-Caveat Lector-
RadTimes # 118 November, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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QUOTE:
"In the larger life of society, the people are made to submit to the orders
of those who were originally meant to serve them--the government and its
agents. Once you do that, the power you have delegated will be used against
you and your interests every time. And then you complain that your leaders
"misuse their power." No, my friend, they don't misuse it; they only use
it, for it is the *use* of power which is itself the worst misuse."
--Alexander Berkman, 'What Is Communist Anarchism?'
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How to assist RadTimes--> (See ** at end.)
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Contents:
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--Free Speech In America -- If You Dare?
--The Republican right prepares for violence
--Vote of No Confidence [how to steal elections]
Linked stories:
*The US election crisis: why is Ralph Nader silent?
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Begin stories:
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Free Speech In America -- If You Dare?
From: Ross <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
In Military Style--Police NOW SWEEP America's streets and buildings for
law--abiding protestors: Increasingly, police interrogate and arrest
citizens who police believe are planning to attend demonstrations. Is it
now, Free Speech In America--If You Dare?
How Far Can Law Enforcement Go--TO CRUSH POLITICAL DISSENT? During the
2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, Police Squads arrested on
streets and private property, law--abiding protestors, bystanders and
tourists--to prevent them from attending demonstrations. LAPD on
10--22--00 used clubs and rubber bullets, to attack and run off
lawful--demonstrators supporting the (October 22nd Coalition) PROTEST
against--police brutality. The coalition had secured a city permit for the
demonstration. In American, police now--arrest, jail, and execute, a
citizen's (Right To Free Speech and Assembly).
When Do Demonstrators Become--Terrorists? The Anti--Terrorist Act of 1996
appears aimed at public dissent: The Act contains language which can
charge law--abiding citizens of being agents or affording support to
terrorist organizations: Broadly written--intent to commit terrorist acts
is defined: (Appeared To Be Intended Toward Violence or Activities Which
Could Intimidate or Coerce a Civilian Population; or To Influence the
Policy of a Government). (18USC Sec. 2331): Any picket line or
demonstration, alleged by police to have blocked or obstructed public
access, could qualify as Terrorist Activities to intimidate or coerce a
civilian population: Terrorist charges make it possible for police to
forfeit attending demonstrators' homes used for meetings and the vehicles
they used for transportation to the event. Concern: Police agencies may
selectively charge a person or organization with either a low level
offense, or Terrorist Offense, for the same illegal act: Example: A fist
fight between union demonstrators and persons crossing a picket line, can
be upgraded by police to charge union members with (Terrorist
Activity).The 1996 Anti-Terrorist Act, broadly--redefined (Terrorist Acts)
as (involving any violent act or acts dangerous to human life that are a
violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state). The
violent or physical act need not cause bodily harm: The Act can be used by
police to target any group of persons--that would dare demonstrate for or
against any issue.
Secret Hearings--Secret Witnesses: U.S. Police routinely purchase court
testimony to convict defendants: Under the 1996 Anti-Terrorist and Death
Penalty Act, prosecutors may use secret/paid informants, secret testimony,
secret witnesses, and other hidden evidence to convict citizens for
terrorist acts: Defense against government terrorist charges, even against
the Death Penalty, may be difficult where citizens have no access to know
the alleged evidence against them or the right to cross examine government
secret witnesses: Secret--Hearings, Witnesses, Jurors: can be invoked by
Government to allegedly protect national security, government
investigations, jurors and witnesses. Conviction for terrorist activities
can result in huge fines, property forfeiture, prison sentences and
execution. Should citizens be allowed to have access to the evidence the
U.S. Government is using to convict them? Are secret--witnesses, hearings,
and jurors, in the best interests of a free society?
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The Republican right prepares for violence
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/elec-n24.shtml>
By the Editorial Board
24 November 2000
The frenzied response of the Bush campaign and its allies in the media to
Tuesday's ruling by the Florida Supreme Court has highlighted a political
fact of immense significance: the Republican Party has become the organ of
extreme right-wing forces that are prepared to use extra-parliamentary and
violent methods to achieve their aims.
