"This is frightening, really frightening," said Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "I feel that unless we stop it here and stop it now," Roxanne Jekot says, "my kids won't grow up to have a right to vote at all." Both of these women are talking about a very scary trend in modern American voting. They were apart of a wonderful story in the British publication, the Independent exposing the improper use, and serious corporate abuse, of the new touchscreen voting machines.
We all remember the hanging chad fiasco in Florida, and the eventual push to change the outdated punchcard systems to a more modern method of voting. The problem is that in the mad rush for states to obtain these touchscreens voting machines, there are many questions being raised about the machines ability to accurately register your vote, and more serious questions about the possibility of votes being stolen by the very companies that make the machines.
The Independent reports that in last Novermber's elections, academic institutions showed "Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare." One of the reasons that this rush to grab these machines is so scary is that, "The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up."
However, this is not the only reason to be worried. It seems that in all the races across the country that were proven to be statistical anomalies, and were conducted on touchscreen machines, all of them benefited Republican candidates. Dr. Rebecca Mercuri recounted a story about voters in Dallas learning to use the machines, in a mock vote before the election, noticed that no matter how many times they voted for a Democrat, the Republican candidate got the benefit of their vote. "And those were the ones where you could visually spot a problem. What about what you don't see? Just because your vote shows up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it is registering inside the machine for the Democrats?" Well, the problem is that you can't tell. Most machines do not offer you a printed verification of your vote. Dr. Mercuri told the Independent, "One has to wonder why this is going on, because the way it is set up it takes away the checks and balances we have in a democratic society. That's the whole point of paper trails and recounts." So, how can you be sure that your vote was counted? You have to trust the machine, and even worse than that, you have to trust the people operating the machines.
The reason it is so difficult to trust the people running these machines is because it seems that the heads of these companies are handing out serious contributions to Republicans. Again, from the Independent, "If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years." Think about that, remember your elected officials are not getting a paper trail of the vote, and so who is in charge of this system? Well, the Republicans are in charge. Maybe, you think I am just being paranoid. Let me give you an example.
I live in Ohio, and my state is one of the many states rushing to get these machines. Well, one of the big three companies that offer touchscreen voting machines is a company by the name of Diebold. It turns out that the cheif executive from Diebold wrote an e-mail to Ohio Republicans that said that he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." He wrote this e-mail after his company had placed a bid on Ohio's contract for voting machines. The winner of the contract will be awarded by the Republican Secretary of State, and he has already put Diebold on a short list as a preferred vendor.
Rebecca Jekot notes, "Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only thing that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky voters. That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're seeing is the corporatisation of the last shred of democracy." If she is right, and it seems that there are certainly reasons to suspect she could be, then our democracy is in real danger.