Milwaukee's largest weekly with a circulation of 72,000.
Was the Election Stolen?
By David Corn
Clear away the rhetoric, and what mostly remains are the odd early exit polls, troubling instances of bad electronic voting, and curious--or possibly curious--trends in Florida. This may be the beginning of a case; it is not a case in itself.
Before the vote-counting was done, the e-mails started arriving. The election's been stolen! Fraud! John Kerry won! In the following days, these charges flew over the Internet. The basic claim was that the early exit polls--which showed Kerry ahead of George W. Bush--were right; the vote tallies were rigged.
Could this be? Or have ballot booths with electronic voting machines become the new "grassy knoll" for conspiracy theorists?
Anyone who questioned the integrity of the nation's voting system--before the election or after--has had good reason to do so. Electronic voting that does not produce an auditable paper trail is worrisome--as is the possibility that the machines can be hacked. The proponents of these systems claim there are sufficient safeguards. But in this election there were numerous reports of e-voting gone bad. Votes cast for one candidate were registered for another. In Broward County, Fla., software subtracted votes rather than added them. In Franklin County, Ohio, an older electronic machine reported an extra 3,893 votes for Bush. Local election officials caught that error. But when I asked Peggy Howell, one of those officials, why the mistake occurred, she replied, "We really don't know." Were these errors statistically insignificant glitches that inevitably happen in any large system? "It gives us the uneasy feeling that we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg," Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is part of the Election Protection Coalition, told Reuters.
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Voter Beware
The skeptics--correct or not in their claims of fraud--are right to be concerned in general about the vote-counting system. Reps. John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler have asked the Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office) to investigate the "voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election."
Blackboxvoting.org--a group that has long decried electronic voting and now claims that "fraud took place in the 2004 election"--has filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 counties and localities, in an attempt to audit the election. The public does deserve any information that would allow it to evaluate vote-counting. Beyond that, extensive election reform is necessary. Electronic voting ought to produce a paper trail that can be examined. There should be national standards for voting systems and for verifying vote tallies. And vote counters should be nonpartisan public servants, not secretive corporations or party hacks.
The system ought to be so solid that no one would have cause even to wonder whether an election has been stolen. more...
http://www.shepherd-express.com/shepherd/25/47/cover_story.html
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