NWA LETTERS

Electronic machines cast shadow over U.S. voting

Here in Fayetteville our e-votes have a paper trail. Not every citizen is so fortunate. More than 80 percent of voters in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania use machines without a paper record. Some Pennsylvania citizens once sued the state about this lack of election verifiability, but lost.

For years, computer experts at Princeton have warned about the vulnerability of electronic voting. Fifteen states use machines without a paper trail. In 43 states, voters use machines that are more than 10 years old. Only half the states require audits to compare the paper record of votes to machine totals.

E-voting has led to several odd election upsets. Former Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska won by landslides in both 1996 and 2002. Until shortly before his first election, Hagel had been chairman of the company now called ES&S, which manufactured Nebraska’s voting machines that elected him. ES&S currently claims 60 percent market share of the nation’s electronic voting installations.

The second largest manufacturer of voting machines, Diebold, was federally indicted in 2013 alleging they bribed government officials and falsified documents to get business in China, Indonesia and Russia; Diebold settled for $48 million. The chairman and CEO of Diebold was a Republican fund-raiser. Bob Fitrakis (a lawyer) and Harvey Wasserman have written two books alleging that the vote count in Ohio, which decided the 2004 election, was manipulated using Diebold machines.

Princeton professor Andrew Appel notes that while voting machines are not themselves on the Internet, election officials use desktop and laptop computers to prepare ballots and electronic files from the OpScan machines. Also computers ag gregate the results together from all of the optical scans. (See “How to Hack an Election in 7 Min utes.”) According to Homeland Security, Russians successfully hacked registration databases in Illinois and Arizona last summer.

Hacking is only one of several ways to change election results. Investigative reporter Greg Palast says millions of ballots are not counted. Optical scanners can’t read them, or they are absentee bal lots or provisional ballots rejected for whatever reason by partisan election officials. These un counted ballots are the main focus of the Green Party recount.

When judging foreign elections, the U.S. State Department finds that when exit polls diverge greatly from the vote count, the election is suspect In our own election, pundits immediately blamed pollsters for the discrepancies.

Some people seem to think a national election is the same thing as a football game, and the de feated should just “suck it up.” But unlike games an election’s consequences are far-reaching, for us and the other 95 percent of humanity. Which is more important: public perception that the nation’s elections are completely secure—or that they ac tually are secure?

I give thanks to the Green Party and all the do nors who contributed to the ongoing recounts for trying to determine the truth.

CORALIE KOONCE

Fayetteville

[email protected]

Upcoming Events