E-voting criticized in movie marathon

By Guy Ashley    ContraCosta Times    16 September 2005

About 30 people hunkered in the darkness of the Grand Lake Theater for a marathon program that eschewed slick Hollywood production in favor of fastidious cinematic presentations about the hazards of electronic voting.

The Tuesday afternoon of movies culminated in a talk by two authors marketing a new book that asserts the 2004 U.S. presidential election was stolen with the help of e-voting machines.

"As long as we allow private partisan corporations to secretly count our votes, we can expect massive irregularities, fraud and outright theft," said one of the authors, Bob Fitrakis, a political science professor at Columbus State Community College in central Ohio.

His words fired up a committed cadre of local activists who lately have been pushing for Alameda County to move away from its four-year-old reliance on e-voting equipment.

Led by the Voting Rights Task Force, one of the sponsors of Tuesday's event, East Bay resisters to e-voting scored a significant victory two weeks ago when Alameda County backed out of an agreement to negotiate a $6 million upgrade of its e-voting equipment with Diebold Elections Systems, a focus of the wrath of e-voting critics nationwide.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors instead chose to take outside bids from companies equipped to provide a new county voting system that emphasizes paper ballots instead of touch-screen machines.

"We're happy about that step," said Allen Michaan, longtime owner of the Grand Lake who targets e-voting in many of the politically cutting messages he leaves on the marquee of his 80-year-old theater.

"But we've got a lot of work to do to raise attention to this issue to the point that people will refuse to vote on these fraudulent machines."

One of the first films shown Tuesday featured Bev Harris, a leading e-voting critic and founder of Black Box Voting, sitting down with former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean and showing Dean how to hack into a Diebold voting system with a laptop computer and change the number of tabulated votes.

"Americans must understand that our electoral system is broken and can be easily compromised," said Harris, whose talk at the Grand Lake event was called, "The Mechanics of Vote-Rigging: How They Do It."

Also attending the event was Alameda County's acting Registrar of Voters, Elaine Ginnold, who admitted to nervousness that she might be heckled for her consistent praise of the county's e-voting equipment.

"I feel touch-screen voting is the most accurate form of voting that has ever come along," she said. "But people in this county feel very strongly about this issue. I have to pay attention to that."