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How do we protect against large-scale vote manipulation? Every citizen must watch over what is done with his/her own ballot. All ballots must be counted by hand, in the public commons, as the law says.
There are many types of vote-counting schemes in the U.S., and just as many ways to manipulate them. "If a man made it, a man can take it apart," is a well-known saying. Apply that to mechanical and electronic vote-counting systems, and you will have to conclude that there are any number of ways that any counting machine can be set up to cheat. (If you don't believe it, how do you think Las Vegas gets so rich? How do you think professional magicians make rabbits and everything else disappear?) The possibilities are endless, and the people who sell you those machines want you to get heated up thinking about their "fool-proof" counting system, so you won't have time to realize that ANY counting machine can be manipulated.
And who is most likely to manipulate the vote-counting machines? The people who made them, of course. Read the history of the new US Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), former President of ES&S Voting Machine Company, one of the two largest companies in the U.S. He was elected on his own company's voting machines! And the Media is now courting him on every issue, asking his opinion as if he's somehow the fountain of wisdom in America. Who is he??? And which people in the Media are responsible for making Senator Hagel out to be Somebody?? Watch him run for next President of the US!
Do you believe everything you read in the papers and see on TV? Okay, you're wise enough to say No. But here's the real rub: do you think the TV news and the major papers would bald-faced lie on major issues and events?? If you think they would not dare to do that, consider this:
Do you remember the Challenger space shuttle, the one that the TV Media showed swallowed up in an instantaneous fireball that filled the whole TV screen in every room in the United States? (Not the one that disintegrated over Texas from the tiles that got broken, the one before that.)
That fireball, and the unspoken conclusion everyone had that "nothing could have survived that," was a deliberate TV manipulation. It was done by editing. First you see the slow-motion replay of the tongue of fire coming out of the rocket carrying the space shuttle. The fire grows bigger and bigger, then CUT! The picture suddenly becomes a huge, white-hot with orange and yellow fireball filling the TV screen. Then, no more picture of the shuttle. The deliberate visual impression is that the fireball incinerated the space shuttle, and that is what virtually everyone said. (Except me. I'm a photographer and have made movies; I know editing. I saw the original live newscasts, the pictures that got edited out within 30 minutes of the disaster. It showed that the fireball was a quick thing, not a big, slow, inescapable thing. As quick as it came, the Challenger sailed away out of it. You could see that on TV. But within 30 minutes, "someone" had made a version of the news that lied straight in the face of the American people, and had electronically sent that news to every station in America.
The truth is, the Challenger sailed off, partly or wholly intact, out of the flames. It landed harshly in shallow water off the coast of Florida, from which the astronauts, if alive, could have easily escaped, if there had been an escape hatch that worked under water. There wasn't. A few weeks later, one AM radio news station in Los Angeles said that the State Coroner of Florida began legal suit against the U.S. government for removing the astronauts' bodies from Florida's area of jurisdiction. (This says that no one but the Feds saw the bodies until they had had ample opportunity to do whatever they wanted to alter the evidence.) Then in 1993, at NASA in Houston, this author was told by an employee that "there was a rumor going around here that some of them [the Challenger astronauts] died of drowning."
So, how do you feel about the Media? Can you use your reasoning enough to convince yourself that you are actually being lied to big time, and that we had better do something to assure that the people in charge of this country are the ones we actually vote for? Because if the Media is controlled to such an extent that the Space Shuttle can seem to explode in front of our eyes, when the truth is that it actually lands and has live astronauts on board who cannot escape, then the Media can do virtually anything it wants to, or it is commanded to do by whoever controls it.
Very certainly, the Media can lie about vote-counting, and about who is rightfully in office in the U.S. It doesn't have to lie outright, by statements that can be proven false. The Media is in a position to lie by omission (like putting an article at the back of the paper, or not reporting it at all), by suggestion (agreeing to use "polite" words instead of the actual words that the public understands, suggesting that the event is not so important), or by simply interviewing someone often enough to make the public think that that person has authority in this country.
One of the biggest ways the Media is lying to the American people is by censoring our scientists. It censors them by simply refusing to interview them. Hence, no one ever hears those scientists.