Spokesmen for George W. Bush and pro-Republican media outlets reacted to
the court's decision, which simply affirmed the constitutional requirement
that all votes be fairly counted, with calls for the Florida legislature to
defy the court and appeals to the military of a semi-insurrectionary character.
The barrage of lies and misinformation, charging the court with "changing
the rules" and "rewriting the election statutes," denouncing Democratic
candidate Al Gore as a thug out to steal the election, appealing to racist
and anti-Semitic sentiments, had its intended effect. On Wednesday morning
a mob of Bush supporters besieged the Miami/Dade County board of
canvassers, grabbing a Democratic lawyer and threatening to assault those
involved in manually recounting the ballots. A few hours later the
Democratic-controlled board announced it was abandoning its recount,
effectively disenfranchising hundreds of Gore supporters whose votes were
not registered in the original machine tally.
The official responses of the Gore and Bush campaigns to the court ruling
provided a stark contrast. Gore went on national television late Tuesday to
appeal for a show of national unity and a public commitment by the Bush
campaign to abide by the ultimate result of the Florida recount. Repeating
his offer to meet with his Republican opponent, Gore spoke as a bourgeois
politician worried over the prospect of an open breach within the political
establishment that could undermine an orderly transfer of power, with
unpredictable and potentially explosive consequences.
Bush's representative, former Secretary of State James Baker, did not even
bother to acknowledge Gore's appeals for unity or his offer to meet with
the Texas governor. Instead he denounced the Supreme Court ruling as
"unacceptable" and incited the Republican-controlled state legislature to
defy the court, saying, "One should not now be surprised if the Florida
legislature seeks to affirm the original rules."
Baker was taking his cue from the Wall Street Journal, which had
editorialized in advance of the court decision: "The legislature has an
option, it seems to us a duty, to make clear that it stands ready to
resolve any dispute between Mrs. Harris [the Republican Secretary of State
and co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida] and the Supreme Court
Democrats. Since the Republicans now solidly control the legislature, they
hold the winning hand."
Paralleling its role in the impeachment conspiracy against Bill Clinton,
the Wall Street Journal has served as the mouthpiece for the extreme-right
forces that have sought from election day on to pollute public opinion with
wild accusations and disinformation and hijack the election for the
Republicans. It has spearheaded the effort to foster a veritable mutiny
within the military against a possible Gore victory, using as the pretext
the rejection of several hundred legally deficient absentee ballots from
overseas military personnel.
On Wednesday the Journal carried an incendiary column entitled "The
Democratic Party's War on the Military." Calling the exclusion of the
military ballots "one more battle in the ongoing culture war between the
core of the Democratic Party and the US military," the column exuded
racism, homophobia and hatred for the working class. The author spoke of
the "twitching carcass" of the Democratic Party's "left""teachers' unions,
feminist activists, gay victimologists, black churches, faculty clubs."
As the election crisis has progressed, thinly disguised appeals to racism
and anti-Semitism have with increasing frequency appeared in the broadsides
of Bush supporters. Republican backers have seized on the role of Jesse
Jackson to whip up anti-black prejudice and fastened on the large number of
Jewish retirees in Palm Beach to galvanize their fundamentalist partisans.
The Journal has not refrained from such methods. In the editorial cited
above it employed loaded terms to take a swipe at Florida's Jewish
population, charging that Mrs. Harris is "under fire for being a Southern
aristocrat rather than a New York sophisticate." It went on to denounce the
Democrats for "import[ing] Jesse Jackson for some race-baiting."
The editorial as a whole was a call for the Republican Party to forego
traditional constitutional restraints in its drive to capture the White
House. It concluded with a barely disguised injunction for a victorious
Bush campaign to fashion an administration along authoritarian lines:
"The conventional wisdom is that if with this hassle Governor Bush does
become President he will be a crippled one. Perhaps. But we find it equally
plausible that facing down the kind of assault now being waged in Florida
would be precisely the best preparation for what may lie ahead. It is
Governor Bush's nature to extend the velvet glove, but he will be much more
successful if he and his party can show that within it there is some steel."
