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Today's Top News
Why Hurricane Ike Demands Paper Ballots on November 4
Hurricane Ike has made it clear that paper ballots must be made available for all voters in Ohio and throughout the nation on November 4.
Ike has blown all the way up into the Great Lakes region with devastating impact. Power has been knocked out and airports shut by gale-force winds up to 78 miles per hour. Days later, hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners remain blacked out, and casualties still mount. Ohio Governor Ted Strickland has declared a state of emergency, with up to 2 million Ohioans still without power.
A repeat performance on election day could change the course of US history if paper ballots are not universally ready.
A bitter battle now rages here in the Buckeye State over whether the Secretary of State's office should provide as many paper ballots as voters might want.
Under current arrangements, half or more of Ohio's may show up to the polls and be forced to cast their ballots on electronic touch-screen machines. Of 5.4 million ballots cast in 2004, George W. Bush's official margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.
Touchscreen machines of the type deployed through Ohio are prone to failure, even without a storm. Diebold has admitted that its software regularly drops votes and cannot be guaranteed to provide a reliable count. That they can be easily rigged has been confirmed by the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan Center, the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Conyers Committee, Ohio's officially-sponsored Everest Study and others.
Voter rights organizations throughout Ohio have called on Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to decertify all electronic voting machines and rely strictly on paper ballots. As of now, Brunner plans to allow the machines to be deployed, even though their software is considered "proprietary," and no reliable recount can be done with them.
A Democrat, Brunner has publicly stated a preference for making paper ballots available to any voter who wants one. But the Republican Party, which controls the state legislature, and the conservative Columbus Dispatch editorial board, claim this would cost too much money. So Brunner has caved to pressure and currently plans to provide enough paper ballots for just 25% of the electorate.
Ike makes it clear this could be catastrophic. A similar storm on election day could knock out virtually all the state's touchscreen machines. Without sufficient paper ballots, hundreds of thousands of Ohioans would lose their right to vote. Given Ohio's pivotal role, the entire presidential election could be once again tainted.
Brunner needs to make good on her repeated pledges to administer a full and fair election. The only way to do this is with universal access to paper ballots, which she must now guarantee.
The same must be done throughout the United States. A nation spending its blood and treasure to allegedly bring democracy to Iraq and the world can certainly afford to spend whatever it takes to make sure all Americans can vote on election day, and get their votes reliably counted.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllBOB & HARVEY: Thank you for your tireless efforts on behalf of "who counts the votes." I doubt the corrections will be made in time. Seems the Republicans want Ohio to be one less state to worry about... after all computer hacks being prostitutes of a sort, will probably let out their secrets to the highest bidders. How many states do they need to manipulate to "win" this election?
Computer hackers wrote the software that runs your web browser and the forum software like CDs. Like all human beings some of them are good people and some are bad people. I think you owe the good ones an apology IMO for stereotyping them ALL as "prostitutes." Are the hackers and computer tinkers who set up indymedia.org "prostitutes?" How about the video tinkers who document police abuse the i-watch video collective who got arrested at the RNC?
P.S. as a computer knowledgeable person I am against electronic voting because the security issues are too great and the companies who make the voting machines are tied to Republicans.
OTH I am grateful to computer tinkers who for example wrote Linux and give it away for free, and the hackers who maintain the internet and allow us to communicate alternative views not sanctioned by the establishment.
If there are no electronic ballots, and the paper votes are all counted, McCain is not guaranteed to win. It's harder to lose ballot boxes (although not impossible).
Does anyone truly believe that McCain is ahead of Obama in the opinion polls? I know Merkins are stoopid, but surely no-one is that stoopid?
What can be done for Ohio voters in this battle? How can the rest of us help?
HOOTOWL: You and I could likely not agree on anything including the weather, I was talking SPECIFICALLY ABOUT those hackers that DO impact the vote count!