See the recent testimony of the Director of the Goddard Space Institute, which is part of NASA, whose job it is to monitor global climatology. He has warned that scientists know the figures for the effects of global warming; it is not a matter of speculation at all, as the Government keeps insisting. He warns that we have only 10 years (until 2015) to begin to reverse the process, or the polar ice caps will disappear in a very short time, ushering in untold global calamity and panic as coastlines everywhere rise, drowning huge parts of major cities. But the Media has refused to interview him on radio, and at first, the Media also refused to put him on TV.
Who is directing the content of our Media? Why aren't editors everywhere joining together and objecting??? Because if the Media will not report the truth, then we have absolutely no way (except now the Internet :-) to learn what is really happening. The Internet can tell certain people the truth, but it is not able to be The News Hour to the whole nation all at the same time, so the effect is not so great.
My fear is that the Media is assisting a submerged machine in this country to put chosen elected officials into US and local office. If there is a group of people who are placing elected officials into our government by fraudulent means, then that group of people can control the direction that this country takes in all matters, national or local and everything in between.
Whether or not vote manipulation changes the outcome of any election, or even occurs at all, it is only public overseeing of the entire vote-counting process, such as is done in European and many other democracies worldwide, that can possibly assure that the numbers so derived are accurate to an acceptable degree.
In the US, most or all states now use "centralized tabulators" that electronically accumulate the huge vote totals generated first at county levels. There have been several public statements to the effect that these central tabulators have modems in them. A modem, as you probably know if you're reading this on a computer, is a telephone hooked to a computer. This telephone allows the computer to link up to other computers, creating the thing called The Internet. The Internet operates through telephone lines. These days (2005) most modems are inside the computer ("internal modem"), but they don't have to be ~~~ they can easily be plugged into one of the ports on the computer ("external modem").
Since centralized tabulators are potentially Internet accessible, they can be manipulated by anyone who knows how to do so. Bev Harris has demonstrated on television with Howard Dean just how easy it is to change one column of vote totals for another column over the Internet. One candidate's votes become another candidate's votes, and it takes about 90 seconds.
As the American public explores the issues of vote counting, more and more people will realize the total impossibility of insuring any machine-counted results. As this realization spreads, faith in American leadership will wane, and in fact, a leadership bent on illegality may arise by corrupting the vote-counting processes. Before this happens, we simply must begin the process of returning to the counting methods tested by the world, instead of being too clever for our own good by trying to invent the inimpeachable vote-counting machine.
Currently, many voters groups, and publications, are airing the view that a "paper trail" will keep people from manipulating the voting machine totals. This "paper trail" idea involves selling local governments an additional machine, a printer, that is added on to existing electronic voting machines. This add-on will print out a paper "ballot" that is marked the way the voter intended when they used the electronic voting machine. If the marked ballot is not the way the voter intended, it supposedly somehow gets destroyed. The odd part about all this is that the voter cannot ever touch the paper ballot. It gets printed, and then it scrolls out under glass for the voter to inspect, then is accepted or rejected by the voter, and scrolls away again, still under glass, into some depository.
This "paper trail" proposal offers just as many ways, if not more, for manipulation to occur. The existence of paper ballots has not proven a hindrance to manipulation in the past --- why should it do so now? The totals that these voting machines create will still be tallied through centralized tabulators which potentially can link to the Internet. The "paper trail" they create will be no more insurance against manipulation than existing machine-counted paper ballots are.
The Ohio recount of the 2004 General Election in the United States shows that a paper recount need not have any effect on the outcome of an election. Only a nominal three percent of precincts in Ohio were actually counted by hand, and those 3% were selected by State officials. It was not a random selection, although the law dictated that it should have been truly random. After these chosen precincts were hand counted, and it was determined (surprise!) that their vote totals matched what the counting machines had said, then the rest of Ohio's paper ballots were to have been counted by machine, by the same doubtful process used in the first place. And of course, the electronic voting machine totals could not be recounted at all, since they left no backup record.
To anyone following this process, it was no surprise that the official report found no discrepancy between the original totals and the recounted ones.
How does the hand-counted paper ballot system work?
When votes are cast, their potential for abuse is huge, until the time that their publicly-counted totals are written down. Neighborhood precincts in America can begin to organize themselves to be present at the neighborhood polling place, to watch the vote-counting process done within the same room that the votes were cast. No person shall be excluded from this room for any reason, nor by any list or prearrangement, until the room is full. The ballot cards are systematically removed from the ballot box and placed in stacks of 100. Then they are tallied by calling out loud and marked on a tally sheet. The process continues until all ballots are counted. The final totals are then written and posted on the outside of the polling place door. Once these totals are made public, the opportunity for manipulating the votes is past. France and other free countries do theirs by midnight on election day. We certainly could learn to do the same.
