11/1/08: Perfect Storm Pennsylvania: the new Ohio and Florida?

Here's a thoughtful analysis (sent to me by a friend) of the electronic voting machines in PA and how this could help "steal" the election there:

Perfect Storm Pennsylvania: the new Ohio and Florida?
In early October, McCain abandoned Michigan due to Obama's
double digit leads in that state. Soon afterwards, McCain
declared that Pennsylvania -- where Obama leads with double
digits -- will be won by him in November. Evidence of
McCain's simple bravado, denial, or perhaps something far
more sinister?
Pennsylvania with its 82% unverifiable electronic voting
machines and accompanying abysmal machine error rate offers
terrifying possibilities. Pennsylvania with its 21 electoral
votes remains the largest East Coast state ready to be
plundered by electronic voting. NY, with 31 electoral votes
casts its votes with paper ballots and are not vulnerable to
electronic hacking. The two other East Coast electoral rich
states -- FL(27) and OH(20) -- well, we know their part in
recent election history.
ELECTRONIC VOTING 101
In 2006, 40% of all US voters voted on Direct-Recording
Electronic (DRE) Machines. The move towards paperless ballots
began in 2002 with the deceptively named Help America Vote
Act, designed to rid the country of punch ballots. HAVA
passed with a Republican House, Senate and President, and
close to 4 billion in federal funds were alotted for this
reform. Currently NV, VT, LA, NJ, DE, MD, SC, GA are all
100% DRE machines; the states of MS, TN, IN, VA, KY range
from 74-95% DRE machines (http://dvice.com/voting/index.php).
Pennsylvania? It has 82% DRE'S, which makes its results
vulnerable to manipulations and therefore suspect.
LIVE FREE OR DIEBOLD
Consider the havoc banks would wreak if they decided to forego
giving their clients records of ATM money transactions.
"Trust us," the banks would say with a sincere smile, "We'll
get the money you deposit to your account. Don't worry."
As it turns out, our votes have been handed to electronic
voting companies who give similar reassurances. Call it
"faith based voting" since the electorate has to have a great
deal of trust that the machines are accurately tallying the
votes.
Diebold (now renamed Premiere Election Systems) remains one
of several major electronic voting machine manufacturers.
Although Diebold creates ATM Machines and their receipts,
they claim they can't provide any paper record for voters,
declare their software to be "proprietary" and refuse outside
inspection. On election day, only Diebold people can touch
machines, so they have in essence privatized that segment of
the vote. If there's a close election? There will be no
recount whatsoever since the electronic machine results will
spit out the same results it offered before.
2.
Diebold's partisan streak runs deep; in 2003 Diebold's
President Wally O'Dell expressed his desire to "Personally
guarantee the electoral votes of Ohio" to George Bush in
2003, a full year before the fateful 2004 election. Kenneth
Blackwell, who in 2004 was the honorary co-chair of the Bush
re-election committee and then Ohio's Secretary of State
admitted to holding 178 shares of Diebold stock, albeit
"accidentally"; Diebold donated $50,000 towards Blackwell's
"political interests".
775 PROBLEMS AND COUNTING
Can we as a country rely on electronic voting? In July, Ars
Technica reported a French study which compared voting systems
and found electronic DRE machines to have a 30 percent error
rate compared to the 5% found with paper. One website which
has recorded every voting error reported in the media since
2004 has now documented a whopping total of 1,070! 75% of
these errors are machine related and include an abundance of
"flipped" votes -- where votes for a Democrat or Libertarian
are cast by a voter and a Republican name flashes on the
screen instead. It has been revealed that more nefarious
methods were used in Ohio, where a "man in the middle" company
had the chance to look at Ohio votes and likely manipulate
the votes before sending them back to Ohio.
Stephen Spoonamore, a lifelong Republican and former CEO of
Cybrinth was not permitted to investigate Diebold System's
secretive software architecture recently said, "They're lying,
they're lying. Diebold is lying. There is no System
electronic in the world that cannot be hacked. I have spent
my entire life building or hacking electronic systems...
[and] secure electronic systems don't exist."
Meanwhile in an ironic twist, Florida -- the state where
voter confidence first began to get shaken -- Republican
Governor Charlie Christ ironically returned to 100% paper
ballots in the form of optical scan votes.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
With so many flaws with electronic voting systems and so few
days before the election, what can be done to insure there
are ways to check how people actually vote so that public
faith in voting doesn't continue to fade? The best answer
in a murky state such as Pennsylvania is to have a system of
scientific checks which can act the final arbiters in
contentious elections.
Exit polls are scientific and have been used for 40 years
with incredible accuracy. An exiting voter answers an
anonymous paper ballot which gets placed in a cardboard box
and later gets tallied. The accuracy between exit polls and
the actual counted ballots is high; usually there is at most
a 1% difference between the two.
3.
Exit polls are also so sensitive that a two percent difference
has been enough to detect election fraud; on that basis Colin
Powell rejected Ukranian election results in 2004. It is
ironic (or tactical?) that Karl Rove has denigrated the method
of exit polls here in the US.
So how can Pennsylvania be stopped from becoming part of a
perfect electoral storm? By keeping a sharp eye on the exit
polls, allowing exit polls to be the final arbiter, and by
relying on that science based method to challenge the
innacurate faith-based voting DRE machines with which we
have been saddled. Only when we have voter confidence will
our damaged Democracy be truly restored.