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Abbe Waldman DeLozier and Vickie Karp
19 Dec, 2008

 

Massive Voter Purging from "Electronic Pollbooks"

 

Another key issue that caused the disenfranchisement hundreds of thousands of voters across the country on November 4th: Electronic voter registration rolls deleting eligible voters. The 2002 "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA) which was the federal mandate leading to the massive purchase of electronic voting systems by the states, also had a mandate that every state in the country had to update their voter registration lists into an electronic format by 2008. Private corporations have rushed in to take charge of these voter registration lists and create electronic poll books. What followed was an inconsistent free-for-all that cost millions of people their right to vote. Voting lists were purged at the whim of partisan Secretaries of States across the country, massively deleting primarily Democratic voters.

 

The New York Times covered this alarmingly high rate of questionable voter purges in their article linked at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27093919/. Author and investigative journalist Greg Palast teamed up with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to educate voters about this problem before it was too late to re-register, through their website and downloadable book at www.stealbackyourvote.org.

 

The greater issue about this was not widely discussed. We now have corporations in control of sensitive private information about voters and their party affiliation; vendors who control the databases by purging voters using frivolous criteria created by each individual state at the whim of the partisan election officials and the corporations themselves, often operating from private agendas. Worst of all, the voter frequently does not discover until Election Day that they have been deleted from the database, when it is too late to re-register.

 

The Move Away From Paperless Electronic Voting, and To Optical Scan Counters: From the frying pan, into the fire!

 

Courageous Secretaries of State in California (Debra Bowen) and Jennifer Brunner (Ohio), after commissioning comprehensive, scholarly studies on electronic voting systems that turned up horrifying evidence of how easy they are to tamper with and hack, have instigated policies to limit and eventually eliminate the paperless touch screen voting systems altogether. Florida has already implemented this ban of DREs (Direct Recording Electronic) machines throughout the state.

 

Unfortunately they have gone to the "solution" of optical scan counters which are used to count paper ballots. Is it better to have paper "in case of a recount"? Sure, IF the numbers are even close enough to tip off one of the candidates that a recount is needed. And IF the challenging candidate has enough money to pay for a recount, which can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And IF the recount isn't hacked such as in Ohio in 2004 (see story of two Ohio election workers convicted of rigging the Ohio recount in 2004: from www.moritzlaw.osu.edu.

 

But the "Catch 22" of optical scan counters is they can easily be hacked to create results that would discourage a candidate from filing for a recount. In the HBO documentary "Hacking Democracy" http://www.hackingdemocracy.com you can watch the simple hack of a ballot scanner, done in minutes by the Black Box Voting "hacking team" of Harri Hursti and Dr. Herbert Thompson: Swapping out a credit-card-sized memory card, this one simple action totally and undetectably "flips" election results on a Diebold Optical Scan Counter.

 

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