This morning, October 26, listening to the Steve Gill show out of a Nashville radio station, the substitute host and his callers were livid about reports of electronic vote machines flipping votes to Obama from Romney in Guilford County, NC. The on-air talent proclaimed his firm belief that "those Chicago thugs" would stoop to anything to win the election.
For those of you not paying attention to this issue, electronic voting machines have undermined the integrity of casting a ballot, the most important single act in secular civil society, ever since they first appeared. The fiasco of the 2000 Florida election created the policy window through which a seemingly elegant idea with great intentions found entree to the American Political System. The vagaries of hanging chads, swinging chads, dimpled chads, and butterfly ballots pale when compared to the nearly infinite side trips to Hell created in the obscurity offered in indecipherable and ephemeral machine code. E-voting became a superb example of the truism that all problems have solutions and that all solutions create problems.
Details beyond the fleur de kos.
One of the first elections in which e-voting blipped the radar screen of good government activists came in the 2002 Georgia governors race. Georgia committed very early to a massive roll-out of electronic machines throughout the state. Roy Barnes, the incumbent Dem faced a serious challenger in former Democrat Sonny Purdue. Barnes' plan to remove the Confederate Battle Flag from the state banner raised enough angry opposition in traditionally Democratic strongholds that everyone knew Barnes was in trouble, presenting the real possibility of the first Republican governor of Georgia since Reconstruction. With the changing demographics of Georgia and the many defections of former Dems to the R column, no one was surprised when Sonny Purdue emerged the winner. A few people did notice that Purdue's margin of victory had an odd feature to it. Most counties throughout the state registered votes commensurate with proportions they had seen in previous elections. Four counties in south Georgia returned record increase in voter turnout and the added votes came in favor of Purdue, at nearly the same total as his statewide margin of victory. The only problem with confirming there was voter fraud is that e-vote machines are so readily hackable
The highest profile concern came in the Ohio presidential race of 2004 when Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, proclaimed in a fund raising letter he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." When exit polls indicated that John Kerry had a sizable lead but "actual votes" showed George Bush carried the state, Dems got the e-vote blues in a serious way. Nothing could be done about the outcome so long as e-voting machines provide no paper trail. How can you recount digital data when it is completely possible to make the alterations impossible to discern?
Although few e-vote issues got national media attention in 2008, VerifyVoting.org estimates that 1800 questionable events involving electronic voting occurred in that election nationwide.
With an election that everyone acknowledges will be close, with the increasing probability that the outcome will result, like in 2000, with a split in the popular and electoral vote totals, with the massive amount of money both campaigns have set aside to deal with post election legal wrangling, and with the fact that 25% of Americans will vote on paperless e-voting machines, the nightmare of an agonizingly protracted struggle in 2012 through early 2013 to determine the final victor looms disturbingly large. The turmoil of multiple state recounts guarantees whoever swears the oath of office in January 2013 will preside over a troubled nation, half of which will be determined to de-legitimize his election at every turn.
The idea that anyone would tamper with a citizen's right to vote whether by registration fraud, voter caging, vote fixing, etc. is beyond reprehensible. That some bastard in North Carolina might have fudged the program on the Guilford County voting machines should infuriate Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike as much as the same happening for Romney in another state. Even if the cause of the reported glitches in North Carolina may also be more benign in origin - a politically innocent programmer could accidentally have left a line of code causing the machine to shift the touchscreen input to the wrong name, such incompetence should enrage citizens just as much as any planned cheating, because the system so many of us use is inherently flawed in the first place.
If there is a silver lining behind the clouds of this coming poo-storm, it is that here at last is an example of these inherent flaws which should make a broader swath of Republicans as concerned as Democrats in the integrity of our electoral and thereby our political system. Out of the chaos of another disputed national election, we might have the opportunity to get it right. Even if foreign policy, taxation, entitlements, infrastructure, military spending debates all result in stupefying gridlock from a Romney administration negotiating with a Democratically controlled Senate or an Obama administration negotiating with a Republican controlled House, here is an issue that just might unite the otherwise intransigent.
If you are interested in this issue three links are listed below.
https://www.youtube.com/...
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/