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the electronic voting corporations providing soggy punchcard ballots designed to fail (produce "hanging chads," etc.) in FLA '00. One employee whistleblower says it was to artificially create a market for electronic voting machines. Another believes it was to steal the election. These motives are not mutually exclusive. Steal one election, and set things up (e-voting boondoggle fast-tracked all over the country) to steal elections forevermore.
It wasn't the paper that was the problem. It was WHO was providing it, and their devious or diabolical intentions.
In any case, punchcards were never a good form of paper ballot. As has been proven in Ohio '04, punchcards can easily be miscounted by slipping the card, with the voter choices represented only by holes in the card, into a wrongly callibrated hole counter. What's needed is a VOTER MARK **NEXT TO A NAME**. The vote must be easily recognizable to the human eye. Anything that interferes in that human relationship--one person's anonymous vote being easily recognizable and countable (and recountable) by other human beings--especially high speed machines run on 'TRADE SECRET' code (jeez)--creates too much opportunity to INTERPRET the results. A voter mark handwritten NEXT TO A NAME is the least ambiguous form of voting. And if those votes are then counted IN PUBLIC VIEW in close proximity to that voter (his/her precinct) BEFORE being transported elsewhere, that is the most security you can have--HUMAN BEINGS, of all political stripes, free to WATCH, and the locally and publicly counted results posted locally for all to see. Every step you take away from a visible mark made by a human, and counted by humans in public view--and, in particular, every machine or private corporations you interpose, and every bit of secrecy created by officialdom--decreases security.
ANY system can be fiddled. With electronic voting, insecurity is huge, and includes the SPEED of the count, the number of votes that can be switched with one simple action (a line of code), the very secrecy of the "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, easy insider access to the 'TRADE SECRET' code, the complete lack of a paper trail (in many states--still) or miserably inadequate audits (even the states that have ballots don't do enough of a hand-count to catch fraud, and some don't ANY automatic audit), and the inherent insecurity of BILLIONS of dollars being at issue, both as to voting machine contracts and who gains power over government coffers (by means of fiddling the vote). The COST of e-voting has corrupted our whole system, and it has introduced a corporate "culture of secrecy" that has infected election officials with HOSTILITY TO THE VOTERS AND CITIZENS whom they are supposed to serve. It is stark-raving madness to give "trade secret" control of election outcomes to PRIVATE corporations, let alone to private corporations with close ties to the Republican Party and rightwing causes (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia).
Punchcards and other mechanical systems also introduce elements--the punchcards, the holes, the callibration--that increase insecurity because you can't SEE the vote, and because--as Dan Rather showed--each element is corruptible. If a private corporation controls production of the punchcards, and government officials do not provide oversight, or look the other way, an opportunity is created to misuse that power.
A marked paper ballot, hand-counted in public, is the MOST secure. Its very slowness is an asset. Its clunkiness and awkwardness INCREASES security because the very existence of a marked paper ballot is a preventative to large-scale vote switching. You have to have duplicate ballots; you have to mark them; you have to get rid of the real ones. And...HUMAN BEINGS ARE WATCHING, every step of the way. You might be able to get away with large-scale fraud, with enough conspirators involved, but every person involved, and every physical ballot you have to get rid or, or falsify, increases the chances that you will be caught.
With e-voting, ONE INSIDER HACKER can switch a million votes, instantly, without detection. The potential exists to EASILY and UNDETECTABLY change the outcome of state and national elections. With zero auditing, or only 1% auditing, how would anybody know? There is only inferential evidence (pre-election polls; exit polls--the very pickle we were in, in 2004). And even with paper ballots that are electronically tabulated (optiscans), if you don't COUNT the ballots, you have only created the POSSIBILITY of a reliable result, not the reliable result itself. Optiscans heighten insecurity partly because they create the ILLUSION of security. ('oh, we have a paper ballot--we don't have to worry.') In most states, those ballots go into a box and are never seen again--and the ELECTRONIC TABULATION of what the ballots supposedly said determines the outcome. Your vote becomes merely a bunch of manipulable electrons!
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