The
ES&S purchase of Diebold's voting machine operation is merely the tip of a
toxic iceberg...
By
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman /
The Rag Blog / September 24, 2009
Unless U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in
2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation.
With 80% ownership of America's electronic voting machines, ES&S could have
the power to shape America's future with a few proprietary keystrokes.
ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based
Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004
presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.
Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust
grounds.
But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with
universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a
reliable vote count in the future.
For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold in tandem will
still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the
U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign
spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections
will have to write two checks instead of one.
And in fact, it's even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of
sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only
the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count
millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who
gets to vote and who doesn't.
Let's do a quick review:
- ES&S, Diebold and other
companies tied to election hardware and software are owned
and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life
ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;
- As votes will be increasingly cast on
optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States
in 2010, the scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place
will offer little security against electronic vote theft;
- The source code on all U.S. touchscreen
machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary,
meaning the companies that own and operate the machines -- including
ES&S -- are not required to share with the public the details of how
those machines actually work;
- Although there are official mechanisms for
monitoring and recounts, none carry any real weight in the face of the
public's inability to gain control or even access to this electronic
source code, whose proprietary standing has been upheld by the courts;
- With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now
apparently controlling 80% of the national vote through hardware and
software, this GOP-connected corporation will have the power to alter
virtually every election in the U.S. with a few keystrokes. Unless there
is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012, the
same will hold true for the next US presidential election;
- Aside from its control of touchscreen
machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S also controls a significant percent
of the electronic optiscan tabulators to count cards on which voters use
pencils to fill in circles, indicating their vote. Accounts of fraud,
rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems arewell-documented and
innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots and runs the
machines designated to count them can control yet another major piece of
the US vote count;
- The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls
the electronic voter registration systems in many counties and states.
With that control comes the ability to remove registered voters without
significant public accountability. In the 2004 election, nearly 25% of all
the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city of Cleveland were
purged, including 10,000 voters erased "accidentally" by a
Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote
counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged
Diebold/ES&S and sympathetic hardware and software companies that
service computerized voting equipment will control who actually gets to
cast a vote in the first place.
Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this
ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed, Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data
management firm, hired by Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine
Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens from voter rolls on the pretense
that they were ex-felons. The vast majority of them were not.
Computer software "disappeared" 16,000 votes from Al Gore's column at
a critical moment on election night, allowing George W. Bush’s first cousin
John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner. The election was
officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote
preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore was the
rightful winner.
In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by
GOP-controlled county election boards (more than one million have been removed
since).
Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from
voting. The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations
coordinated by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Diebold was a major player in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by
numerous other computer voting firms and their technicians in "recounting
the vote" which confirmed the Bush "victory," despite exit poll
results and other evidence to the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order,
56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed some or all of their ballots or election
records. No one has been prosecuted.
In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold's voting machine operation is merely
the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the
REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and
ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and
contractors whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that
guarantees them.
Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted
paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election
by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the "retail" level is far more
difficult than stealing votes at the "wholesale" level with an
electronic flip of a switch.
As it's done in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only
realistic means by which the U.S. can establish a democratic system of ballot
casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks
and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and
vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!
[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election
protection, available at freepress.org at, where this article also
appears, and where Bob's Fitrakis Files are also available. Harvey Wasserman's
History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com.]
