Everyone knows it, but NOT MANY politicians or mainstream journalists are WILLING to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.
When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts.
How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida - where recent polls give John Kerry the lead - once again swings the election to George Bush.
Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.
Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's brother in the White House.
This on the heels of intimidation of black voters in Florida ALREADY, as noted by Bob Herbert yesterday:
State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November.
The officers, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, say they are investigating allegations of voter fraud that came up during the Orlando mayoral election in March.
Officials refused to discuss details of the investigation, other than to say that absentee ballots are involved. They said they had no idea when the investigation might end, and acknowledged that it may continue right through the presidential election.
"We did a preliminary inquiry into those allegations and then we concluded that there was enough evidence to follow through with a full criminal investigation," said Geo Morales, a spokesman for the Department of Law Enforcement.
The state police officers, armed and in plain clothes, have questioned dozens of voters in their homes. Some of those questioned have been volunteers in get-out-the-vote campaigns.
I asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what criminal activity had taken place.
"I can't talk about that," he said.
I asked if all the people interrogated were black.
"Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at - yes,'' he said.
If you are NOT yet up-to-date on the very real problems surrounding voting in the upcoming presidential election, RUN, do not walk, to Black Box Voting immediately.
Bev Harris is an American patriot and hero who has almost singlehandedly brought this issue into the mainstream press, who have been kicking and screaming all the way.
Bev has posted an update on her findings regarding the 2000 election, and this one is going to be even worse. ALL of the three major voting machine vendors, Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S, are major Republican campaign contributors.
The above thread reveals that "the state of Washington has decided that it would be fine to install software on voting machines in 6 counties that has never been ITA or state certified. In the dark of the night they changed rules and they now allow 'conditional' certification which does not require any inspection by an ITA. The 6 counties are a mix of Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia."
This is the single biggest problem with DRE voting machines: Representatives from the vendors are able to come in at any time and install so-called "software patches" to resolve "glitches". Even if you want to assume that the software is bulletproof and fair when the voting machine leaves the manufacturer, to allow vendor reps to install new software of any kind during the election without recertification is a security hole that even an idiot should be able to recognize.
Those who would rig yet another election for Republicans are counting on the technical ignorance of the American public and of the people manning the precincts to allow them to do whatever they want with the vote counts.
Electoral-Vote.com shows the polling to be very, very close in most states. If this situation doesn't change, look for "vendor reps" to march into precincts in swing states across the country, installing "software patches" as soon as the early results start to come in. You have no way of knowing what's in these so-called "fixes". It could be something as simple as a few lines of code saying "Change every 10th vote for Kerry to a vote for Bush". And how will you know? Harris reports that "Voting machine companies intend to hire thousands of temporary employees, who will have access to the computerized voting system. We received information from individuals inside Diebold, ES&S, Hart, and Sequoia. When we asked whether these temporary employees (called "contractors" by Diebold) would have criminal background checks, we learned that, to the horror of some management employees, not only does management have difficulty finding out about the temps' backgrounds, but some managers are having trouble even learning the names of these temps."
Why are "thousands of temporary workers" necessary?
I am a software developer. I work on web-based data entry systems. Any system we developed that WE KNEW required thousands of temporary workers to install software patches would never make it into production. So why are these vendors so certain that their software will need to be patched? Either their software isn't ready for prime time, in which case why are these companies being paid with taxpayer money, or they are installing patches to rig the outcome. Either way, it's unacceptable.
Are YOU confident that the eventual "winner" of the upcoming election will be the people's choice? I'm not.
Do you care?
UPDATE 8/18/04: America is starting to wake up. Six letters in the New York Times today show that at least six Americans do "get it."
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