Significantly, the editorial was entitled "The Squeamish GOP?" The Journal
chooses its words advisedly, in this case employing a term that connotes an
aversion to bloodshed. The meaning of the newspaper's editors was
unmistakable, a Republican president must be prepared to use violence and
repression to impose its reactionary social agenda. Gaining the White
House by suppressing votes and riding roughshod over the popular will is an
excellent preparation for dealing with "what may lie ahead" i.e.,
widespread popular opposition.
It is high time to stop masking the character of the Republican right with
the complacent term "conservative." These are fascistic elements who are
breaking with the traditional methods of bourgeois democracy.
There is a logic to politics. Once influential sections of the ruling elite
conclude they cannot achieve their aims through democratic means and take
the path of conspiracy and repression, they are well on the way to civil war.
It is not here a matter of predicting the imminent imposition of a military
dictatorship. But it would be the height of folly to ignore the signposts
of such a danger looming ahead. If the campaign the Republicans are waging
to gain the White House begins to resemble a covert operation akin to those
mounted by the CIA against US imperialism's liberal and leftist opponents
in Latin America, for example, in Chile, then it must follow that an option
under serious consideration is the Pinochet solution. No one should doubt
that Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley and the reactionaries on his
staff are already working out the arguments to justify the use of violence
against their political opponents and the working class.
The Wall Street Journal speaks for powerful sections of American big
business. These forces within the financial elite have increasingly adopted
the standpoint of the extreme right, and sponsored, financially and
otherwise, the growth of this fascistic element, precisely because they
have come to realize that they cannot impose their social agenda through
normal democratic channels.
They rely on the right-wing rabble that populate the corporate-controlled
media to conceal their anti-democratic aims and fill the airwaves with
half-truths and lies. Their strength does not lie in any great popular
support, on the contrary, their support in the general population is marginal.
Rather, the strength of the Republican right consists in the fact that it
articulates more consistently and uncompromisingly than any other bourgeois
political grouping the requirements of the American corporate elite. The
radical right knows what it wants and is prepared to ride roughshod over
public opinion in order to get it. The Republicans do not play by the
normal constitutional rules, while their bourgeois opponents in the
Democratic Party wring their hands as impotent and passive onlookers. They
embody a demoralized liberalism, whose watered-down perspective of reform
has been discarded by the ruling class.
At the same time the Republican right senses that it has a narrow window of
opportunity for realizing its ambitions. It was staggered by the results of
the election, which registered a victory in the popular vote for Gore and,
if the intent of Florida voters were officially acknowledged, a Democratic
victory in the electoral vote as well. The combined vote for Gore and Green
Party candidate Ralph Nader showed, broadly speaking, that a significant
majority of the electorate supported policies of a liberal and leftist
character, and opposed the increasingly naked domination of corporate power
over American politics.
A look at the electoral map underscores the fact that the overall
trajectory of American society does not favor the forces of the radical
right. Bush piled up the vast majority of his electoral votes in the more
backward and rural regions of the country, the South, the Southwest,
sections of the Midwest. The more urbanized, industrialized, densely
populated and culturally vibrant regions went for Gore. Within this general
scheme, the decisive pro-Gore margin in the popular vote was provided by
blacks and other highly oppressed sections of the working class, whose vote
expressed deep distrust of the Republicans and a determination to defend
past gains in civil rights and social conditions.
Moreover, the economic conditions fostering the rise of nouveau riche
layers that comprise a critical component of the Republican right's social
base are clearly receding. The stock market boom, based to a considerable
extent on speculative capital, parasitism and outright swindling, is
breaking up, leaving in its wake a society more economically polarized than
at any other period in the past half-century, and a spectacle of corporate
greed and criminality of unprecedented dimensions.
The response of the Republican right is growing hysteria. Its frenzy and
recklessness bespeak a rebellion by a minority that feels it must stake all
on immediate victory, because its future prospects are dwindling. The
Republicans sense that the 2000 election is their best, and perhaps last,
chance to seize hold of all the branches of government. If they lose the
White House, they face the prospect of internal warfare and political
disintegration.
