Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
September 2, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Recent
Stories
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
2, 2003
Ghosts in the Machines
The
Business of Counting Votes
By JASON LEOPOLD
It seems fitting that a president who was brought
into office because of a scandalous election would enact a law
to overhaul the electoral process to make it easier for people
to choose their leaders the second time around.
But that's not what the Omnibus Appropriations
Bill, signed into law by President Bush in October 2002, will
do. Instead, the law will force most states to switch from paper
balloting to a fully computerized system---one that is currently
rife with programming flaws and is incapable of being audited_that
could call into question the legitimacy of future local and national
elections and put the wrong candidates into office.
The bill contains $1.515 billion to fund
activities related to the Help America Vote Act, a federal election
reform bill that provides money to states for the improvement
of elections; including $15 million to the General Services Administration
to reimburse states that purchased optical scan or electronic
voting equipment prior to the November 2000 election.
Bev Harris, a Seattle resident who runs
a small public relations business, is credited with uncovering
the flaws in electronic voting machines and has recently written
a book on the subject called "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering
in the 21st Century."
Harris' muckraking on electronic voting
have been featured on Scoop, an award-winning Internet news site
based in New Zealand, (full disclosure: I am a regular contributor
to Scoop) that is quickly developing a reputation in the United
States for its groundbreaking investigative news stories.
Harris recently uncovered "some
40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable
files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based
in North Canton, Ohio," according to an Aug. 21 feature
story on Harris in the Seattle Times, and exposed the massive
flaws in Diebold's software that can easily be manipulated. An
in-depth report on Diebold's electronic voting machines can be
found at <www.scoop.co.nz>
Diebold's chief executive, Walden O'Dell,
in a fundraiser his company sponsored for President Bush last
week promised the president that his company would "deliver"
the necessary votes needed to keep Bush in the White House for
a second term, prompting Democrats in Congress to call for Diebold
to remove its machines from being used during next year's primary
election.
Michelle Griggy, a Diebold spokeswoman,
dismissed any appearance of a conflict-of-interest saying the
company routinely holds fundraisers for other political causes
absent of any bias.
While much ink has been spilled in the
mainstream media on the so-called benefits of computerized voting
(cheaper, faster, more reliable), you would be hard-pressed to
find an equal number of stories highlighting the side effects
that comes from computerized voting.
The disastrous 2000 presidential election
and the subsequent ballot recount in Florida, in which hanging
chads made it nearly impossible to figure out whether people
in the Sunshine State voted for Al Gore or George Bush, led to
a full-scale campaign by lawmakers to outlaw paper balloting
in favor of user-friendly computerized voting machines.
The problem with the Omnibus bill, according
to Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr
College in Pennsylvania and one of the most vocal opponents of
paperless balloting, is that it leaves no paper trail, making
it ripe for manipulation.
"Any programmer can write code that
displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints
yet another result," Mercuri told a reporter for Common
<Dreams.org>. "There is no known way to ensure that
this is not happening inside of a voting system. No electronic
voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of
the U.S. government or international computer security standards..."
The Federal Election Commission provides only voluntary standards,
and even those don't ensure election "integrity," she
says.
That's exactly what happened in Cleveland
on May 7, 2003. Election officials said they ran into problems
with the electronic voting machines when they tried to merge
the numbers from their Lorain and Elyria offices.
The elections board used two different
kinds of ''touch-screen'' voting machines in two Cleveland counties
and the results couldn't be merged with totals from another county,
which came from more familiar punch cards.
''I don't know exactly what happened
... we're having software people look into that now,'' said Marilyn
Jacobcik, the board of elections executive director. ''But we
are assured that all the numbers are accurate.''
One of the biggest problems, according
to one election worker, was that the office wasn't prepared to
compile data from three different computer systems.
John Blevins, a member of the board of
elections, attributed the breakdown to ''growing pains.''
Because of the Help America Vote Act
passed last year, he said, elections boards are required to install
electronic voting machines by the 2004 election.
''We were basically trying two different
computer systems,'' Blevins said, noting the county used machines
provided by Diebold in North Ridgeville and MicroVote in the
Amherst race. ''I realize maybe things move a little slower but
in the end it will be a much smoother operation. We have to do
this by November 2004.''
Computerized voting and the technological
problems related to the system had already been realized before
hanging chads became a household phrase. In November 1998, an
election in Hawaii was held using state-of-the-art computers
designed by Electronic Systems & Software, a company with
close ties to Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
One such lawmaker, Sen. Chuck Hagel,
R-Neb, was part owner and former chairman and chief executive
of ES&S, a company that made all the equipment that counted
the votes during his last two runs for office, yet he failed
to list his ties to the company on federal disclosure forms.
