- This nation is not a Super Slurpee, Mr. President. With
that said, let's pretend there isn't an American attack on a sovereign
nation in the offing, that Europe is still among America's allies, and
global warming is just a paranoid speculation by all those diaper-butt
scientists. Let's pretend the space shuttle touched down in the usual manner,
Al Qaeda isn't gearing up for another urban planning project, and North
Korea is very, very sorry about all those naughty threats it made and even
as we speak they're hammering their swords into ploughshares--although
what they could possibly want with ploughshares when nothing grows in their
country, I cannot surmise. In other words, let's pretend -and we will be
pretending so hard the veins will stand out like whipcords in our necks--that
all is well with the rest of the world. That still leaves some shall we
call them difficulties? Difficulties here at home. And they're not going
to go away until we pry open Pandora's Black Box: the voting machines.
-
- Because the American Experiment, as it is known, ended
on November 4, 2002. Not much has been made of this, but it seems like
a noteworthy subject. Until that day, this country had a pretty simple
system for choosing its leaders: candidates ran against each other for
public office, and then the voters would come out in very small droves
to vote for the candidate with the most money. There were anomalies that
tested the efficacy of the system once in a while, if efficacy is the word
I want. It might be defecation. I'll have to look it up. But in general
the arrangement was unsatisfactory to everyone, and so we kept it. Then
a strange thing happened. During a race for the presidency, the loser won.
-
- This had happened before: there's a thing called the
Electoral College, and it's how the Electoral College votes that actually
determines who shall be president. It's a peculiar system and isn't mentioned
anywhere in the Constitution, but the premise is that each state has a
bunch of electors who get together and vote, and these votes are sent on
to Washington. Ideally this college, which doesn't offer diplomas or student
loans, takes a bead on who the voters voted for, and votes for same. But
way back in 1824 and 1876, there wasn't a clear winner--in the first case
because nobody got a majority, and in the second case because there was
so much fraud in the South they sort of drew straws and chose Rutherford
B. Hayes. The more things change, the more they don't. But the real kicker
was in 1888, when one candidate got the most popular votes (votes from
humans) but the other candidate got the most votes from the Electoral College.
It was all perfectly legal, and not nearly as boring as I make it sound.
In the year 2000, the presidency was won by the loser again (and what a
loser this time). But this time it wasn't just an anomaly. The Supreme
Court jiggered the election, the Electoral College's votes were skewed,
and a guy named Hanging Chad declared George W. Bush the president.
-
- This proved to be a terrible mistake, and to ensure such
an arschficken never occurred again, lots of clever boots got together
and decided to install digital voting machines in place of the old-fashioned
steam-powered ones in common use throughout the country. But because America
is currently in the grip of Capitalism as extreme as Communism was back
in the good old days, we couldn't have a government agency take care of
this. That might involve new bureaucracies and public spending, and besides
launching the trifling $40,000,000,000 Homeland Security Department, this
administration opposes that sort of thing.
-
- So instead of 'open source' software to tabulate the
votes as they are entered into the machines, private companies got to write
private code for the purpose. ('Open source' software is any program whose
code is publicly available, so that ordinary people may fail to understand
it, not just computer experts). Now Australia has computerized voting,
and the source code is readily available (it can be found at http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html,
if you're that much of a geek). I've looked at it and it's so short and
simple a monkey could understand it. My monkey has looked at it too, and
he assures me this is the case. But the American code is not only secret,
it's also 200,000 lines long, which makes it 'spaghetti code', so called
because it's impossibly tangled and complex, or because it's made of pasta.
-
- Not only is the American voting code secretly held by
private companies (naturally for copyright reasons; the Dollar trumps Democracy
every time), but private companies manufacture the voting machines. And
those companies are owned, predominantly, by Republican interests. Including
Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who won by a landslide on machines made
by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a company he owned a considerable
interest in. And he wasn't the only one.