Very unclear wording I suspect if I had said such a vague and stereotyping statement about women, or blacks or Jews you would have rightly condemned me, well it's no less offensive against computer geeks.
And actually we do agree on certain things like stopping war, empire, and environmental destruction the difference is I do so for rational as opposed to subjective irrational "reasons."
There are some advantages to electronic voting: instant runoff voting is one. But there is no good reason for ever allowing "proprietary" software to count the votes...that's like a bank leaving its deposits on the street Friday night and expecting them to be there Monday morning.
We man the polls, oversee the election, and then let someone else count the votes?
That's crazy.
That's lazy.
That's crooked.
The vetoing software could be written in opencode so it can be inspected and checked. Linux and FreeBSD are opencode and they can be made secure much more secure than Windows. When I go to a Diebold ATM and preform a $10.00 transaction I get a receipt. When I vote on a Diebold voting machine I don't get a receipt. Voting is more important than $10.00. The election is the most important thing that Government does. It's how they constitute themselves legally. If the election is faulty then nothing they do is legal. The power problem is a legitimate issue. Has anyone tried to checkout in a grocery store when the power is down. Nothing works and nobody can add or make change without a machine anymore.
I and my neighbors were fortunate to have suffered little damage from Ike. People will be moving into my area just as the Katrina evacuees did. With so little time to reregister many may very well be disenfranchised. I was an alternate judge and an election judge in Houston for two years. It's easy to see how people can get there precinct confused. The evacuees from Galveston and Bolivar Point will be preoccupied with the insurance companies in order to get their houses rebuilt. They will not be concerned with voter registration while they wait and if they don't register it's not certain that they will be able to vote when the poles open in November.
Isn't there a way to check precinct based on address? These people are like displaced persons within our own country. Each one needs to get an absentee ballot in their hands and a waiver about sending it to the home address.
Joe
In a democracy light country like America having proper voter lists is something they don't want.
Media calls it a neck and neck race so Diebold will produce that results. Get use to it America Palin will have the US at war full speed ahead in as many parts of the world as it can. The Gov has taken over control of the stock market so relax go watch you Digital TV and hope you don't get sick.
Just think: A hurricane fueled by Global Warming shuts down power across half the States on election day. This wipes out over half the for-profit Republican based electronic voting machines, and just like that, McCain and Palin are "voted" in. A presidential election affected by global warming. How convenient. But I guess I'm just Global Whining.
I'm Canadian, and although I don't speak for the whole country, I confess that I've always been confused about the attraction of electronic voting. Are (North) Americans so enamoured with digital gadgets and playthings that this is the only way to lure them to the polling stations?
You wouldn't know it, but we're also in an election cycle here in Canada (funny, the election was called on September 7, and the vote is on October 14 - contrast that with the exciting yet exhausting 18-month American campaign). We don't use electronic voting systems in Canada, we're still stuck on the old-fashioned paper balloting, and guess what - it still works.
And there are no voter purges, optical scans, hacked systems, voter suppression, or hanging chads. Simply put, we wouldn't put up with any of it, and I'm always shocked by the degree to which the American people do.
Here, ballots are mostly counted by hand, and since the folks doing the work are largely volunteer scrutineers associated more or less equally with the political parties, the costs are low and there is a measure of "keeping the other guy honest".
I dunno, isn't there something to be said for simplicity?
I agree. Tis a gift to be simple. There is talk of replacing our kludgy old voting machines in NY with some computerized system. Why? The old ones work and the new ones don't. It is about contracts for the computerized systems and the ease with which they can be comprimised on a large scale.
Everywhere I have worked there are those who inflate their importance with useless expensive sexy high tech projects that frequently flop. Worship of technology combined with lack of understanding is a dangeros and expensive dynamic that operates here. People are afraid to question, because they could look ignorant or not be of the guys.
Joe
Growing S:
I feel electronic voting should be banned. How many shows on TV have shown how easy it is to fix it.