I’m pleased to have the honor of writing this year’s hallowed Tech Beat. After all, legend has it that forty years ago tonight, my pregnant mother was handing out candy when she went into labor. Determined to not have her child born on Halloween, she continued to take care of the trick-or-treaters. Not until after midnight did she tell my father to take her to the hospital. Just a few hours later I was born, on All Saints Day.
So in the spirit of the season, I offer you this true story of something really frightening. It is a spooky story about computers, but I’m referring to something even scarier than the blue screen of death. This is a tale about a large black box that we will all confront soon. No, it’s not a casket. It’s something even more dreaded. Yet, you might not even be aware of the evils within it. Be warned, for in just a couple weeks, you will have to put your faith in … the voting box!
We all must indeed have faith come November 7. We’ll need to put our faith in a flawed system that cannot guarantee verifiable results. I don’t intend to scare anyone away from the polling place. By all means, please vote. Just be aware that when you insert your ballot into the Diebold optical scanners used throughout Humboldt County, there is no absolute guarantee that your vote will be counted correctly, or that the results cannot be tampered with. In fact, we can only be one percent certain that our intended ballot results will even make it to election headquarters. That’s the number of paper ballots that are actually verified by hand, just one percent.
Here are just a few anomalies from the 2004 election based on scary voting elections technology. According to the Associated Press (http://tinyurl.com/7wc8r), 4530 votes were lost in Carteret County, NC due to the computer memory limit of the voting machines used. The Palm Beach Post (http://tinyurl.com/8kbb4) reported that in Broward County, FL the voting machines actually started counting backwards as final results were being tabulated. In Lancaster County, NE the Lincoln Journal Star (http://tinyurl.com/8kbb4) reported that optical scanners used there at times incorrectly detected two ballots, therefore counting many votes twice.
In a letter to the Government Accountability Office (http://tinyurl.com/b978j) on November 5, 2004 the U.S. House Judiciary Committee requested an immediate investigation of the efficacy of voting machines due to numerous reports from voters indicating that machines were flipping Kerry votes to Bush. In fact, according to the Election Incident Reporting System (www.voteprotect.org) more than 42,000 similar incidents were reported across the United States.
But problems occur in every election, not just the debacle that occurred in November 2004. Let's look at some scary things that happened during Humboldt County’s most recent election on June 6. In Eureka, two memory cards failed from Diebold optical scanners. Two more failed in Arcata. In Rio Dell, Hydesville, Scotia and Fortuna, the scanners were unable to transmit their data by modem to the central tabulator at the elections department headquarters for various reasons.
While these “aren’t things that are suspicious,” as Elections Manager Lindsey McWilliams told the media at the time, there is indeed cause for suspicion when considering the Diebold optical scanner technology. Part of the programming contained in the Diebold scanners is proprietary "interpreted code" which is prohibited by the 2002 FEC Voluntary Voting System Standards according to the California's Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board (VSTAAB).
Even more frightening however is how insecure this system is. In July 2005, www.BlackBoxVoting.org published a report by Harri Hursti documenting exactly how he was able to alter election outcomes without leaving behind any evidence. In February 2006, the VSTAAB issued a report confirming Hursti's findings, and identifying 16 new bugs in the programming of Diebold's optical scanners.
So what is one to do, besides run away scared? For starters, I recommend getting educated about how flawed our elections system really is. A great place to start is the comprehensive blog found at www.WeDoNotConsent.Blogspot.com that is published by local advocacy journalist Dave Berman who helped contribute to this article.
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Jim Nelson is co-owner of Agreda Communications, which provides total graphic solutions to companies worldwide from their online storefront at www.MarcomAndPOP.com.