Seven of ES&S' 361 voting machines
used in Hawaii on Election Day in November 1998 malfunctioned
(five units had lens occlusion, one unit had a defective cable
and one unit had a defective "read head"), which led
to Hawaii's first ever statewide election review and a first
in the history of the United States. Hundreds of people who used
the machines complained mightily to local election officials
that the candidates they picked did not register in the computerized
system.
Mercuri said in an interview with Common
Dreams last year that in order for an electronic voting system
to be foolproof, five components must be present - a voter, a
ballot, a computerized voting machine, a printer, and an optical
scanner - and three basic steps must be taken.
"First, the voting machine registers
a voter's selection both electronically and on a paper ballot.
Second, the machine then displays the paper ballot behind clear
glass or plastic so that the voter can review their selection,
but not take the ballot home by mistake. If the voter's selection
doesn't agree with the ballot or the voter makes a mistake, the
voter can call a poll worker to void the ballot, and then re-vote.
And third, the paper ballot is optically scanned (most likely
at the county administration building), providing a second electronic
tally. If anything goes wrong with either the voting machines
or the optical scanner, the paper ballots can be hand-counted
as a last resort or as part of an audit. And voila! We have a
fully auditable voting system with checks and balances, review
and redundancy."
There are dozens of other horror stories
that spawned from the signing of the Omnibus bill by President
Bush and these too involve Florida and a Bush.
The new touch-screen equipment used during
the September 2002 Florida elections wrongfully credited GOP
gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush in one precinct when votes were
cast for the Democratic candidate for governor because of a "misaligned"
touch screen. No one knows how many votes were misrecorded. Miami-Dade
was still licking its wounds over the 2000 presidential election
that helped put George Bush in office. For the primary election,
the county spent $24.5 million for 7,200 voting machines, but
many polling places opened late or did not have enough machines
up and running. Many poll workers had problems collecting votes
from the machines, delaying the final results of the election
for a week.
The November general election was relatively
glitch-free, but the county had to turn the logistics of the
election over to the Miami-Dade police department and dedicate
at least three county employees to each polling place.
In May, a Miami-Dade Inspector General
released the results of a seven-month investigation into the
use of the electronic voting machine that were credited with
helping Bush secure a second term in office. The results of the
probe are damning.
For one, the company that sold the touch-screen
voting machines, ES&S, to Miami-Dade county misled county
officials about the "about the equipment and delivered goods
that were ''hardly state-of-the-art technology,'' according to
the Miami Herald, which obtained a copy of the inspector general's
report.
"The draft report by the county
inspector general's office following a seven-month investigation
provides a critical account of the process leading to the $25
million purchase of a voting system that was expected to lead
to trouble-free elections. Instead, the Sept. 10, 2002, election
-- a national black eye for Miami-Dade -- was plagued with problems
caused in part by the lengthy start-up time for the machines,"
the Herald reported.
Moreover, the report found that ES&S
told county officials that its electronic voting machines would
provide voters with a system that could run a trilingual ballot,
in English, Spanish and Creole. Although state certification
was pending for the trilingual ballot software, the county only
considered the possibility of having separate English/Spanish
and English/Creole machines as a backup plan.
In its oral sales presentation, ES&S
told the county that having a trilingual system would not require
additional data capacity. Yet, the company's own documentation
from 2001 indicated that the type of files that would be required
for such a system would require an additional storage device.
The report questions why the boot-up
time for each machine under the software used in the primary
election was so lengthy, noting that the processor for each machine
is an Intel 386 EX processor, technology that is more than a
decade old.
Testing by the State of Florida found
numerous "anomalies and deficiencies" in newer versions
of voting machine software that would have sped up the boot-up
process. The report also cautions the county not to be "overly
reliant" on representations made by ES&S about what
a highly touted upcoming version of the software will do.
Still, because Miami-Dade invested more
than $25 million into the technology, the inspector general did
not recommend scrapping the electronic voting machines, but rather
work within the limitations of the system and "hope"
that it will pull off a successful general election come 2004.
Linda Rodriguez-Taseff, president of
the South Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union
and a leading advocate of voting reform in Miami-Dade, said the
report was not surprising.
"It's everything we said it would
be," she said. "The time to act is now. Let's scrap
this system and get a new system in place."
Despite the malfeasance, it's become
difficult for county officials to challenge the results of tainted
elections.