Questions to be considered:
- How many centralized vote-tallying computers are there in each state, and how are they connected to local polling places?
- Which groups are actively pursuing the advocacy of paper ballots, and what progress is being made?
- Are mathematicians and statisticians getting together to discuss the Exit Poll Discrepancy? Is there a consensus?
- Are there Republicans who have voiced concern about the vote-counting methods used in this Election?
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News
Breaking News from Bev Harris
Berkeley CA statistical analysis of Florida data, Nov. 18, 2004
Recount in Ohio,
Nov. 15, 2004
California collects $2.6 million in Diebold suit for faulty voting machines, Nov 11, 2004
BBC says NBC exec calls exit polls "junk," Nov. 4, 2004
Kerry Won in Ohio, by Greg Palast, TomPaine.com, Nov. 4, 2004
Myriad errors in OH & PA Voting Process, Nov. 3, 2004
Will the Election be Stolen? Sept 29, 2003
Seattle Times discusses Bev Harris's findings, Sept 25, 2003
Definitions
Australian Ballots: another name for paper ballots in the U.S., system developed in Australia in mid-1800's
Ballot: comes from the same word as "ball"; voting in ancient times was determined by secretly placing a tiny black or white ball into a container; today, ballots are of many types: optical scan, punch card, data punch, and paper; ballotless voting is done by electronic (touch-screen) machines and the older, lever machines that count like a car's odometer; by far the largest form of ballot in use in the US in 2004 is the optical scan ballot ("OS") ballot system
Central tabulating software: ballot-counting software installed on a computer at the vote-counting headquarters, usually at county level;it is possible that this vote-tabulating function can be accessed by any computer in the world, and that to do so is not at all complicated, however, an investigation is necessary to learn the extent to which this is possible
Central tabulating office: ballot-counting is done here, usually at the Registrar of Voters of any given county (US); a county will be divided into regions called "precincts," which have a voting place centrally located; votes made at the precinct polling place are counted either at the precinct, then sent to the central tabulating office, or sent directly to the central tabulating office where all votes/ballots are counted ("tabulated")
Chad: the pieces of paper left in the holes that are supposed to get punched completely out in votomatic and other punch-card voting machines; recent discussion has delineated several specific types of chads, such as "hanging chad," "pregnant chad," and the like, giving much cause for election-time mirth
Ciber Labs: the Huntsville, Alabama branch of an ITA that was supposed to, but didn't, test Diebold GEMS central tabulator software for penetration, according to Bev Harris
Computer voting system: a blurry, general category that, in the public eye, includes paperless touchscreen systems, as well as any system where voting results are tabulated by computer at a centralized location, which of course includes almost the entire U.S. voting process; much clarification needs to be done between computer knowledgeable people and their less-informed counterparts across the nation, to inform ourselves more clearly on what is being sent by what segments of the Internet; the primary necessity is to create a U.S. system where a recount can occur as accurately, precisely, and efficiently as it does in European and other democracies; only when a recount is feasible can the voting process be depended upon to be fair
Data Punch: "voters punch holes in the cards (with a supplied punch device) opposite their candidate or ballot issue choice. After voting, the voter may place the ballot in a ballot box, or the ballot may be fed into a computer vote-tabulating device at the precinct."
Diebold: second largest vendor of voting machines for the 2004 Election; owner, Mr. O'Dell, said publicly that he will help to get Ohio's votes to go for Bush; the company has given nearly $200,000 to the Republican party
DRE: a ballotless system known as "Direct Recording Electronic" voting system, also called "Touch Screen"
Electronic Voting System: Ballotless voting system, also known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE); used statewide or nearly so in Georgia (Diebold), Kentucky, Tennessee, Nevada, New Mexico, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey; used extensively in several other states (see map, above)
E S & S: "Election Systems and Software," one of the biggest manufacturers of computerized voting and vote-counting systems
Exit Poll: a survey taken after voters have voted and exited the polling place, by asking voters who they voted for; this gives a very close approximation of how the real vote is going; historically, exit polls in the U.S. have been very accurate, differing from final tabulations, at the most, by 1/10th of 1 percent.
