Meanwhile, as the War Over Which Americans Get to Exercise Their Right to Vote rages on, concern about how the votes of those who do get to vote, will (or won’t) be tabulated, goes largely unnoticed. Again.
USA Today takes a moment to mention that point in an unbylined editorial headlined ‘Electronic voting is the real threat to elections’. Their headline may understate the very real concerns about access to the polls, because these two issues — both access to the polls and accurate, transparent tabulation of ballots — have always been two sides of the same coin.
Both issues must be assured for an election with anything close to integrity.
But, given the, necessarily, extraordinary focus on the first issue this year, access, it’s nice that the paper has taken a moment to highlight just a few of the continuing causes of concern for the actual tabulation of votes. Nothing has gotten better since 2010 or 2008 or even 2004. We’ve covered all of the examples for reasons to be concerned that they point to in the editorial, of course, and many more, over the years here at The BRAD BLOG.
And, naturally, since the paper is still a corporate media outlet, they just had to “balance” their fairly decent, fact-based editorial with an additional “opposing view” editorial, filled with a bunch of misleading, dishonest bullshit about Internet Voting, of all things, from a corporate lobbyist hack…
First, here’s the beginning of the paper’s not-terrible, largely fact-based editorial (NOTE: The links in the following are their own, not ours, most of our coverage of these matters was in far greater detail, as regular readers will know)…
How? Sometimes, technology or the humans running it simply fail:
•In March, malfunctioning software sent votes to the wrong candidate and the wrong municipal election in Palm Beach County, Fla. The mistake was corrected only after a court-approved hand count.
•In an election in Pennington County, S.D., in 2009, a software glitch almost doubled the number of votes actually cast.
•In Carteret County, N.C., 4,530 electronic votes simply disappeared in 2004 when the voting machine ran out of storage capacity and no one noticed until too late.
•In 2010, a University of Michigan assistant professor of computer science and three assistants hacked into Washington, D.C.’s online voting system during a test. They manipulated it undetected, even programming it to play the Michigan fight song. While inside, the hackers blocked probes from Iran, India and China. Washington officials canceled plans for online voting.
Experiences like these argue for great caution about expanding electronic voting, but too many states are choosing convenience over reliability. Sixteen states, for example, use electronic voting devices with no paper backup, according to a study by the Verified Voting Foundation, Common Cause and the Rutgers School of Law.
This means there’s no way to know whether the machine has recorded a vote accurately or, for that matter, recorded it at all. And there’s no way for elections officials to conduct a verifiable recount if things go wrong.
The paper does not have all of their facts straight in the rest of the editorial, and they seem to misunderstand both the solution (which is publicly hand-counted paper ballots at the polling place on Election Night) and don’t seem to fully appreciate the very serious concerns of paper ballots tabulated by optical-scan computers. Still, given the dearth of coverage elsewhere once again this election season, we’re glad they took a moment to notice any of it, frankly.
Of course, since this is still the corporate mainstream media, their definition of “Fair and Balanced” is, at best: when telling the truth about something, be sure to “balance” it with an “opposing view” from a corporate lobbyist shill who just pulls things out of their ass. And so they include a link to an “opposing” editorial from Bob Carey, identified by the paper as “president of the Abraham & Roetzel government affairs firm. Until May of this year, he was director of the Defense Department’s Federal Voting Assistance Program.”
Not noted by the paper is that Carey was the former Legislative Affairs director for former Republican Senators George Allen (who went on to disgrace himself by using a racial slur during a campaign event) and Spencer Abraham (who went on to become George W. Bush’s Energy Secretary.)
Also not noted by USA Today, at least not in plain language, is that Abraham & Roetzel is a corporate lobbying firm.
In Carey’s misleading and obnoxiously-headlined “opposing view” piece, “Paper voting system is broken”, Carey makes the pitch for unsecurable, unverifiable Internet Voting, naturally, as that is also what he pushed for while at the Pentagon, despite the near-entirety of the computer science and security world’s unambiguous warnings against it.
We can’t find record of Abraham & Roetzel actually serving as a registered lobbyist for for-profit Internet Voting firms such as Scytl or the failed Everyone Counts (where former U.S. Elections Assistance Commission chair Paul DeGregorio has cashed in on his former title by serving as Chief Operating Officer), but Carey was just allowed to make one helluva pitch for their business in the pages of “The Nation’s Newspaper”.
It looks like the voters get just half-a-loaf, if that much, from USA Today’s coverage. But even that much is more than we’ve gotten elsewhere of late when it comes to the privatized, unverified, unoverseeable computer tabulation that will be used once again to determine the President, the balance of Congress, and local races and initiatives in all 50 states this November.
On balance, I was glad to see it. Far too many people have no clue that there are ANY problems w/ e-voting, so the exposure was worth the shallow coverage.
