Harper's: Election 2004

Finally, we start to see some names. Could this be an angle for further investigation?

Harper's: "No Appeal" by Ronnie Dugger

To steal elections is human nature. In 1948 a U.S. Senate seat was stolen, by simple ballot-box stuffing, for Lyndon Johnson; without it he would never have reached the presidency. John Kennedy only won the presidency in 1960 with the support of dead voters in Chicago. But now we approach a national election that is susceptible to theft in its very machinery—not just in Florida but almost anywhere.

Roughly three out of every ten of the ballots cast by voters on November 2 will vanish into direct-recording-electronic (DRE) computers the moment they are cast. These votes cannot be recounted independently of the computers because there will be no voter-marked ballots to recount. The exception is Nevada, where the obvious solution, a printer, will produce verified paper ballots. In at least twenty-five other states, the votes cast on DRE computers will be unrecountable, meaning that programmers will know their work cannot be checked against any evidence created by voters.

Although complex safeguards against error and fraud in computer-voting systems do exist, they are, most computer scientists agree, overwhelmingly inadequate. Computers can be programmed to steal elections and then erase all evidence of the theft. The reliability of the totals spat out by the DRE systems is dependent on the validity of their internal audit trails and “ballot images,” which can be rigged. Some computerized voting systems, such as those that scan punchcard or mark-sense ballots, at least have voter-marked paper ballots that can be recounted. But to “recount” the 35 million or so votes in DRE jurisdictions, officials will simply command the computers to regurgitate second printouts of the same results, which, in point of fact, are not recounts at all.

Especially troubling is the fact that the vote-counting process is now dominated by private corporations, whose machines (which include not just DREs but paper-ballot scanners) will count five out of six of all votes. Of the top five companies in the field—Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Nebraska, Diebold Election Systems of Texas, Sequoia Voting Systems of California, Hart InterCivic of Texas, and Danaher Corporation of Illinois—at least two have strong partisan ties. ES&S, which will oversee the counting of more than half of all the votes, is part-owned by an investment firm whose CEO, Michael McCarthy, is a frequent contributor to Republican causes. Another 8 to 9 million votes will be tabulated in computers provided by Diebold, whose CEO, Walden O’Dell, caused a scandal by declaring he would help deliver his home state, Ohio, to George W. Bush.