Will Your Vote Count?

The polls, the pundits and the prognosticators tell us that the public’s anger about the war in Iraq and the country’s direction as a whole will turn the Republicans out of office from both the House and Senate and vote in a Democratic majority in both houses. But lest those yearning for change place those chickens before the cart (a joke, son) and contemplate a world where there exists a true check and balance to Bush policies which have wrought so much carnage and incompetence at home and abroad, understand that the election and its outcome are not a foregone conclusion. It is not that the polls, the pundits et al are wrong. Indeed, I truly believe that the public is yearning for a change in Washington and will vote for that change. It is that because the mechanism of the election is so fraught with potential for abuse and manipulation as to raise the real possibility that its outcome, regardless of how the votes are cast, will produce a result that will likely ensure that there remains a Republican majority in both houses.

The problem lies with the electronic voting machines which will see their wide-spread use for the first time in the 2006 mid-term elections. You need look no further than Robert Kennedy Jr.’s brilliant article in the October 12, 2006 edition of Rolling Stone Magazine (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr_
will_the_next_election_be_hacked) to begin to understand the nature of the problem and extent of its threat to our democracy. The problem, as he writes, is that we, the citizens of the United States, have vested nearly sole responsibility for counting our votes to four private concerns, Diebold, Election Systems & Software, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic , which currently count eighty-six percent of all the ballots cast in the United States. Of these four companies, three – Diebold, ES&S, Hart InterCivics and Diebold, have very close ties to the Republican Party. Chuck Hagel, for example, was the Chairman of ES&S before becoming the senior senator from Nebraska; Tom Hicks, to whom George Bush sold his controlling interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team, is a principal investor in Hart InterCivics. As for Diebold, consider that when Bush signed into law the “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA) in 2002, committing $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation’s voting system, the Act’s prime sponsor was the now-infamous Bob Ney of Ohio (he of the Abramoff influence-peddling scheme and one of the first House members to plead guilty for his acceptance of Abramoff money) and that Abramoff apparently received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby Ney and others for the voting machine contracts which were to be let under the HAVA mandate. Begin to see the dimensions of the problem?

The problem described by Mr. Kennedy and others involves Diebold and the other Republican-connected machine vendors embedding small software applications on the memory cards that are inserted into the voting machines to tally election results. Those “applets” can be pre-programmed to ensure that voting favors one candidate over others by the use of complicated software-based algorithms and have already apparently affected the outcome of voting in Georgia for both Governor and Senate in 2004 with Republicans prevailing in both races when their Democratic opponents, according to polls taken on or just before Election Day, found both Republican candidates trailing badly in those polls. The problem is further complicated by the failure of Diebold and the other companies to provide for a paper receipt for the vote cast in order to permit a recount in the event of machine failure.

With so much at stake this November, it does not take much imagination to expect that the Republican party will not go quietly into the night as the populace demonstrates its anger in the polling booth. It and its candidates will predictably use every available resource to ensure that it and they not lose control of Congress. As the Times reported on October 19^th, Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania are expected to experience the most problems with the vote because of electronic voting technology whether those problems are the result of manipulation or a simple failure to function as intended. Research finds Diebold machines turning up in vast numbers in all of these states raising the specter of voting irregularities in each jurisdiction that may raise serious concern about the outcome of the vote totals. At the very least, one can expect that if the outcomes do not match the results on November 7^th, the entire election process will likely not find resolution without judicial intervention and if the 2000 election has shown us anything it is that the Courts simply do not belong in the election process.

It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the very essence of our democracy is at stake. I would urge you to let Congress know that the current situation is not acceptable and requires more oversight and accountability than is currently provided.

Please go to moveon.org at http://pol.moveon.org/repairthevote/ and sign the petition asking Congress to support electoral reforms. Your vote depends upon it.