Think the Florida Recount Was Bad? Just Wait Until November 6
/You think the hanging chads in Florida were bad in 2000? You think the patch of procedures, appeals, and standards of review was crazy? At least a human being was looking at those ballots. At least some of the rest of us were able to look at that human being looking at those ballots. At least there were ballots to be seen. In 2012, on the other hand, loose technology, lax industry oversight, political indifference, and partisan bigotry mean there is the potential for mischief -- and by that I mean democracy-crushing voter fraud -- on a scale that would make the high drama and low comedy of November 2000 seem mundane.
How about thousands upon thousands of votes instantly disappearing from the electronic count of one candidate, or being added to the count of another, with no paper trail left behind? How about electronic voting machines whose programs can be breached and hacked -- patched for fraud, is the new term -- from thousands of miles away? How about new voting technology controlled largely by corporations with strong partisan ties? Not only can it all happen in two weeks, there is a viable case to be made that it's already happened -- in both the decade before and the decade since Bush v. Gore.
And of course the great irony of it all, one of the most under-reported stories of this campaign, is that the politicians and activists who have tried so hard this election cycle to make it harder for poor, ill, and elderly voters to vote are some of the ones most closely aligned with the operatives who can, with a click, determine the outcome of the coming election. Instead of securing accurate voting rights for all, they want to deprive voting rights for some. This is the important message Victoria Collier sends us courtesy of a trenchant piece (not currently online) in the November issue of Harper's *, titled "How To Rig An Election." Collier writes:
Old-school ballot-box fraud at its most egregious was localized and limited in scope. But new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a statewide or even national scale. And whereas once you could catch the guilty parties in the act, and even dredge the ballot boxes out of bayou, the virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programming could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It's the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.
Collier's piece is timely and jaw-dropping because of the context it offers for this cycle's voting-rights fights. It suggests persuasively that the Florida recount, and the federal legislation it spawned, have made our elections less reliable and thus more susceptible to partisan disenfranchisement than we ever could have imagined watching those hapless bureaucrats count those chads. We took a bad situation, in other words, and made it much worse. If the coming election is as close as everyone seems to think it is, there is no reason to believe with any confidence that honest officials could prevent someone from stealing it outright.
n direct response to the embarrassment of the 2000 election, and even before the next national election in 2002, Congress passed, and the aforementioned Bush signed, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), federal legislation designed to raise state election standards. It passed 92-2 in the Senate and 357-48 in the House of Representatives. The preamble to the law states its purpose:
To establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for States and units of local government with responsibility for the administration of Federal elections, and for other purposes.
In order for the states to improve their voting systems, they needed money. And HAVA authorized nearly $4 billion for the upgrade. The states gobbled up the money. And so did the electronic-voting companies. HAVA, we were told, was an example of bipartisan success, where both the winners and losers of 2000 had come together to protect the rights of all Americans to have their votes counted as accurately and fairly as possible. The only problem with the story, and the law, was that the money found its way into the wrong hands around the same time that the public oversight required by the law was turning out to be a sham.
The Recent Past
Let's now catch up with Collier's piece. The practices she chronicles may be new, but the patterns aren't. There were problems with electronic-voting irregularities before Florida, she contends, and cites as an example the 1996 Senate race in Nebraska, where Chuck Hagel won a surprisingly decisive victory over Ben Nelson. The polls were even days before the election, but Hagel won by 15 percent of the vote -- votes counted by a company Hagel had chaired until shortly before the election. The "surprising scale of his win," Collier writes, "awakened a new fear among voting-rights activists."
The intervening 16 years -- and electronic-voting irregularities in most of the five national elections since 2002 -- have done little to allay those fears. Nor did the Help America Vote Act. Collier writes that the law isn't ensuring voting accuracy or the reliability of election results but instead is "accelerating a deterioration of our electoral system that most Americans have yet to recognize, let alone understand." For example, Collier writes about an appalling lack of online security for electronic voting operations:
As recently as September 2011, a team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory hacked into one of Diebold's old Accuvote touchscreen systems. Their report asserted that anyone with $26 in parts and an eighth-grade science education would be able to manipulate the outcome of an election.
"This is a national security issue," wrote the Argonne team leader, Roger Johnston, using the sort of language that would normally set off alarm bells in our security-obsessed culture. Yet his warning has gone unheeded, and the Accuvote-TSX, now manufactured by ES&S [Hagel's old company], will be used in twenty states by more than 26 million voters in the 2012 general election.
Meanwhile, Collier reminds us, the "Election Assistance Commission" created by the law, the federal oversight office that was supposed to help ensure voting security, was so feckless that one of its chiefs, a Bush appointee, resigned in 2005, calling his office a "charade." That year, not incidentally, the Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was called a bipartisan effort, warned about the potential for great abuse from electronic-voting insiders, but reassured the American people that electronic voting was reliable so long as officials included a "voter-verifiable paper audit trail."
The CFER's 2005 report, led by lions-in-winter James Baker and Jimmy Carter, did more than just that. It also (to great public controversy) placed blame for election inaccuracies on the voters themselves, suggesting in great detail how states could force people to show more identification when they registered and voted. These recommendations paved the way for the current generation of odious new photo-identification laws, passed by Republican lawmakers in dozens of states. At the time, a handful of the commission's most vocal dissenters, the counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, presciently recorded their opposition:
While our election system is undeniably in need of substantial structural and administrative improvement, the burden of reform must not be borne by voters. The problems with American elections are not caused by American voters. They are caused by inadequate attention to election administration, insufficient resources, and unfair and unreasonable rules and procedures often designed and administered by elected or partisan individuals with an interest in the outcome of elections. Unfortunately, several sections of the Commission's report seem to shift the blame to regular Americans, and as a result, make recommendations that are likely to exclude a significant number of citizens from the political process -- especially those who have traditionally been disadvantaged by restrictions at the polls.
In other words, while Baker and Carter and company were focused on rules designed to stymie the efforts of a few illegal in-person voters, the wise men largely ignored the direct and obvious threat to millions of legitimate votes, the accurate and complete counting of which depends, then and now, on the good faith of unregulated companies and their employees, who operate with scarcely any government or public oversight. Add Collier's report to Tova Andrea Wang's excellent recent book The Politics of Voter Suppression, which shines the light on the long history of voter suppression in America, and it portends truly bad things for election night.**
