http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0902-01.htm Published on Tuesday, September 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
The Business of E-Voting and How it Can Put the Wrong Candidate in Office
by Jason Leopold
It seems fitting that a president who was brought into office because of a scandalous election would enact a law to overhaul the electoral process to make it easier for people to choose their leaders the second time around.
But that’s not what the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, signed into law by President Bush in October 2002, will do. Instead, the law will force most states to switch from paper balloting to a fully computerized system---one that is currently rife with programming flaws and is incapable of being audited—that could call into question the legitimacy of future local and national elections and put the wrong candidates into office.
The bill contains $1.515 billion to fund activities related to the Help America Vote Act, a federal election reform bill that provides money to states for the improvement of elections; including $15 million to the General Services Administration to reimburse states that purchased optical scan or electronic voting equipment prior to the November 2000 election.
Bev Harris, a Seattle resident who runs a small public relations business, is credited with uncovering the flaws in electronic voting machines and has recently written a book on the subject called “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century.”
Harris’ muckraking on electronic voting have been featured on Scoop, an award-winning Internet news site based in New Zealand, (full disclosure: I am a regular contributor to Scoop) that is quickly developing a reputation in the United States for its groundbreaking investigative news stories.
Harris recently uncovered “some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton, Ohio,” according to an Aug. 21 feature story on Harris in the Seattle Times, and exposed the massive flaws in Diebold’s software that can easily be manipulated. An in-depth report on Diebold’s electronic voting machines can be found at www.scoop.co.nz
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