Sad to say but only about 10% of the people have any knowledge of what is going on in this country. Fox noise has divided our country so far that I don’t think it will ever improve. Even after what went on in England with Murdock not one Fox watcher will admit that just maybe they are getting the wrong spin. When another 50% don’t have enough brains or gumption to get off their butt and get out to vote this country is in a world of hurt.
This is completely predictable, IF a mainstream media outlet were to recognize the problem it would be at a time (way) too late for anything to be done about it.
The last window of opportunity to deal with this problem was the 18 months after Obama’s inauguration when the Dems had control of both houses of congress.
Of course, during that period the Dems were too busy being terrorized by the GOP into defunding ACORN, perhaps the Dems best defense against the radical reich’s chronic campaigns of voter suppression and election fraud.
USA Today, AND bradblog do a dis-service,
The headline here gives a false impression that the popular vote decides the next president.
FALSE: as the only fucking thing that matters now in saving the us constitution vs the nwo is the electoral college.
This isn’t journalism, it’s parroting the fucking propaganda.
You already know the electronic vote machines are rigged anyway! WTF, is there no critical thinking at all left in the world?
Greedy fucking Greentards is what I think of you now. fascist fucking pigs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sZLqsRqKFyI
NMHB said @ 4:
Um, with all due respect, NMHB, and I don’t have much, perhaps I missed here where either USA Today’s or our own headline gives the “impression that the popular vote decides the next president”.
Am I reading a different article than you? Or are you just off your meds again?
These Candidates should NOT be on the ballot MR Journalist, they should be in a PRISON CELL.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/if-you-believe-in-right-and-wrong-dont-vote
Oh I get it. You are not attacking me your trying to get me to fuck up.
The answer to the question is.
Started with USA Today,
‘Electronic voting is the real threat to elections’.
then parroted a second time without correcting the fucked up language which hides the fact the candidates and rest of the system is dogshit, indeed there is no body to vote for who will obey their sworn oath.
The time has come for candidates to sign sworn oaths they won’t screw up the system more. Before they get voted in.
How else can they be trusted? Without the same threat of law they foist upon us?
Looking at things like al-queda, I think you quickly see this is all double speak bullshit, they hate terrorism, but support the terrorists they actually list?!
You are the one steering bradblog, and your viewers future, not me.
I’m your logical dissent.
NMBH @ 7:
So, um, you are admitting you were wrong in your previous remarks then? Cause I missed your apology for that, if so.
That, of course, would be the right thing to do for someone claiming to be concerned about right and wrong. Please feel free to try it. Thanks!
Left out is a more insidious problem. In Wisconsin we have optical scanners which do, at least, leave a paper trail that makes tampering a bit more risky. Poll volunteers (party affiliation not mentioned) were directing people to the only all digital voting machine(used for the visually impaired)during the Walker recall attempt, telling them it was ” faster and more accurate”. There were people lined up in front of this one machine while 5 paper based machines sat idle. I have no idea how wide spread this was, but I found it deeply disturbing.
Some no name rock band has done more for protecting national security than the entire military / government complex.
2003 story
RANT! Blargh! Rant, rant, damn you, Brad, you damn librul!! Rant, rant, spew, spittle, git off my lawn.
Don’t let the cranks get ya down, dude. Your work is important, your site is awesome, RANT, rant, librul meedja. Rant. Spit. Drool.
Love it, keep it up, bestest, hugs N kisses.–jim
Many of these political discussions completely circumvent the real and critical issues. Examples would be discussions of health care that do not address the exorbitant cost of healthcare, or a discussion of the economy without any discussion of the war-budget!
This piece is one that actually goes to the heart of the matter. That some individual or group should wish to manipulate an election process (not very common) is nothing to the power to flip a switch and and have proprietary (i.e., unsupervised and unsupervisable) software (in place all over the country) choose our president!
The existence of these machines is just nonsense and yet there they are and inexplicably there are no riots. What more proof do we need that the public has been put to sleep by the schools and the media and remains asleep.
One more thing. Why was the whole country not in the streets to support the Occupy folks? That’s simple. They listened to the main stream media who made sure that the public was convinced, falsely, that they had no solidarity with those people on Wall Street. Chris Hedges is right; the system is broken and the sooner we get to the streets the better. The official/corporate media is an agent of big government and big government is an agent of big money. We must unhook from these nefarious controls of what is in theory a free republic “of, by, and for the people.”
J. Warren Clark
I don’t understand why there is not some type of “lock” on the machines after the last vote is cast. I know the companies own the software, but it seems to me that if a hacker can get into all these sophisticated programs , then there ought to be a way to lock down the results before the owners of the software flip any votes. Or maybe read the results as the votes are cast. If we were to go back to paper ballots I would sleep a lot better at night. I do not like having all this un-democratic cheating and lying going on.