-
- Computerized voting machines in the 2002 election did
all kinds of weird things: if you pressed the Democrat's name in some counties
in Texas, for example, the Republican's name was chosen. And in Cormal
County, Texas, three Republican candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes
apiece. There's the kind of coincidence the FBI loves. But it gets even
more amazing: in two other races elsewhere in this great nation, Republicans
won by--wait for it--18,181 votes. The odds of this are similar to the
odds of waking up on the surface of Mars with your underwear on your head
and a bowling trophy gripped between your knees. These results were eventually
'adjusted', proving it was all just a wacky coincidence. But how can we
know? Because there is no physical evidence of how a vote was cast. No
punch card, no paper ballot, no twig with notches in it. And they stopped
doing exit polling in 2002 (apparently the results weren't coming out right--
I see what they mean) so we can't even get an objective comparison of the
digital results with the voter's intentions by asking them how they voted
as they leave the polling place, bilious and sickened. Kind of makes you
feel all scared and crampy, doesn't it? But yes, gentle reader, it does
get worse.
-
- There is a complex connection between the companies that
make voting software and machines and the GOP, as mentioned above. But
it's not some remote connection that only folks with tinfoil beanies and
radios in their fillings could understand. These are partnerships, blind
trusts, corporate ownership kind of connections. Who's pals with whom.
Connections that make sense of some of the most astonishing outcomes of
2002, where vast majorities of black voters voted for anti-black candidates,
for example, or where Republican votes skyrocked and Democratic numbers
plummeted, reversing historic trends, or machines tallied more votes than
were actually cast (according to a Florida official a 10% margin of error
is acceptable--that would be over ten million votes nationwide). In Alabama,
Democrat Don Siegelman won the election for governor and went home. The
next morning, 6,300 of his votes were gone, and Republican Bob Riley took
the job instead. Don't worry: ES&S is looking into the problem. Not
the government, not an independent commission. Golly.
-
- Need more? There's lots more. ES&S shows up in many
of the problem areas, but they're not the only ones. 'Computer Glitches'
accounted for the loss of hundreds of thousands of votes nationwide, and
the irregularities everywhere are both mystifying and highly suggestive,
considering the system was supposed to smooth the way for fair and glitch-free
elections in America. Could be just glitches, or it could be a concerted
effort to steal the vote.
-
- So when 2004 comes along and we see historic Republican
victories across the country, landslides in every territory, and you feel
like there's no reason to try any more, remember this: yes, the Republicans
have the system rigged. But so did a certain German chancellor in the 1930's.
He predicted a Thousand Year Reich. It lasted half a decade. Then again,
they didn't have computers back then, so maybe I'd better not sound an
optimistic note. After all, there's an inescapable conclusion about the
fundaments of American democracy here, which is that the vote--the single
most vital instrument of democracy--has been tampered with on an unprecedented
scale. And like falling off a thousand-foot cliff, just because you haven't
hit the ground doesn't mean you're not dead. In the year 2002, Americans
lost the right to vote. One could argue it was all just bugs in the system.
But where there are that many bugs, there's an infestation.
-
- Ben Tripp is a screenwriter and cartoonist. He can be
reached at: credel@earthlink.net
-
- Ben Tripp is a screenwriter and cartoonist. He can be
reached at: <mailto:credel@earthlink.net>credel@earthlink.net
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/tripp02202003.html
-
-
- Comment
-
- From John Albrecht
- john2864@cox.net
- 2-23-3
-
- Jeff,
-
- Regarding Story: Welcome To The Voting Machine- Glitch
Wins By A Landslide, 2-21-3
-
- In the story it was stated the program code is secret
and then blames copyright law and the "Dollar".
-
- ("Not only is the American voting code secretly
held by private companies (naturally for copyright reasons; the Dollar
trumps Democracy every time), ....").
-
- This is an erroneous claim (well, the copyright part,
anyway).
-
- When one formally files a computer program copyright,
one is required to publish all the code associated with the copyrighted
material.
-
- Either the voting machine company is holding the code
as proprietary and NOT protected by copyright, or if it is copyrighted,
then licensing agreements could at most prohibit reverse engineering.
-
- The former is more probable since the company's people
most likely have physical control of the secure machines at all times.
These are not like commercial programs that are bought and sold. If a
physical program copy is ever carried around, it's probably handcuffed
to the courier.
-
- There is no need to copyright the program if no one else
has access to it and in fact copyrighting in such a case would be detrimental
because that act itself puts the code in public view.
-
- If it is copyrighted the code is on file at the US Copyright
Office.
-
- I know this, because I filed for a formal copyright on
one of my programs and was required to divulge each and every byte of code
in my program, and even provide copies for publication in the Library of
Congress.
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