Schrodinger’s Vote
Why Diebold can’t be trusted to tally in ’04.

Somewhere out there in the wilds of America is a patsy, a Lone Nut if you will. He’s living a quiet life. Maybe he has a secret fixation, an obsession that no one around him, no neighbor, no co-worker, no family member knows about. Maybe he thinks he’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s soulmate. Maybe he wants to "rescue" Britney Spears.

When the Tecumseh Curse kicks in and bullets rip through the head of George W. Bush, this man will be called upon to take the fall, and fall he will. In the absence of an impeachment resolution, the Tecumseh Curse may be our only hope for regime change. Most likely our salvation will emanate from CIA headquarters in McLean, VA, but we can call it Wellstone’s Revenge.

Because the way it’s looking, an honest and fair election won’t do the trick.

Here in New York, at my local polling place, we use those great clunky lever-driven voting machines. You probably know them: You step inside, pull the lever and the curtain closes. You cast your vote, pull the lever again, the curtain opens and off you go. There exists the possibility of technical failure.

There was an incident not too long ago in Massachusetts wherein an accumulation of dust in some of the machines triggered errors in the recording of votes cast.

There also exists the possibility of vote-tampering. The voter does not receive any sort of receipt or physical verification that the vote recorded is the vote cast. These devices were invented by Thomas Edison.

The essence of sleight of hand is misdirection. During the 36-day electoral cliffhanger the nation was forced to endure following the 2000 presidential vote, the mass media in this country emphasized the "chad" problem with paper punch ballots to the exclusion of all other factors involved. This resulted in a great clamor and fuss over our "antiquated" system of logging votes. Congress passed the HAVA (Help America Vote Act) with about as much due diligence as accompanied the passage of the Patriot Act. The rush to implement a fully computerized touchscreen voting system has led us to an eminently hackable and totally unreliable set-up completely dominated by partisans and minions of the Bush regime. The leader of the pack is Diebold Election Systems Inc., but the two leading competitors, Sequoia Systems and ES&S, are also top-heavy with ardent Bush disciples.

Some very peculiar results came out of California’s recent recall election. Fringe candidates who shouldn’t have gotten any votes at all outside of their own districts received puzzling margins in unlikely places. Not surprisingly, in these unlikely places, the voting machines are manufactured by Diebold. Diebold machines were behind the insane seesawing vote counts in Brevard County and Volusia County, FL, during the 2000 presidential contest. These machines have also been implicated in irregularities (not to say outright fraud) in Dallas, TX, and in Georgia.

Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, is an enthusiastic Bush supporter who has publicly vowed to deliver his home state of Ohio’s 2004 electoral votes to the incumbent.

With paper ballots, the votes are counted at the polling place by local officials, transported under lock and key, easily available for audit should any questions arise. The system can certainly be corrupted, but economy of scale (always the central issue in any kind of conspiratorial shenanigans) dictates that this would be an enormously unwieldy undertaking. Traditionally, vote fraud in America has been expedited through the use of dead voters, almost a tradition in Democratic strongholds like Chicago, Boston and New Orleans. A computerized, internet-accessible touchscreen system can be corrupted with a few keystrokes or a rigged "card"–as appears to have happened in Florida–which could result in vote fraud on a scale that the late Chicago mayor Richard Daley could only dream of.

Recently, Diebold engaged in a virtual war against blackboxvoting.org, a website run by a Seattle woman by the name of Bev Harris who has written an excellent critique of computerized voting systems, "Black Box Voting." Here’s a juicy excerpt regarding the Florida debacle in 2000:

Black Box Voting reveals for the first time that it was the Volusia and Brevard County anomalies that caused TV networks to call the election for Bush. An internal document from CBS, combined with timelines and interviews from Agence France-Presse and internal Diebold memos show that:

–A replacement set of votes was uploaded on the Diebold machines (then called Global Election Systems) in Volusia County about one hour after the original votes.

–The original votes were on "copy 0" of the memory card containing the vote database. The replacement votes were tagged to a "copy 3."

–According to an internal memo written by Diebold Election Systems Sr. V.P. of Research and Development Talbot Iredale, the second set of votes should not have been done and may have been "unauthorized."

–In the replacement vote set, totals for all races were correct except for the presidential race.

–According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible for calling the election for Bush.

–Brevard County, Florida also used Global Election Systems (now Diebold) voting machines. Brevard omitted 4,000 votes for Gore from its tally, which contributed to the decision by the networks to call for Bush.