FEC: Federal Election Commission; in 1984 they produced Voting System Standards: A Report on the Feasibility of Developing Voluntary Standards for Voting Equipment
GEMS: Global Election Management System, the Windows-based software at the heart of the Diebold voting machines
IEEE: "The IEEE and its predecessors, the AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers) and the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers), date to 1884."
ITA: Independent Testing Authority, the categorical name for companies hired by NASED to test the computer-driven voting systems now in use in the U.S.
Lever Machines: Ballotless voting system operated by pulling a lever to add one's vote to a tally; a series of levers and resulting tallies operate like odometers, moving up 1/10th of a rotation with each vote; now used in New York, Virginia and Louisiana primarily; these machines are no longer made
Mark-sense or Marksense: Voting system where dark marks are made on a paper ballot, then scanned by various types of machinery; also known as "Optical Scan" or OS, as opposed to the earlier (pre-1960's) electronic sensing systems that read the conductivity of pencil marks; optical systems read the shade (lightness/darkness) of the mark, not its electrical properties
NASED: National Association of State Election Directors, with the Secretariat of this group being in Texas; they are supposed to certify that your election voting system is "safe" and free from tamperability (Note: their new website has only one contact person, whose city and state are not given; see Bev Harris's website , p. 5, for a list of NASED officials; the Secretariat is/was R. Doug Lewis in Houston, TX electioncent@pdq.net)
Optical Scan:, a voting system where ballots are marked by the voter, then put through a scanning machine that reads the marks; the most widely-used type of US voting system; also known as "Marksense" (see above)
OS: Optical Scan (see above)
Paper Ballots: forms printed on paper or cardstock listing candidates names, and election choices, and including places to mark one's choice; known as Australian ballots, because the system was perfected there first; are filled out in privacy and put into a sealed ballot box; counted by hand; undoubtedly the best, some say the only, system for insuring accurate counting of ballots
Paper Trail: = ballots! If voters cast paper ballots, these can always be recounted, thus keeping the election honest. When voters use computerized voting machines, there's no proof that what the voter chose is what got counted (even if the voter gets a paper record, that will not help, since it would be impossible to collect all these papers from voters and recount them)
Polling place: or "polls," the place where people go to vote; the voting place; in the US, these are often in schools and other official, easily-accessible locations;not to be confused with the other meaning, i.e., surveys taken, asking a series of people the same questions
Polls: (1) surveys taken by asking people certain choices, for the purpose of finding out the generally-held views of a group of people; (2) the place where people go to vote; the voting place; in the US, these are often in schools and other official, easily-accessible locations
Public Commons: the rightful gathering places of the public; the entire vote-counting process is supposed to take place here, in full view of members of the public, and never be hidden from public view, as it is today with computerized counting machines of all kinds, which system is causing increasing secrecy of the vote-counting process away from public accessibility
RAS: Remote Access Server, a type of phone-number-accessed server, run on Windows, which is very easy for computer folks to enter; the centralized vote counting programs used in the November 2 Presidential Election were linked through RAS systems, meaning that anyone, anywhere in the world, could get in, change vote counts, and leave without much of a trace, according to Bev Harris
Secretary of State: An office at both the Federal and State levels; at State level, this is an elected position, but quizzically, this official's responsibility is to oversee all major elections
Server: a computer that "serves" to link many computers together, forming the "Internet"; a server is just another computer, like yours or mine, that has server software on it; the huge net of servers forms the Internet; you can "see" the Internet connecting you to a distant website --- go to Start, Run, type in cmd, hit OK, then in the black window, type tracert, then a space, then the domain name of the website you want to see the path to (e.g., www.craigslist.org); hit "Enter"
Tabulation: the county-level activity of counting all the votes in the county; this counting is done, in most cases in the US, by a normal-looking computer that has special tabulation software installed; each county has one, or sometimes two, such computers functioning on Election Day and for some time thereafter; each computer can process up to 2,000,000 votes at a time; often, today's voting machines are connected via the Internet, directly to the tabulation computer
TS: Touch Screen, a ballotless voting system where the voter touches the computer screen to select his/her choice; a type of DRE system
Votomatic: punch card voting system that has nothing except numbers printed on the ballot cards; one punches the card at the numbers that correspond to the choices on a separate display
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