Notwithstanding the many obvious differences, there are striking parallels
between the political crisis arising from the 2000 election and the
convulsive period that led up to the Civil War of 1861. One of these is the
similarity in psychology and methods between the Republican right of today
and the political representatives of the Southern slave owners 150 years
ago. In both cases, the most reactionary social forces in the nation were
driven by a sense of desperation, arising from the fact that the momentum
of historical development was moving against them, to employ the most
provocative and reckless methods.
One great difference, to extend the historical analogy, is the absence
within any faction of bourgeois politics today of a force either willing or
able to take on and defeat the radical right. As they have repeatedly
demonstrated, the flaccid ranks of liberalism, institutionalized in the
Democratic Party, are organically incapable of waging a serious struggle in
defense of democratic rights. That task now falls to the working class,
which must construct its own mass, socialist party to carry it out.
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Vote of No Confidence
<http://www.conspire.com/vote-fraud.html>
Everything you need to know about stealing elections
Reprinted in abridged form from
"Metro: Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper," Sept. 28, 1989.
The author makes grateful acknowledgment to Dan Pulcrano.
The next president of the United States may not be chosen by the
voters of the United States. Instead, he or she may be the choice of
whomever controls or manipulates the computer systems that tally the
votes. A single, Berkeley- based firm manufactures the software used
in the machines that compile more than two-thirds of the nation's
electronically-counted votes. Analysts describe the software
as "spaghetti code," tangled strands of instructions indecipherable
to outsiders. The experts say the code could be manipulated without
detection. In fact, that may have happened already.
Vote fraud by computer is an even greater threat to local elections,
the experts fear. With the entire system shrouded in mystery and
absent of assurances that the voting process is tamper-proof, voters
these days have more reason than ever to ask, "Does my vote count?"
"The whole damn thing is mind-boggling," says Ronnie Dugger, a Texas-
based writer who investigates computerized elections. "They could
steal the presidency." "Any use of computer technology is
subvertable," Peter Neumann of the Menlo Park research firm SRI
confirms. "The consensus is that elections can be rigged easily
locally, but nationally takes a lot more work." However, Neumann
says, the task of fixing a presidential election is "doable."
Election-rigging is a time-honored tradition in the US, from the days
of New York's Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall to Chicago's legendary
Mayor Richard Daley, who, historians believe, engineered President
Kennedy's narrow margin of victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960
general election by stealing a key bloc of Illinois votes. And Lyndon
Johnson's 1948 Senate victory, according to a biographer, was the
result of vote-rigging in Southern Texas, where ballots were burned
before a recount could take place.
As recently as 1984, a US Senate race in Florida, in which Republican
Connie Mack defeated incumbent Buddy MacKay by just 35,000 out of
four million votes, stirred deep suspicion though no fraud was ever
proved. The question, however, is whether a well-executed computer
vote fraud ever would yield enough evidence to constitute "proof."
Ballot boxes can be stolen and stuffed, mechanical lever machines can
be tinkered with, paper ballots can be forged. But computers seem
somehow more sinister. Though defended, as one would expect, by
professionals in the field who insist that computers are less
vulnerable to error and tampering than counting paper ballots, the
invisibility of computer functions and the esoteric languages they
use make that assurance difficult to accept.
"Computerized elections could be made more difficult to defraud than
hand-counted elections, but they're not that way now," says Erik
Nilsson, a Portland, Ore., software engineer who monitors
computerized voting for the Palo Alto-based Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility (CPSR). "If you believe election officials
deliberately defraud elections, if you really believe people are that
dishonest, then we're kind of stuck."
Nilsson echoes many computer professionals who say that the internal
security/measures of most vote-counting systems make tampering
difficult to detect. He is cautious on the subject of widespread
computer tampering. "Our feeling has been that while we know vote
fraud exists, the larger problem is error," he said in an interview.
Other critics go a step further. "CPSR has been very conservative on
this issue," Dugger says. The journalist is a native of South Texas,
where, he says, election-rigging is a matter of course. "If they're
asking me to trust politicians and election officials," he
quips, "they'll have to ask Someone else."
