Godless Mom in the Bible Belt

As I've stated before, I don't believe that Bush legitimately won either the 2000 or 2004 election. The 2000 election was decided by the Supreme Court. The 2004 election was decided through fraud, tampering, manipulation and intimidation.

Now, lest you think I've suddenly crossed the line into La La Land, let me assure you that I'm not the type to go looking for a conspiracy. I've said before that I'm not overly bright and I tend to be a bit slow on the uptake but what I lack in raw intellect I make up for in sheer tenacity and thirst for knowledge. After my experience at the voting booth during early voting last October that tenacity and thirst kicked into overdrive and I found myself questioning everything I had ever known about the democratic process in the United States.

After the debacle of the 2000 election and all the bullshit regarding pregnant and hanging chads the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002. I believe it was passed with the best of intentions as a solution to the problems involved with the traditional ballots, but rather than fixing these problems it opened up a can of worms unlike any we've ever seen.

Now, there were problems all over the country on election day with the electronic voting machines. Issues like the one I encountered were labeled "Calibration error" and while this type of issue was frustrating and potentially damaging to election results it didn't even scratch the surface of the real problem. We've all heard about the case in Franklin County, Ohio where the machines gave Bush 4,258 votes even though only 638 people actually cast ballots. You've also probably heard about Broward County, Florida where due to a glitch in the machines, once the votes totaled more than 32,000, the silly things started counting backwards. These problems are only two examples of many irregularities that occurred with the electronic voting machines in November, 2004. There were cases of some votes being counted twice and the machines returning totals that exceeded the number of registered voters, the machines in some precincts would only register 300 votes and then would quit tallying, votes were lost when it turned out the machines didn't have the ability to store the amount of data needed to handle a national election. This happened all across the country in red and blue states alike.

There are two main problems with the machines. First, there is no paper trail. Once you've pushed that button to cast your vote, it is lost in a sea of data. The only way to do a recount is to run the same numbers through the same computer. A manual recount (traditionally the most labor intensive yet reliable method) is impossible. The second problem is the vulnerability of the data to manipulation. A group of professors and researchers from Johns Hopkins did a security analysis on the Diebold machines in May of 2004, this is a quote from their findings.

"Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered and executed without access to the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable, showing that not only can an insider, such as a poll worker, modify the votes, but that insiders can also violate voter privacy and match votes with the voters who cast them."

It is easy to assume that in order to manipulate an election on a national level it would take so many people that the conspiracy would quickly fall apart as whistleblowers came forward. The problem with our new fangled electronic systems is that it would actually take very few people to manipulate the election results on a massive level. The fact that the electoral system puts the results in the hands of a few key "swing" states makes the election even easier to manipulate. Who cares about what happens in Idaho when all you have to do is concentrate your efforts on Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania?

Tomorrow I'll address the issues of voter suppression, anomalous results and exit polls.