In city council elections in Palm Beach
last March, when a losing candidate challenged the results, a
local judge denied the challenger and his consultant the opportunity
to inspect the machines, citing the rights of the manufacturer,
Sequoia, to protect its trade secrets.
In February 2003, Daniel Spillane blew
the whistle on his former employer, VoteHere, a privately held
electronic voting machine company in Washington, D.C., run by
a former senior military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and
whose board includes former CIA Director Robert Gates, claiming
the company's patented digital balloting software contained severe
programming errors, which could lead to, among other disasters,
the massive deletion of ballots.
Spillane, who was fired from VoteHere
in 2001, alleged in a wrongful termination lawsuit against his
former employer, that VoteHere's undertook measures to thwart
an independent review of its software. He said he voiced his
concerns with company executives and that he was fired hours
before VoteHere was scheduled to meet with representatives from
the Independent Test Authority, an auditing group that scrutinizes
electronic voting equipment and software, and the U.S. General
Accounting Office.
Spillane is one of a half-dozen experts
to question the wisdom behind the Omnibus bill and warns that
the law's true goal is to facilitate the sale of electronic voting
machines.
He and Mercuri wrote in November about
Sequoia Voting Systems, an outfit seeking to install electronic
voting booths in Santa Clara County, California. Most of Sequoia's
machines provide nothing in the way of receipts or physical audit
trails, which would facilitate a recount, ripening the prospects
for electronic election fraud. She and other experts have also
been barred from examining Sequoia's product, because it is sold
under restrictive trade-secret agreements.
Spillane, Mercuri, and 453 other technologists
have endorsed a "Resolution on Electronic Voting" which
warns of the dangers inherent in electronic voting systems that
keep only digital records of ballots cast. The resolution states
that programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious
tampering are serious risks which call for a voter-verifiable
audit trail -- a permanent, physical, tamper-resistant record
of each vote which can be checked by the voter before casting
their ballot, and retained afterward.
Despite the resolution, Santa Clara County
made its final decision on Tuesday to spend $20 million on 5,000
touch-screen voting booths made by Sequoia, most of which will
not include a printed audit trail. Sequoia has a history of involvement
with government corruption, including the pay-off of Louisiana
election official Jerry Fowler.
The San Francisco Chronicle is one of
only a handful of news organizations that called into question
the veracity of electronic voting when it became clear that the
new technology could lead to voter fraud in Santa Clara County.
David Dill, professor of computer science
at Stanford University and leader of an anti-electronic voting
campaign told the Chronicle that the electronic voting machines
Santa Clara planned to purchase "pose an unacceptable risk
that errors or deliberate election-rigging will go undetected,
since they do not provide a way for the voters to verify independently
that the machine correctly records and counts the votes they
have cast."
Dill, in consultation with other experts
and his Stanford colleagues, had voiced their concern via a petition
urging that voting machines not be purchased or used unless they
provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, according to the Chronicle.
When such machines are already in use,
the petition stated, they should be replaced or modified to provide
such a record. And Dill had collected the signatures of hundreds
of technologists, including many of the best-known names in computer
science, security and election technology.
The opposition movement caught the eye
of Kevin Shelley, California's new secretary of state. In January
2003, Shelley appointed a task force to advise him and the board
charged with certifying voting equipment in the state on security
and audit ability issues raised by touch-screen voting.
Peter Coyote, who narrated a documentary
film last year on the disasters surrounding the 2000 presidential
election, has launched a grassroots letter writing campaign urging
federal lawmakers to take a second look at how the Help America
Vote Act can put the wrong candidates in office.
In his letter to California's Democratic
Senator Barbara Boxer, Coyote writes: "Last year, I narrated
a film called "Unprecedented" by American journalist
Greg Palast. This film documents the illegal expunging of 54,000
black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters from the Florida rolls
just before the presidential election. We interviewed the computer
company that did the work, filmed their explanations of the instructions
they received and their admissions that they knew that their
instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now
been revised to 91,000. Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to
have returned these voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains
his last re-election. The Republicans have something far worse
in mind for the next presidential election and Democrats need
to be prepared."
"Unless the issue of voter fraud
is elevated to an issue of national importance, not only is it
highly probable that Democrats will lose again and again, but
eventually voters will "sense" even if they cannot
prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those
boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization
of the vote is tantamount to turning over the control of democracy
to the corporate sector. I urge you to use your considerable
powers and influence to address this issue."
Jason Leopold
can be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
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