5-25-2004: Sign this petition to Congress for verfiable voting machines
UPDATE (4-21-04): A summary of where everything stands as of today can be found here (PDF).
The new electronic (touch screen) voting machines being installed across the US for the 2004 election are easily tampered with, making massive vote fraud simple and undetectable. These machines are also apparently less reliable than the old-fashioned paper and mechanical voting machines. With electronic voting machines, there's no paper, so no recount is possible. You have no way of being sure you voted for who you think you did.
The three companies who make the majority of all voting machines (Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia) refuse to allow security experts analyze the software to see if it is secure, however, recent leaks from Diebold have allowed some of their code to be analyzed, to dismaying results. There are many other disturbing aspects to this issue - check out the various articles below for more information.
There is a bill (H.R. 2239) before congress to require paper audit trails, and for the voting software to be open and secure. It needs your support. You can find out more about the bill and the issues involved, below, as well as how to contact your congressional representatives.
This is a serious issue, and goes to the core of American democracy. The mainstream press has not yet picked this up, but will hopefully do so in the near future. In the meantime, please spread the word and support the bill I mentioned, H.R. 2239.
Start here:
Recent CNN article (2 Nov 2003) - briefly covers the basics
Comprehensive Diebold articles: Part I, Part II
See also: VerifiedVoting.Org : "Will Your Vote Count in the Next Election? Maybe not! How will we even know?"
From Metafilter:
posted by troutfishing at 7:27
AM PST on September 24
1) Diebold voting systems produce no audit trail - paper or otherwise - which can be verified.
2) Diebold has a track record of absurdly shoddy security in their voting systems
(if one can even honestly use the word "security" for it) including
back doors in their databases which allow random users to alter primary voting
record databases.
3) Diebold systems seem to have a tendency of disappearing votes for Democratic
candidates. Further, Scoop noted an odd tendency in the 2002 election for races
to swing in favour of republican candidates, especially in key races. "Scoop’s
analysis shows that - according to the polls - the Republican Party experienced
a pronounced last minute swing in its favor of between 4 and 16 points. Remarkably
this last minute swing appears to have been concentrated in its effects in critical
Senate races (Georgia and Minnesota) where it secured it's complete control of
Congress."
4) Diebold's
CEO has pledged, at a GW Bush fundraiser, to deliver Ohio's electoral votes for
GW in '04.
5) In fact, most of the major voting machine companies have strong ties to the
Bush administration.
"In the Houston area, two Republican U.S. representatives were declared
winners in the last election until it was discovered that the results were caused
by a "faulty" and Republican-friendly microchip. When the proper chip
was installed in the computerized voting machine the correct results were revealed:
two Democratic victories......what do we have here other than the obvious denial
by mainstream America? We've got a CIA family, their corporate supporters working
with CIA contractors at Battelle
in order to bring flawed
electronic voting to the U.S. with no paper trails and questionable exit polls. Recall
that Battelle was also the contractor for Voter News Service (VNS) and failed
to produce exit polls for the 2002 Congressional election."
More articles:
An Open Invitation to Election Fraud (Salon expose), and related discussion on Metafilter
Summary of the various problems, past and future
If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines
Voting Fraud in Volusia Co., FL, 2000 election (evidence from leaked Diebold memos)