On Sunday [October 8, 2006], the New York Times reported that tens of thousands of Georgia voters recently received letters telling them they must show a photo ID to vote on Election Day despite repeated court rulings striking down Georgia's restrictive voter ID requirement.
The media is quickly prepared to dismiss the conspiracy theorists who suggest that concerted and planned measures to subvert the democratic and fair election process. The research and testing of the Diebold electronic voting machines showing the very real potential for manipulation of vote tabulations and “fixing” election results have received little consistent and in depth reportage. Substantial evidence of the ease with which security of the voting machines could be breached and compromised has been presented and verified by independent analysts. The voting tabulation could be manipulated to cause the machine to record votes cast for one candidate to be placed in another candidate’s column. Moreover, programming sophistication has been shown to enable the machine to impose these “adjustments” only when voting results are within certain parameters, thus rendering the manipulation more difficult to discover. Concerns that the majority party currently in control might stoop to unethical or illegal voting fraud measures to maintain that hold on to power are ignored or dismissed as paranoia.
But are these concerns so far fetched? When the Secretary of State in two critical election jurisdictions also served as the Campaign Chair of the Republican Party, and thereafter took deliberate and persistent actions to thwart investigations into alleged irregularities in election procedures, does manipulation seem out of the question? Katherine Harris took every measure that she could, including one or more that were enjoined by the Florida judiciary, to obstruct the full examination and counting of ballots. Kenneth Blackwell adopted measures and issued orders to restrict the investigation of voting irregularities. Complaints about the failure to provide adequate voting machines in heavily populated precincts that were traditionally Democratic went unresolved and largely unexamined by Blackwell’s office. Subsequently, both Harris and Blackwell have been rewarded by substantial GOP financial support backing their candidacy for higher elective office.
Stalin declared that those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. The federal legislation enacted by the GOP controlled Congress is resulting in the rapid expansion of electronic voting machines across the country. Many of these devices have no paper backup to provide for audit and verification that the tabulations reported electronically actually reflect the votes cast on Election Day. The development of technology may or may not keep pace with the development of methods to pervert the technology for unethical and illegal purposes. One very interesting suggestion was raised during the 2004 election. That suggestion was that international observers be employed to help assure that the election was conducted in a fair and legal manner. This is the same process that the US frequently urges when elections are conducted in developing countries or countries where the US Government has concerns about which regime will obtain control as a result of the election. However, the suggestion that similar independent international observation of the US election process and the potential that an objective report of the facts bearing upon whether the election was free and fair was treated almost as an insult and a preposterous idea. The only thing that is perhaps more absurd is the way in which the American public stands by quietly as the democratic institutions are continually and substantially eroded. The GOP stated objective is a “permanent majority” that controls the White House, Congress and the Judiciary.
Perhaps the question deserves being raised again. Is it possible that there could be a concerted effort to suppress voters or to manipulate voting results? Nawwww, never happen! This is America.
No comments:
Post a Comment