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CounterPunch
February
20, 2003
Welcome to the Machine
Glitch Wins
by a Landslide
by BEN TRIPP
This nation is not a Super Slurpee, Mr. President.
With that said, let's pretend there isn't an American attack
on a sovereign nation in the offing, that Europe is still among
America's allies, and global warming is just a paranoid speculation
by all those diaper-butt scientists. Let's pretend the space
shuttle touched down in the usual manner, Al Qaeda isn't gearing
up for another urban planning project, and North Korea is very,
very sorry about all those naughty threats it made and even as
we speak they're hammering their swords into ploughshares--although
what they could possibly want with ploughshares when nothing
grows in their country, I cannot surmise. In other words, let's
pretend -and we will be pretending so hard the veins will stand
out like whipcords in our necks--that all is well with the rest
of the world. That still leaves some shall we call them difficulties?
Difficulties here at home. And they're not going to go away
until we pry open Pandora's Black Box: the voting machines.
Because the American Experiment, as it
is known, ended on November 4, 2002. Not much has been made
of this, but it seems like a noteworthy subject. Until that
day, this country had a pretty simple system for choosing its
leaders: candidates ran against each other for public office,
and then the voters would come out in very small droves to vote
for the candidate with the most money. There were anomalies
that tested the efficacy of the system once in a while, if efficacy
is the word I want. It might be defecation. I'll have to look
it up. But in general the arrangement was unsatisfactory to
everyone, and so we kept it. Then a strange thing happened.
During a race for the presidency, the loser won.
This had happened before: there's a thing
called the Electoral College, and it's how the Electoral College
votes that actually determines who shall be president. It's
a peculiar system and isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution,
but the premise is that each state has a bunch of electors who
get together and vote, and these votes are sent on to Washington.
Ideally this college, which doesn't offer diplomas or student
loans, takes a bead on who the voters voted for, and votes for
same. But way back in 1824 and 1876, there wasn't a clear winner--in
the first case because nobody got a majority, and in the second
case because there was so much fraud in the South they sort of
drew straws and chose Rutherford B. Hayes. The more things change,
the more they don't. But the real kicker was in 1888, when one
candidate got the most popular votes (votes from humans) but
the other candidate got the most votes from the Electoral College.
It was all perfectly legal, and not nearly as boring as I make
it sound. In the year 2000, the presidency was won by the loser
again (and what a loser this time). But this time it wasn't
just an anomaly. The Supreme Court jiggered the election, the
Electoral College's votes were skewed, and a guy named Hanging
Chad declared George W. Bush the president.
This proved to be a terrible mistake,
and to ensure such an arschficken never occurred again,
lots of clever boots got together and decided to install digital
voting machines in place of the old-fashioned steam-powered ones
in common use throughout the country. But because America is
currently in the grip of Capitalism as extreme as Communism was
back in the good old days, we couldn't have a government agency
take care of this. That might involve new bureaucracies and
public spending, and besides launching the trifling $40,000,000,000
Homeland Security Department, this administration opposes that
sort of thing.
So instead of 'open source' software
to tabulate the votes as they are entered into the machines,
private companies got to write private code for the purpose.
('Open source' software is any program whose code is publicly
available, so that ordinary people may fail to understand it,
not just computer experts). Now Australia has computerized voting,
and the source code is readily available (it can be found at
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html,
if you're that much of a geek). I've looked at it and it's so
short and simple a monkey could understand it. My monkey has
looked at it too, and he assures me this is the case. But the
American code is not only secret, it's also 200,000 lines long,
which makes it 'spaghetti code', so called because it's impossibly
tangled and complex, or because it's made of pasta.
Not only is the American voting code
secretly held by private companies (naturally for copyright reasons;
the Dollar trumps Democracy every time), but private companies
manufacture the voting machines. And those companies are owned,
predominantly, by Republican interests. Including Senator Chuck
Hagel of Nebraska, who won by a landslide on machines made by
Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a company he owned
a considerable interest in. And he wasn't the only one.
Computerized voting machines in the 2002
election did all kinds of weird things: if you pressed the Democrat's
name in some counties in Texas, for example, the Republican's
name was chosen. And in Cormal County, Texas, three Republican
candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes apiece. There's the kind
of coincidence the FBI loves. But it gets even more amazing:
in two other races elsewhere in this great nation, Republicans
won by--wait for it--18,181 votes. The odds of this are similar
to the odds of waking up on the surface of Mars with your underwear
on your head and a bowling trophy gripped between your knees.
These results were eventually 'adjusted', proving it was all
just a wacky coincidence. But how can we know? Because there
is no physical evidence of how a vote was cast. No punch card,
no paper ballot, no twig with notches in it. And they stopped
doing exit polling in 2002 (apparently the results weren't coming
out right-- I see what they mean) so we can't even get an objective
comparison of the digital results with the voter's intentions
by asking them how they voted as they leave the polling place,
bilious and sickened. Kind of makes you feel all scared and
crampy, doesn't it? But yes, gentle reader, it does get worse.
There is a complex connection between
the companies that make voting software and machines and the
GOP, as mentioned above. But it's not some remote connection
that only folks with tinfoil beanies and radios in their fillings
could understand. These are partnerships, blind trusts, corporate
ownership kind of connections. Who's pals with whom. Connections
that make sense of some of the most astonishing outcomes of 2002,
where vast majorities of black voters voted for anti-black candidates,
for example, or where Republican votes skyrocked and Democratic
numbers plummeted, reversing historic trends, or machines tallied
more votes than were actually cast (according to a Florida official
a 10% margin of error is acceptable--that would be over ten million
votes nationwide). In Alabama, Democrat Don Siegelman won the
election for governor and went home. The next morning, 6,300
of his votes were gone, and Republican Bob Riley took the job
instead. Don't worry: ES&S is looking into the problem.
Not the government, not an independent commission. Golly.
Need more? There's lots more. ES&S
shows up in many of the problem areas, but they're not the only
ones. 'Computer Glitches' accounted for the loss of hundreds
of thousands of votes nationwide, and the irregularities everywhere
are both mystifying and highly suggestive, considering the system
was supposed to smooth the way for fair and glitch-free elections
in America. Could be just glitches, or it could be a concerted
effort to steal the vote.
So when 2004 comes along and we see historic
Republican victories across the country, landslides in every
territory, and you feel like there's no reason to try any more,
remember this: yes, the Republicans have the system rigged.
But so did a certain German chancellor in the 1930's. He predicted
a Thousand Year Reich. It lasted half a decade. Then again,
they didn't have computers back then, so maybe I'd better not
sound an optimistic note. After all, there's an inescapable
conclusion about the fundaments of American democracy here, which
is that the vote--the single most vital instrument of democracy--has
been tampered with on an unprecedented scale. And like falling
off a thousand-foot cliff, just because you haven't hit the ground
doesn't mean you're not dead. In the year 2002, Americans lost
the right to vote. One could argue it was all just bugs in the
system. But where there are that many bugs, there's an infestation.
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter and cartoonist. He can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
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February 15
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