Even if elections were never corrupted, the vulnerability of
computerized vote-counting could so damage public confidence as to
render elections virtually useless.
"The public's perception of the security (as well as the accuracy) of
the vote tabulation process is as important as the actual security
measures," said a 1988 report by the Pennsylvania research firm
ECRI." And care must be taken to avoid even minor nuisances that can
give the public and political leaders the impression that the
system's integrity is not sound."
Unfortunately, the problem is more than simply "public perception,"
more than "minor nuisances." In many important ways, the system is
not sound. "The complex systems that tally 55 percent of our
electorate are badly designed, hard to monitor and subject to a host
of technological threats," Nilsson wrote in a CPSR "Election Watch"
report. "Worse yet, detection of error or sabotage is more difficult
than in traditional elections." In the report, Nilsson and a co-
author listed ways in which vote-counting software can be "secretly
changed." The possibilities include adding extra ballots,' discarding
some ballots, misreading ballots, turning off the computer's internal
record-keeping system or simply changing the results.
"Any of these threats can be accomplished by a single computer expert
or, in many instances, by a non-professional," Nilsson's report
states.
So far, there have been no legally established cases of computerized
vote fraud, or at least of fraudulent software tampering. "There's
probably been some we don't know about," claims one computer company
executive. If a computerized vote fraud were successful, would the
public ever know? A Los Angeles Times article earlier this year
raised that very point, quoting former California state prosecutor
Steve White, who pointed out that "if you did it right, no one would
ever know. You just change a few votes in a few precincts in a few
states and no one would ever know."
The technique of fixing a relatively small number of votes could be
used to swing a close election to a designated candidate. Just as
troublesome is the prospect of increasing a candidate's margin of
victory. Presidential elections are rarely won by margins of more
than a few percentage points, and more than 8 percent is considered a
crushing margin of victory. Altering a small percentage of votes in
various districts across the country could turn an indecisive
election into an artificial "landslide," creating a false "mandate"
for the winning candidate.
But who on Earth would do such a thing? In Chicago in 1982, 58
Democratic party bosses were convicted of fraud after they were
caught stuffing not the ballot box, but the computer. They had
punched out fraudulent cards for falsely registered and nonexistent
voters, then run them through the card-reader.
There have been numerous other ambiguous cases. Many of them have
involved Berkeley's Computer Election Service (CES)-which recently
changed its name to Business Records Corporation Election Service.
The company is the dominant force In the American election industry;
an estimated 33 to 40 percent of all American votes are cast on and
counted by CES systems. CES uses aversion of the punch-card voting
system prevalent in California.
In 1985, the National Security Agency (NSA)-the government's most
expansive and most secretive intelligence service-took an interest in
CES. According to the New York Times, NSA was following a directive
from then-President Reagan to improve the security of major non-
military computer systems.
Government officials were queasy at the prospect of a top-secret
military spy agency-particularly NSA, whose domain is high-tech
intelligence gathering-delving into the nation's electoral process.
According to the Times, an official of the government's General
Accounting Office told a Senate committee that NSA's involvement with
CES "raises basic questions concerning the extent to which the
defense establishment should be involved in policy formulation within
the government's civilian agencies."
The chair of the House Science and Technology Subcommittee at that
time, Rep. Ron Glicksman, also expressed "serious reservations "
about NSA's involvement with CES. The Times story of Sept. 24, 1985
(which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle the following day) ,
announced that NSA was "investigating" CES to determine if its
systems were open to fraud, but the NSA now says the Times got the
story wrong. "There never really was an investigation," says Cynthia
Berecek, an NSA public information officer. Berecek said the National
Security Agency's interest in CES was in "data gathering,"
not "investigating." The NSA, according to Berecek, no longer has
responsibility for computer security outside of government
operations. She says the Times misquoted an NSA spokesperson as
saying, "We have no interest in any particular election." The correct
quote, according to Berecek, should have been, "We have no interest
in elections per se." (Berecek says the NSA spokesperson interviewed
by the Times kept a written record of the conversation.) Exactly
what "improvement" the NSA was supposed to have made in the CES
system was never announced. Berecek says there were "no results to
talk about" because there was no "investigation," only "data
gathering."
