I am writing this Viewpoint to criticize and point out errors in our election system, most specifically in the Nov. 2 election many are doing their best to forget. But let me start with a dose of reality: Bush is president for the next four years. Trust me, I don't like saying that, but it is necessary to show that investigations into the election are being done because every American deserves to have his or her vote counted and we should strive to prevent mistakes next time, not to overturn the results.
Many outside groups have been calling for an investigation since Nov. 3, but only recently have the Democratic Party and Kerry campaign decided to lend their support to overseeing the ongoing count in Ohio. I don't know if mainstream media has been covering any of this, so here are some examples of what went on with our votes.
There were over 1,100 complaints of voting machine malfunctions, with many being in Florida, where the touch screen would show Bush selected despite a vote for Kerry.
In Broward County, Fla., (sound familiar?) the software tallying up votes began counting backwards once its limit of 32,000 was reached.
In Franklin County, Ohio, one precinct with 638 total votes cast managed to count 3,893 extra votes for Bush. The problem was corrected only after an outside Democratic group pointed it out.
In Carteret County, N.C., over 4,500 votes were lost forever because the electronic system could hold fewer votes than it was believed to, and there is no way to recover them.
In Sarpy County, Nebraska, over 10,000 extra votes showed up in the count and no one is sure why, but they are working to figure out the correct counts.
All of these examples are lucky in that they were caught and corrected if possible. But what about all the times where problems were not caught? No one knows how many votes might have been lost due to malfunctioning machines and computers. These problems are made worse by two facts. First, the vote totals are extremely easy to manipulate if you have access to the central computer, and no record of the change can be found. Second, E-voting machines have no paper record. It is like making a deposit at the bank and not getting a receipt. If they then claimed never to have gotten it, you would have no way to prove otherwise.
When the person in charge of finalizing the votes, the secretary of state, is also the state campaign chair for a candidate, can we really expect an unbiased analysis of these problems? Katherine Harris screwed up the Florida 2000 election and was punished with her very own seat in congress. Perhaps Ohio's Secretary of State Ken Blackwell would like the same treatment. 37 states use machines manufactured by Diebold, Inc., which do not give any paper trail and whose software security is still controlled by the company. Coincidentally, the owner of the company, Walden O'Dell, promised to "help deliver Ohio's electoral votes" to Bush, and raised over $100,000 for his campaign.
In Warren County, Ohio, the vote counting was cut off from the public and press and any other watchdog group citing "homeland security" reasons that
apparently threatened only one county only on one night. Bush won the county by a landslide. (Maybe for some people getting Bush into office counts as a homeland security emergency that supersedes fair elections.)
Another issue that needs to be addressed is the hiring of so called "challengers" by the two parties to demand proof of voting eligibility of suspicious people. So of course Democrats will challenge voters in Republican areas and vice versa. The real effect of this practice, though, is not to ensure legitimacy of votes, but to clog up lines at polling places and discourage people from going through with the whole process.
This was most common in minority areas. Also in these areas, there were fewer machines per capita, meaning the wait was often up to five or six hours. No one knows how many people had to forfeit their vote because they couldn't wait for hours and miss work or picking up their child. There are also reports of people imitating elections officials telling people to vote in the wrong precinct, again mostly in minority areas.
Just because exposing these problems won't change the election results doesn't mean we shouldn't care about it. In 2000, events such as these did make the difference on who won, and it could happen again in the future. There are certainly more problems that occurred in this election that I don't know about, and we need to encourage our officials to find and fix all the problems before next time.
