A secretive, opaque, corruptible vote-counting process has no place in our society. With a fast-approaching deadline of 5 p.m. Wednesday, it is essential that a recount be filed for in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. This will lift the cloud of uncertainty currently hanging over the results:
One thing we should expect from our government is certainty about who won an election and, within a reasonable margin of error, by how much.
Government famously failed that test in the 2000 presidential election and did so again April 5 in a down-to-the-wire election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The discovery, two days after the election, of 14,000 missing votes changed the likely outcome of a race that had become a referendum on Gov. Scott Walker and his slashing of pay, benefits and bargaining rights of public sector workers.
Given a 5 year history of vote irregularities in Waukesha county including such impossible anomalies as 20,000 more votes than ballots cast, it would be insane to rely on an outcome produced by easily hackable unaudited voting machines.
In 2006, Wisconsin began using systems such as the Diebold AccuVote OS. The vulnerabilities of this machine were exposed in the HBO Documentary Hacking Democracy:
The GOP legacy has been associated with the use of dirty tricks to change the outcome of elections. One example of this is Ohio 2004:
By any calculation, the Ohio 2004 election was a black day for American democracy. Lou Harris, known as the “father of modern political polling,” and a man not given to hyperbole, called it “as dirty an election as America has ever seen.” All the exit polls suggested Ohio would go to Kerry. But when the vote was counted George Bush had won by 132,685 votes, adding Ohio’s crucial 20 Electoral College votes to his tally. And putting him, not Kerry, into the White House. It has since been alleged that at several points on election night, the Ohio secretary of state’s official Web site, which was responsible for reporting the results, was being hosted by a server in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee...
In computer jargon it is known as a man-in-the-middle attack.
“At the time I didn’t know who SMARTech were,” says IT expert Stephen Spoonamore, opening a file on his computer showing the Internet architecture map of the 2004 Ohio election. He points to a red box in the bottom right-hand corner showing SMARTech’s server.
“Then I found out: They host Rove’s e-mails. They host the RNC’s Web site. They host George Bush’s Web site.” His voice rises in disbelief.
“I go, ‘Holy shit, this is a man-in-the-middle attack! These guys have programmed the state’s computers to talk to a company with ties
to the Republican Party.’
Another infamous instance of suspected hacking is Florida 2000, when the Republican Speaker of the State House asked a programmer to create vote-rigging software:
Curtis’s explosive allegations, repeated in sworn testimony to members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, included the remarkable charge that he had been asked in 2000 by the Speaker of Florida’s Legislature, Republican Tom Feeney, to create an electronic vote-rigging software prototype.
Curtis and Feeney first crossed paths when, in a seemingly substantial conflict of interest, Feeney worked as corporate counsel and registered lobbyist for the software firm Yang Enterprises Inc. (YEI) in addition to being the House Speaker. Feeney insists there was absolutely no conflict of interest, even though YEI has had several multimillion-dollar contracts with the state of Florida. Curtis saw a major problem with Feeney’s request that vote-rigging routines be invisible in the computer source code. (Routines are specific instructions for a program; for example, a routine could add an extra Republican vote for every two Democratic votes recorded.) Curtis says he was told by his boss—Mrs. Li-Woan Yang—that the program was needed “to control the vote in South Florida.”
The best way to deter these tactics from being used is to perform a full hand recount in disputed elections such as that for the Supreme Court in Wisconsin.