By SCOTT DEWING
Published: July 2004

Henry Kissinger once said that democracy is too important to be left up to the votes of the people. Kissinger was acerbic and clever like that when he was Secretary of State during the Nixon administration, characteristics that perhaps sustained him through one of the most turbulent and truthless times in American politics.

Of course, a democracy in which the votes of the people don’t count is no democracy at all. Voting is the foundation of a democracy, so let’s assume we want everyone’s vote to count so we can claim to have a legitimate democracy and not feel hypocritical about wanting to bring the light of democracy to all those dark, despotic, terrorist-sponsoring countries out there in the world. Let’s also assume then that it’s important to have a method that assures votes are counted accurately too. While these assumptions may seem elementary and obvious, our current national election system accomplishes neither.

Electronic voting is the use of computers to gather and tally votes. While computers have been used in the voting process for many years now—from early punch card readers to more modern optical scanners—electronic voting, or “e-voting”, is the exclusive use of computers for both the casting and counting of votes. In short, no paper.

This type of voting system has been referred to by some as “black box voting.” According to Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, the term black box voting refers to, “any voting system in which the mechanism for recording and/or tabulating the vote is hidden from the voter, and/or the mechanism lacks a tangible record of the vote cast.”

The majority of e-voting systems in use today are black box voting systems that cannot be audited if something goes wrong. And based on the past performance of e-voting machines, it is highly likely that something will go wrong. Here are just a few examples of e-voting fiascos:

November 2000, North Carolina: a voting machine software error allowed 5,000 early and absentee ballots to be counted twice.

November 2000, New Mexico: election officials withheld 60,000 ballots because of “a problem with the database” in the voting machine.

November 2002, Florida: in the gubernatorial race between Bill McBride and Jeb Bush, voters reported that “Jeb Bush” lit up as the selected candidate when they pressed McBride on the touch-screen. Jeb Bush “won” the election, but because no paper trail was available for an audit, no one would ever know for certain if the reported error unfairly affected McBride.

There are hundreds of other documented incidents like these and we can expect to see many more. According to Election Data Services, 50 million voters will use e-voting systems in the upcoming November election. That’s nearly one-third of registered voters.

Earlier computer-based voting systems have had their share of problems too. The tragic comedy-of-errors in Florida during the 2000 election involved optical scanners that incorrectly read those little ovals filled in on ballots. This resulted in 4,000 erroneous votes being given to George W. Bush while Al Gore had 16,022 legitimate votes taken away. In that case there were paper records to fall back on for an arduous but clearly needed manual recount. With e-voting, that type of error would likely go undetected and if contested, there would be no way to audit the “official” results.

Following the Florida debacle, Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a sweeping election reform bill that created “a gold rush to purchase new voting systems”, according to Black Box Voting.

Who makes these “black boxes”? Only a half-dozen companies with the leaders being Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and Sequoia Voting Systems. Diebold is also one of the leading manufacturers of ATM machines, which have the ability to provide paper receipts with each transaction. Their e-voting machines do not. Both Diebold and ES&S have documented, deep ties to the Republican Party as well as other conservative groups, which has raised the specter of conspiracies and vote rigging. The premise is that those who control the machines, can control the outcome.

Vote rigging is nothing new to our political landscape. The history of voting in America is rife with incidents of voters being intimidated, arrested, beaten and prevented from getting to the ballot box. Votes have been bought and elections stolen. With e-voting, the possibility of vote rigging promises to be much less violent but far more insidious and effective. Without the ability to audit our treasured elections, they become tarnished and unreliable, thus undermining the very foundation of our democracy.

Vote rigging conspiracies aside, there is, at a minimum, a serious conflict of interest here. These companies are the ones who not only make the voting machines but write the software programs that tally the votes. Because they are private companies, this software is not open to public scrutiny. In fact, the government itself does not have the right to look at the code.

Our right to vote is guaranteed by the Constitution. This right was paid for with the blood of those who fought to make voting the Constitutional right of all Americans. When the rights of The People are left in the hands of the few, those rights will be lost. That’s why those whom we’ve entrusted with the day-to-day running of our democracy must remain fully accountable to The People. Any exceptions are a cancer that will destroy even the healthiest democratic system.

In its current form, e-voting threatens to jeopardize our Constitutional rights by placing control of the voting system in the hands of the few. In its current form, e-voting is a flawed system ripe with opportunity for inaccurate vote tallying that would be unauditable and therefore unchallengeable.

Or worse: vote rigging carried out by those in control of the e-voting machines who place their personal agenda above the will of The People, which brings me back to something else Henry Kissinger once said: “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.”