The Washington Post
Tuesday 10 October 2006
Washington - Sometimes, paranoids are right. And sometimes even when paranoids are wrong, it's worth considering what they're worried about.
I speak here of all who are worried sick that those new, fancy high-tech voting systems can be hacked, fiddled with and otherwise made to record votes that aren't cast, or fail to record votes that are.
I do not pretend to know how large a threat this is. I do know that it's a threat to democracy when so many Americans doubt that their votes will be recorded accurately. And I also know that smart, computer-savvy people out there are concerned about these machines.
The perfectly obvious thing is for the entire country to do what a number of states have already done: require paper trails so that if we have a close election or suspect something went wrong, we have the opportunity to go back and check the results.
And so it is heartening that a diverse group - Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives - in Congress has proposed legislation to give everyone, even the supposedly paranoid, confidence that our elections are on the level.
The bill has been pushed by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., with strong support from Reps. Tom Davis, R-Va., and Tom Cole, R-Okla. It has 219 co-sponsors, which happens to be a majority of House members.
The bill requires that voting machines produce a permanent paper record that voters themselves can verify. It requires random, unannounced hand-count audits in 2 percent of all precincts to make sure the machines recorded votes properly.
It prohibits connecting any voting machine component to the Internet and bans political and financial conflicts of interests among manufacturers, test laboratories and political parties. It also includes protections for voters with disabilities.
Pretty much common sense, right? The problem is that the issue of protecting the right to vote has been mired in partisanship and in the suspicion that all who worry about electronic voting are crazy conspiracy-mongers who imagine the worst about everybody.
But Holt and Davis don't fit the stereotype. "I have steered clear of conspiracy theories because I'm not a conspiracist by nature," says Holt, a Ph.D. in physics who has no problem with innovation. "But I'm quick to say that you cannot disprove the conspiracy theories if you don't have a paper trail." Anyone with confidence in these machines should have faith that they'll pass any tests of how well they'd work.
Because of the bitter disputes over what happened in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, some Republicans are suspicious that all the noise surrounding the new voting machines is being generated by angry Democrats. "When I first introduced the bill a couple of sessions ago," Holt says, "a lot of Republicans stayed away from it because they believed that it was payback for Florida."
But over time, many Republicans have come to realize that machine errors are nonpartisan. Tom Davis is about as loyal a Republican as you'll find. He came to this cause in part because a result in a Virginia school board race not only defied everyone's expectations but seemed to him flatly wrong.
"Some people will call me paranoid," Davis chuckles, "but it was real clear to me that in that race, some votes weren't picked up." And the technology, he says, made it impossible to check the count.
In fact, as Davis notes, partisan splits on the new technologies vary sharply from state to state. Whichever party happened to control the election board that spent a lot of money on the new technologies tends to resist challenges to it. But defensiveness, either by election officials or by vendors, should not get in the way of reforms and protections.
Nor, says Davis, should political polarization be allowed to stop even those reforms that have a lot of bipartisan support. "A lot of no-brainers that ought to be getting done," he says, "aren't getting done."
There are respectable studies - for example, one released this summer by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School - suggesting that the new machines may be far easier to hack than we want to know. But Holt explains why even skeptics of such studies should favor technological safety nets just in case they someday prove to be right.
"The winners will always believe the results of elections," says Holt. "But it eats away at democracy if the loser thinks that something went wrong, for accidental or malicious reasons."
Let's hope that things go OK this November, and then make sure that winners and losers alike can have confidence in our system the next time around.
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New Voter Registration Laws Leave Thousands Off the Rolls
By Richard Wolf
USA Today
Tuesday 10 October 2006
Washington - Some of this year's elections could be decided by those who can't vote.
Voting Fraud: Report Refutes Fraud at Poll Sites
Across the country, new laws restricting who can register and vote have reduced the number of people who are eligible. Some of those laws have been blocked in court. Even so, critics say, the damage has been done:
* In Arizona, about 21,000 voter registration applications were rejected because of inadequate proof of citizenship, required under a 2004 law. Most who were affected lacked up-to-date driver's licenses, birth certificates or passports.
A federal appellate court blocked enforcement of the law - which also requires voters to show ID at the polls - last week, four days before the registration deadline. "We're looking at an enormous disparate impact on people of color," says Linda Brown, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network.
* In Florida, a law setting up new requirements for independent groups that register voters prompted the League of Women Voters to suspend registration drives for five months until a court intervened. In that period, the league could have registered thousands of people, The registration deadline is Tuesday. "You've just got to assume it's going to have an impact," says Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the league's state president.
* In Ohio, a law that made paid workers liable for the validity of the registrations they collect caused several groups to stop signing up voters for two months this summer. By the time courts intervened, the opportunity had been lost for thousands of registrations.
The group ACORN, which advocates for low-income families, wanted to sign up 138,000 Ohioans this year; now it will settle for 100,000. "Those were really the critical months," head organizer Katy Gall says. "In past years, we've met or exceeded our goals."
Advocates of registration and photo identification laws say they are needed to prevent fraud. They say the rules apply to all potential voters, regardless of race, ethnicity, income or ideology. "This is a matter of voter confidence, whether or not the fraud is real or perceived," says Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, whose state has one of the nation's strictest ID requirements.
Laws tightening the rules on registrations also have been passed in Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington. Laws imposing photo ID requirements at the polls were passed in Georgia and Missouri, but courts have intervened.
Paul DeGregorio, chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, says the laws should not discourage citizens from voting. Far worse, he says, would be for states to ignore problems that cause Americans to distrust the process.
Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law disagrees. "All of them will have an impact in suppressing votes," she says. "Even when courts have overturned them, they have ongoing impact."
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Now that you've gotten all "paranoid" here's some relief...........I think..........LOL..............Scott
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Cartoon Satire: 'GOP 2.0' (Fiore Animation)
Comparing the USA's Republican Party to a new kind of software that lets
you do all sorts of keen things:
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/messaging.html
... plus Fiore cartoon archives:
http://www.markfiore.com/animation.html
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