Home
Site Map
Reports
Voting News
Info
Donate
Contact Us
About Us

VotersUnite.Org
is NOT!
associated with
votersunite.com

From town meeting: Consider vote tabulating machines

By Tom Sadowski    The Village Soup   21 June 2005


 LINCOLNVILLE (June 21, 2005): Editor's note: The following remarks were prepared by Tom Sadowski for the Lincolnville Town Meeting on Saturday, June 18. He wished to respond to Article 35, which sought $6,500 to purchase a vote tabulating machine. The measure passed.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have been involved and interested in all kinds of information processing and counting machines for most of my life. Thirty-five years ago I worked with IBM punch-card sorting machines and today I work with personal computers.

I am constantly flirting with electronics and mechanics. I have a counting machine that can count events that happen at a snail's pace or actions that happen as fast as 100 million times per second.

I love counting machines.

I am a great advocate of having machines do the work. Any work.

With all my interest in counting machines comes an understanding of what they can do. And ladies and gentlemen, what they can do is amazing; it is awesome, and in this case it borders on frightening.

Item C of article 35 asks us to purchase a vote tabulation machine. This is not just a question of a $6,500 purchase. If we purchase this machine, it will fundamentally change the way our votes are counted.

Why does it matter how we count the votes? It matters because proper counting makes your vote important. Screw up the count and it really doesn't matter how, or even if, you voted. And democracy, at that point, is dead.

Democracy is dead when we lose confidence that our votes count. Who will bother to vote if they think the vote counter is messing up or just plain making up the results?

I ask you: How much confidence do you have in a vote counting machine? Can you be sure this machine will count the votes properly every time? If you have confidence, what's it based on? My own lack of trust is based on my knowledge of counting machines. What is your trust or lack of it based on?

Who do you believe? If our good Town Manager David Kinney says the machine is honest and accurate, that's fine; we can believe him. But who does he believe to tell us such a thing? He may believe the people who are selling it to the town and they believe the people who manufacture it. Perhaps he believes the political appointees in Augusta who certify these machines.

The machine may have been independently tested but only under certain conditions. How do we know the machine hasn't been tampered with between the testing and the election? Even honest machines can easily be made to give false results.

Where will this machine be kept? Who will have access to it? Who will clean it? Who will adjust and service it? Will these people be alone with the inner guts of the machine? Will the machine be tested immediately before an election? Who will be the tester, a Democrat or a Republican? A man? One of the candidates? Will you or I be allowed to spend some time with the machine to make sure it works properly?

I won't trust a vote counting machine that I can't personally inspect in my own shop and neither should you. And of course, I want to inspect it only after everybody else gets through looking at it. I want to be the last to fiddle with it before the election. Just to make sure nobody else fiddled with it.

Do you want me to spend time fiddling with a machine that counts your vote? If I were you I wouldn't let me near such a machine. And I don't want you anywhere near it either. If you won't let me check the machine and I won't let you inspect the machine who gets to adjust and clean it?

Who will we believe that the machine is ready to count our votes fair and square? I won't believe anyone who can't answer all the questions I pose.

Maybe we could trust some expert geek computer nut who is neither a Republican nor a Democrat and is not employed by anyone.

Strangely, that description fits me exactly.

It all boils down to trusting a very, very long line of people who have the potential of getting quite intimate with this machine.

If you want a counting machine I will build you one for $5,000. It will pass any test that you throw at it, but on election night, for that one time when it really counts, I guarantee it will not give you accurate results. I can do this and I'm just a hack. Do you want the town to use a vote counting machine that I build? What's the difference between a machine that I build and a machine that a group of strangers in Texas builds?

Maybe these strangers build a perfectly honest machine just like I can. But give me access to the machine right before the election and I will get it to announce your candidate as the winner.

People say that this machine Lincolnville is buying is an optical scanner and can't be modified to change a vote. If you want to know just how easy it is to throw an election with a machine like this, get on your computer and go to blackboxvoting.org. Right there you can get a set of instructions on how to hack an optical scan voting machine.

A couple quotes from this extensive website should put you ill at ease:

?This [optical scanning system] is so profoundly hackable that an advanced-level TV repairman can manipulate votes on it.?

?When it comes to this optical-scan system, as Dr. Hursti, an expert on these voting machines says, 'It's not that they left the door open. There is no door. This system is 'open for business.' "

The beauty of a hand count is that trust is nearly a nonissue. You can be sure your vote will be counted. People on all sides of an issue or a candidate always look over each other's shoulders so a fair count is assured.

Unless the ballots are hand counted we will never be sure the machine count is correct. So what's the point of a machine? Let's just stick with hand counting.

For 200 years the voters of Lincolnville have been confident that their votes have been accurately counted. Are we going to change that confidence with a careless vote on Article 35?

Is your vote so unimportant ?- is democracy so unimportant that you're willing to trust the vote counting to a machine that strangers built and maintain?

How about you veterans risking your lives so that we can vote and have a great democracy? Are you willing to throw all our precious ballots into a machine and let it interpret the results? If we are going to do that, why fight and die for democracy? When there is a chance that a programmer in California can change your vote in Lincolnville, why bother to defend our right to vote?

If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, well, let's not let our guard down today. This will not be a government of ?we the people? if we can't be sure that all our votes count.

It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes.

Let's keep ?We the People? counting the votes.

Tom Sadowski lives in Lincolnville.



Previous Page
 
Favorites

Election Problem Log image
2004 to 2009



Previous
Features


Accessibility Issues
Accessibility Issues


Cost Comparisons
Cost Comparisons


Flyers & Handouts
Handouts


VotersUnite News Exclusives


Search by

Copyright © 2004-2010 VotersUnite!