politics in this country. To start with endorsements, to start talking about endorsements. Now we're talking about polls. And then we're talking about money. Well, you know, when you do that, you don't have to talk about what's important to the American people.
"Ted, I'm the only one up here that actually, on the stage, that actually voted against the Patriot Act. And voted against the war. The only one on this stage. I'm also one of the few candidates up here who's talking about taking our healthcare system from this for-profit system to a not-for-profit, single-payer, universal health care for all. I'm also the only one who has talked about getting out of NAFTA and the WTO and going back to bilateral trade conditioned on workers rights, human rights and the environment. Now, I may be inconvenient for some of those in the media, but I'm, you know, sorry about that."
One has to wonder whether Kucinich's rebuke of Koppel, and his criticism of the priorities of the media, had something to do with ABC's decision to limit coverage of these candidates. No matter what the rationale, this does raise a concern that ABC is making an early call on the election of 2004-- weeks before any votes have been cast.
For the record, before ABC's decision to cut back coverage, Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun had been mentioned a combined total of ten times this year on ABC's World News Tonight, according to a search of the Nexis database. Only one of those mentions referred to the candidate's position on a policy.
ACTION: Contact ABC and ask them why they have decided to limit their coverage of Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun. Encourage ABC to let voters, not pundits, decide who they want to select as a presidential nominee.
CONTACT:
ABC News
World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
mailto:PeterJennings@abcnews.com
Nightline
202-222-7000
mailto:nightline@abcnews.com
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your correspondence.
Feel free to respond to FAIR ( fair@fair.org ). We can't reply to everything, but we will look at each message. We especially appreciate documented examples of media bias or censorship. And please send copies of your email correspondence with media outlets, including any responses, to fair@fair.org.
FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
http://www.fair.org