"If you sit and read a magazine that has an article about a computer
company, that's gathering data," Berecek says. The NSA is the
government's electronic intelligence bureau, responsible for
monitoring telephone calls, telex messages and other electronic
communications. It also gets information from spy satellites..
According to some reports, the secrecy-obsessed agency possesses the
most powerful computer system in the world. In addition to the
concerns raised by NSA's "data gathering," doubts about the company's
integrity have been raised in several civil lawsuits. In these civil
lawsuits (no criminal charges were filed), CES has been accused of
actually participating in election fraud. Despite the fact that CES
has never lost a court case, the company's public image certainly
hasn't been helped by the litigation. In 1983, several losing
candidates in Indiana (a state where a county clerk once pronounced
vote-buying as "a way of life") sued CES and local election
officials, charging them with "false and fraudulent" vote counts.
CES President John Kemp denied in the press that his company
participated in wrongdoing of any kind, though he did admit to the
New York Times, "It is totally economically unfeasible to have a
fraud-proof system." CES also has been challenged in at least three
other states. When investigators have tried to unravel the CES
counting program, however, they inevitably have gotten lost in the
linguini-like mess. In the Indiana case, the defeated candidates
brought in computer consultant Deloris Davisson to analyze the CES
vote-counting software. She found it hopelessly obscure and hard to
follow. Her report termed the program's source code (the key to
understanding the program) "convoluted, unstructured and
undocumented."
Davisson called its memory functions -- where die vote counts are
actually stored within the computer -- "a shell game," and noted that
the program doesn't stop running or even give a warning if "there are
more votes recorded than, there are registered voters."
Davisson's report may be open to accusations of bias. After all, she
was a paid consultant hired by people who had a vested interest in
proving CES faulty. But her finding are echoed in the ECRI report,
which was funded by a grant from an independent foundation.
Criticizing the software of "some vendors" (indicting CES only by
implication), the report states that the vote-counting software has
been modified so many times that "the resulting 'spaghetti code' may
bide routines that could affect the -accuracy of results in subtle
ways, and it would be virtually impossible to find deliberately
erroneous routines." (Emphasis added.) The source codes of CES
programs, and those manufactured by companies with a smaller market
share, are usually impenetrably obscure, incapable of being
understood by "me voting public and even by the election officials
who run the programs. "They treat it like it was something handed
down on stone tablets. The codes should be in the public domain,"
says Robert Naegle, a federal elections consultant based in La Selva
Beach, south of Santa Cruz. Naegle authored the government's new
voluntary standards for computerized election tallying. But some of
his best suggestions were refused. , Naegle recommended to the
Federal Elections Commission (FEC) that all source codes be written
in "high level language," a computer language resembling English.
While still hard to understand for the uninitiated, the codes would
be more accessible than those written -- as most codes currently are -
- in digital "assembly language."
The FEC rejected Naegle's recommendation.
A 1980 Pennsylvania study, not related to any court case, found that
one CES program was so complex and jumbled that "it is possible to
alter its functioning without any record." the study's author,
University of Pittsburgh Professor Michael Shamos, recommended that
the state refuse to certify CES. The state ignored him.
State elections boards are being "buffeted by elections systems
salespeople," Shamos was quoted as saying in Datamation
magazine. "Punch cards result in disenfranchisement. The CES system
is riddled with scandal potential."
According to Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters George Mann, the
system is subject to a "logic and accuracy test" run before the
election, in which up to 45,000 pre-punched cards are fed through the
computer. The computer's count is matched against the actual count.
Members of news media and political office holders are invited to
view the test. Mann, however, concedes that the system's accuracy
could never be verified unless someone wanted to hand count
personally 45,O00 computer cards. They just have to take his -- and
the computer's -- word for it.
