Can you just imagine the chief executive of the main paperless electronic voting machine maker say, “(I am) committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”? You don’t have to imagine. It happened!
Walden O’Dell, then Diebold CEO made the prophetic guarantee in an August 2003 fundraising letter. Can you imagine what Republicans or their mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh would say if that CEO were a Democrat speaking of a sitting Democratic president?
Yet, the multitudinous tales of election mayhem by Diebold from California, Georgia, Maryland, Florida, Minnesota, Ohio and most if not every state continues unabated. Election fraud will happen this fall and without a paper trail it will be nearly impossible to prove it.
There is a guiding rule for public servants and those dealing with them: one must not engage in an activity or accept, or give, a benefit if there is even the appearance of impropriety. This rule has been utterly trashed, and instead its opposite now rules the hearts and minds of our top so-called leaders. But in the voting machine scandals it is not just the appearance, but also the actuality of an ongoing impropriety.
The wolf is not merely guarding the henhouse—the wolf now owns it while we scuttle like lambs from one non-story to another allowing this outrage continue.
Three of the four voting machine makers are major Republican supporters. Chuck Hagel was chairman of ES&S, the voting machine maker that tallied 85% of Nebraska’s votes in his 1996 election to the Senate, the first Republican in 24 years to win that seat.
There are many reports of computer patches, code swapping and hacked manipulations. Just last week Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich, Jr., a Republican running for re-election, said that the voting situation is "approaching crisis proportions." He advised voters to vote with absentee ballots. "I don't care if we paid half a billion dollars or $1 billion," Ehrlich said. "If it's going to put the election at risk, there's no price tag for a phony election or a fraudulent election."
A former Diebold employee-turned-whistleblower, Chris Hood, recounts how in 2002 Diebold, though it was the highest of nine bids, got the Georgia contract for voting machines, and how Georgia essentially delegated the whole voting apparatus to them. He said Diebold employees altered 5000 voting machines (he personally did 56 and witnessed 1200) in the heavily Democratic DeKalb and Fulton Counties with a patch—a programmable memory card that can skew an election to any desired result. Small wonder that though the poles showed Democrats Max Cleland and Roy Barnes ahead six days before the election, both lost narrowly. [Max Cleland, you may recall, was the triple amputee Vietnam War vet who was viciously and fraudulently painted as a traitorous chicken by Republican Saxby Chambliss.]
Beyond the obvious corruption and unaccountability of paperless, ostensibly Republican-run, voting machines is the GOP’s systematic dis-enfranchisement of registered voters. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s ultra-partisan GOP secretary of state oversaw the purging of over 300,000 names in heavily Democratic precincts of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. Not surprisingly there were 50,000 complaints of dis-enfranchised voters following the election. Long lines up to 6 hours, in poorer Democratic precincts discouraged many still on the rolls from casting their ballots.
The United States is one of the very few democracies that allow private companies to run the voting of nations electorate. Just four such companies will secretly tabulate over 80% of Americans’ votes using their own proprietary software with no reliable checks or balances.
Regardless of party affiliation, we should all protest the further use of paperless, electronic voting machines, which without the safeguard of a verifiable paper trail, leave them easily subject to manipulation and fraud.
Equally, we should reject any and all attempts to discourage voting. Such dis-enfranchisement is the hallmark of fascist, totalitarian states, not the world’s supposedly truest democracy.
So instead of sending Jimmy Carter to some far off third world country to promote free and fair elections let’s send him somewhere closer to home. Let’s send him to America.
Richard F. Dawahare, 11/2/06
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