WHY SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED ABOUT IT?
The past fifteen years are studded with stories of votes switching from one candidate to another, disappearing entirely, or appearing out of thin air. In 1996, Sequoia touchscreen voting machines in Louisiana flipped votes from one candidate to another. In 2000 and 2004, Diebold machines flipped or lost thousands of votes in California and Florida. More than 100,000 extra votes were added to the total of a district in Indiana with only 19,000 voters. In the 2008 presidential election, voters using ES&S machines reported watching as their vote for one candidate was flipped to the other.
Many of the vote flips and losses tend to favor Republican candidates. This is especially interesting in light of a 2003 fundraising letter from Warren O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, to supporters of President Bush stating that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” Now certainly, O’Dell is entitled to support the candidate of his choice, but he was also in a position uniquely suited to delivering votes to a particular candidate, a task Diebold machines in particular seem inclined to do.
O’Dell’s statement was described by his company’s marketing mouthpieces as a lapse in judgment, but it seems to be the sort of lapse in judgment common to companies that manufacture voting machines. Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, for instance, served on the board of ES&S during a time when that company’s machines counted as much as 85 percent of the Nebraska vote. Machines built by ES&S have had their approval withdrawn or reviewed in several states, and the company itself has been under antitrust investigation. Sequoia has gained a reputation for substandard manufacturing processes and reliability problems from the hanging chads controversy in 2000 to touchscreen machines that refused to work in 2007.
Diebold, a company that has shown no reluctance to threaten grandmothers and college professors with legal action should they attempt to examine the proprietary software within their voting machines, accidentally left all that software sitting on an unsecured FTP site. Using that software, a woman named Bev Harris showed Howard Dean how to rig an election on a Diebold central tabulation computer in less than two minutes.
The government has abdicated responsibility for the sanctity of your vote to a small group of individuals more concerned with the continual flow of cash into their pockets than the orderly functioning of our democracy. Your vote is vulnerable, and no one is responsible for seeing it counted. It may already have been taken away from you. Without transparency in the vote-counting process, democracy could easily disappear in a pile of buggy software, and no one would notice.