–The two erroneous county totals came directly from the central tabulating system for the county. The GEMS program is Diebold’s central tabulation software.

One journalist was doing his job correctly that night: Ed Bradley… Bradley sounded alarm bells over discrepancies in the data, but no one paid attention to him. CBS also ignored independent data from The AP; had CBS and the other networks used AP data instead of Voter News Service (VNS), they would not have called the election for Bush.

The election was first called by Fox analyst John Ellis, who had earlier conferred with his two cousins, George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Ellis was privy to the numbers from VNS, and presumably knew the margin that would be required in order to call the election. During the evening, a 55,000-vote spread evaporated into just hundreds of votes.

Al Gore called George W. Bush around 3:15 a.m. and conceded the election. Between 3:30 and 3:45, he boarded a motorcade to make a public concession. Votes were melting away at a rate of some 5,000 every 15 minutes, and Ed Bradley from CBS was telling everyone in sight that someone needed to check the figures.

When Gore was two blocks from Memorial Plaza in Nashville, Tennessee, where he planned to issue a formal concession, word of the disappearing votes reached him.

He chose not to concede: Thus we had a recount in Florida.

It doesn’t help Diebold’s case that CEO Walden O’Dell attended a $10,000 a plate strategy session with other wealthy Bush supporters–known as "Rangers and Pioneers"–at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, earlier this year. The next week he sent out invitations to a $1000 a plate soiree to benefit the Ohio Republican Party’s federal campaign fund at his opulent mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

Bev Harris got hold of some very incriminating internal memos from a whistleblower at Diebold and put them up on her website to further support her allegations. When Diebold attempted to shut down Harris’ website, all hell broke loose. Another site, www.why-war.com, called for an "electronic civil disobedience campaign," and college students from sea to shining sea took up the cause, setting up mirror sites including the extremely damaging internal Diebold memoranda regarding problems with these machines.

At this point, Diebold is trapped in a game of "Whack-A-Mole" with colleges ranging from Stanford to Princeton, including an estimated 50 campus servers nationwide. The campaign is expanding exponentially, and as of this writing, going international.

"We’ve been receiving more hits than ever before," Why War? member Micah White told a New Zealand publication. "Our goal when we started this campaign was to provide public access to this information, and we’ve been so successful that Why War? recently had to purchase higher bandwidth to accommodate the sheer number of people who wanted to read the memos."

The irregularities and anomalies in the recent California recall election involve the apparent redistribution of votes in counties using Diebold equipment from Davis and Bustamante to fringe candidates with no name recognition whatsoever outside of their own districts. This is called "vote-skimming." (Details are available at whatreallyhappened.com, among other sites, under the heading "How to Rig an American Election.")

CNN finally reported part of the story on Oct. 30, quoting MIT voting expert Stephen Ansolabahere as saying, "The computer science community has pretty much rallied against electronic voting. A disproportionate number of computer experts who have weighed in on this issue are opposed to it." That would include David L. Dill, a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, among many others.

Meanwhile, over in Australia, a little company called Software Improvements put together a perfectly workable, open and verifiable electronic voting system based on the Linux operating system in just six months back in 2001. The Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S systems being marketed here in the States are Windows-based, using proprietary software that is closed to public view. Software Improvements’ lead engineer on the project, Matt Quinn, told Wired that that all e-voting systems should be open to public inspection and provide paper receipts.

"There’s no reason voters should trust a system that doesn’t have it," he said of the paper- receipt option. "And they shouldn’t be asked to. Why on Earth should voters have to trust me–someone with a vested interest in the project’s success? A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to ‘prove’ the system’s integrity to the vast majority of electors, who, after all, own the democracy."

Quinn is quite militant about the use of open-source software on such projects: "The keystone of democracy is information. You have a big problem when people don’t have enough information to make up their minds, or even worse, they have misleading information and make up their minds in a way that would be contrary to what they would decide if they had the full story. Any transparency you can add to that process is going to enhance the democracy and, conversely, any information you remove from that process is going to undermine your democracy. If a voting system precludes any notion of a meaningful recount, is cloaked in secrecy and controlled by individuals with conflicts of interest, why would anyone buy it? At the very least, give citizens the right to choose whether they want to use paper ballots, thus allowing each elector to be personally satisfied as to the integrity of the process in which they are participating."

Of course, Quinn is assuming that the current administration has an interest in hearing and implementing the will of the people. Being an Australian, he may be forgiven his naivete. Here in America, some of us are beginning to get the grim feeling that ballots, honest or otherwise, may not be sufficient to provide the regime change we so desperately and clearly need.