The punch-card system used by CES, called the Votomatic, has another
disadvantage that has long concerned computer voting critics: the
problem of the "hanging chad," The issue concerns the little
perforated squares that voters punch out of computer-voting cards,
known as "chad." When the paper rectangles aren't punched fully, they
hang from the card, creating an ambiguous ballot. Elections workers,
however, "sweep" the chad from the cards. The workers are put in the
questionable position of deciding whether voters intended to vote for
candidates where chad is incompletely punched. There are no laws in
California governing how voter intent is to be determined in the case
of ambiguous ballots. Usually, though, workers are not supposed to
remove chad unless it is hanging from the card by one or two
perforated corners.
Mann estimates that "less than five percent" of all punch cards come
into the counting room with hanging chad. But there has been many an
election decided by less than five percent of the vote. He also says
that when a ballot fails to run through the card-reading machine
correctly, election workers simply punch out a new ballot, attempting
to duplicate the one filled out by the voter. There is a rich history
of elections botched because of faulty card reading and counting. In
a 1970 election in Los Angeles, a computer assigned votes to the
wrong candidates and failed to read other votes at all. A Carroll
County, Maryland, school board election in 1984 was thrown into
confusion after a CES computer picked the wrong winner (the "true"
victor was later determined by a manual recount). Somehow, the
correct counting program had been replaced with a test program.
A four-way Dallas mayor's race in 1985 also featured oddities. When
the second-place finisher requested a recount, vote-totals changed in
161 of the city's 250 precincts. Roy Saltman, a government consultant
who wrote a 1988 report on "Accuracy, Integrity and Security in
Computerized Vote-Tallying," calls the count changes "perplexing" in
his report. The second-place candidate's campaign manager alleged
that the vote-counting computer's "instructions" were changed after
the count showed her candidate leading by 400 votes. At around 8 pm
on election night, her candidate was ahead when the computer went
down. When it came back up, he was trailing.
And election that same year in Arizona experienced a near-miss when a
mistake that would have given all Democratic votes to Republicans.
Those are just a few of the sizable list of elections that have been
distorted by faulty computerized counting. in 1985, the wrong man was
elected to the Moline, Ill., board of aldermen. In the 1986 general
election, the computer simply skipped two percent of the ballots in
Oklahoma County, Okla., effectively disenfranchising hundreds of
voters.
And so on.
Since CES changed its name to Business Records Corporation there is
now a new Computer Election Services. This separate company was
founded by Robert Varni, a founder of the original CES in the 1960s.
His company, located in a Benecia industrial park, is planning to
market a "chad free" punch card system and hopes to reestablish what
Varni says was the original, sterling reputation of CES -- a
reputation that has been tarnished in the original company's later
years.
Another founder of the "first" CES has a similar idea. Jack Gerbel's
company, Unilect of Dublin, Calif., is also selling a chad-free punch
manufactured by Triad of Ohio. In fact, Gerbel says he has "no
knowledge" of any other chad-free punch and was surprised to hear of
Varni's system.
But punch-card voting may be on the way out, replaced by more
advanced technology. the trend in the computer elections business is
toward "direct recording" machines -- basically, automatic teller
machines for voters. These machines increase the convenience of
voting and the speed with which votes can be tabulated on election
night. But since there are no ballots,, there is no way to manually
verify the machine's counts. Some direct recording devices are
capable of transmitting counts immediately over phone lines or even
via satellite.
Consultant Naegle recommended to the Federal Elections Commission
that direct recording machines should have some way of recording
votes independent of its own internal memory. Again, the FEC rejected
what seems like a sensible, even crucial, suggestion.
One of the most widely used direct recording machines is called
the "Shouptronic" named for its company, R.F. Shoup. The president of
that company, Ransom Shoup II, was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy
and obstruction of justice related to an FBI inquiry into a lever
machine-counted election in Philadelphia.
New York City is now prepared to spend up to $50 million to convert
its elections to direct recording machines or another electronic
system known as "optical mark." the Shouptronic is among the
candidates in a furious campaign to win the Big Apple contract.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Linked stories:
********************
The US election crisis: why is Ralph Nader silent?
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/nad-n24.shtml>
********************
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======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
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