Stuffing Ballot Boxes. An Electronic Alternative

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http://www.mytown.ca/nutshell/

 

 

In a Nutshell

by Norla Antinoro

 

 

Stuffing Ballot Boxes

An Electronic Alternative

 

3 April 2006

 

 

Fair elections? To that let me just say: " Diebold!! "

 

The last time I went to the polls to vote, my ballot was a piece of

paper that fit into a slot where only that one thing would fit. Two

ballots could not fit at the same time. And each ballot was

individually scanned by a machine as the votes were counted. Marshals

watched to make sure no one at the polls tampered with the ballots and

no one bothered the voters. It's been years since I actually went to a

polling place to vote. My last few have been done absentee as I travel

from place to place across North America.

 

At one time I had complete faith in our voting system. In my teen

years I knew that voting fraud was happening in `other places' but it

was clear that great care was being taken to avoid that fraud when I

got to voting age and started casting my ballots. No one could even

walk closer to the polling places than 50 feet with a button that

proclaimed their loyalty to their candidate. No one was allowed to

talk to someone who was in the process of voting, nor go near them. It

looked as if the federal government was taking enough care that the

bad ole days of stuffed ballot boxes and political groups fudging the

elections by messing with the votes themselves were long past.

 

What naïveté. Human nature has not changed. People want to win. Many

of them do not care how. If humans were not so frail in their morality

and ethics, we would not need marshals to guard our voting places. We

would simply be able to trust that everyone would play fair.

 

Well, to that concept I say: " Diebold! "

 

The old tricks to steal an election were the ultimate in crudity

compared to the sophistication of the 2000 and 2004 elections. When I

was a kid, they simply looked at the color of your skin and if it was

too dark, they made you read something from Chaucer. If you could not

read Olde English or some such, you failed their literacy test and

were not allowed to vote. They have stepped to more sophisticated

measures to do the same thing. Since non-whites are obviously more

likely to be felons, let's purge the felons from the voting rolls. Oh,

and, of course, anyone in a mostly non-white district who has a name

similar to that of a felon. Lordy, there were likely a lot of John

Smiths purged from the low income largely democratic districts. Can't

afford to miss one of those nefarious felons, so we better purge ALL

of the John Smiths in non-white districts just to make sure. There's

bound to be a felon named John Smith, right?

 

When the company we hired to purge those rolls draws it to our

attention that the process we are using is flawed and is purging

people who should not be purged, we'll just tell them " Don't you worry

your pretty little head about that, missy. We'll take care of it. "

 

While we are doing our best to remove democratic voters from the rolls

in as many places as we can, let's start selling our machines to the

voter registration and vote counting offices of every state in the

union. Do we want to win this election? Well, then, get out there and

sell those Diebold machines. They can be programmed to show any result

you like. That algorithm is an easy one to write. Hiding the traces is

a bit harder so what we have to do is slap a " proprietary " label on it

and require that it all be " black box " . Nobody gets to look at our

programming to check for back doors and traps. Then use the tendency

of most governing bodies to use a " low bid " system of awarding

contracts. It takes very little to make sure we or one of our cronies

gets that low bid. After all, we can suck it up and let a few pennies

slip away if it means we can take the election. Think of it as an

investment.

 

It's actually quite frightening. In spite of the problems uncovered in

state after state as they use and test these electronic voting and

ballot counting systems, more states are opting for the electronic

option, some of them without the paper trails. At least in some

states, like Arizona, there is a paper ballot that is used so that if

the vote looks too far off what one would expect, a recount can be

called and the ballots can be counted by hand from the original paper.

The new paperless machines make this impossible. Nothing but

electronic records exist.

 

I will always vote absentee so that there will be a paper trail of my

vote. It's not much, but it is a small act that I can make in the

direction of securing the integrity of our elections. It is not,

however, enough.

 

Now, while not every state has bought these expensive government

stealing machines, is when we need to get really active in stopping

the move to paperless ballots. Once every state has the paperless

machines as the only way to vote, the people will have no voice unless

they rise up in arms and rebel. Only the owners of the machines will

have a say in government once the machines are the only way votes are

counted.

 

It is looking very much like something out of a George Orwell

nightmare. The winner of the election will be proclaimed based on the

results from the voting machines…….programmed by the corporate

sponsors who got the contract for the machines this year…….to produce

a result decided upon at the most recent meeting of the G8………

 

What has happened to democracy in America? Once again I say: " Diebold! "

 

 

Norla Antinoro is a life long Democrat. Born in California she spent

the last 40 years in and around Tucson, Arizona. Currently a New

Yorker she commutes regularly to Guelph, Ontario where she is the

voluntary curator of the Rosalie Bertell Resource Centre.

In a Nutshell, Series 1