Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"We need to start differentiating between targeting real terrorists and terrorizing random targets. This is no way to win a war." -- Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, 2004-05-12

I always say -- how come when they have an election, people say, "Well, you know what? We can't ever get it exactly right. As many times as you get a recount, you're going to get a different count."

Why -- why is that? Why can't we get an exact count? We seem to be able to get an exact count with money. I've never gone to the bank and have them say, "You know, it might be $10,000. It might be a little more. Every time we count it, it comes out different. So if it's ahead for you, good luck." I don't know.

  -- Bill Maher, 2004-10-19

Part I -- What Is Going On And How You Can Help

It won't change last week but it may well matter a great deal for 2006 and 2008 and beyond. Let's properly count the votes and see where the system worked, and where it didn't and how badly. Let's investigate all those reports of intimidation, fraud, and other improprieties. We know there are problems; some people say they're few and small and not enough to matter, while others wonder whether some close races might have been tipped. Let's look and find out how bad the problems are and figure out how to fix them.

First, A Petition to Congress requesting an investigation into the Presidential Election of 2004 at petitiononline.com. 36,839 e-signatures so far, the last time I looked.

The petition asks for an investigation "to examine the voting process in any and all areas in which there is even the slightest indication of impropriety", and despite the title, it seeks examinatin of Senatorial races as well.

Second, David Cobb and Michael Badnarik (the Green and Libertarian presidential candidates in the most recent election, respectively) have announced that they will be filing a formal petition for a full recount of the state of Ohio, but state law requires them to fund the recount. They're asking for donations; they're looking for $110,000. The deadline is Monday. About 26 hours ago they only had $75,000; I'm not sure how much they have now. One of the places you can donate online is http://web.greens.org/c/cobb/supporters.cgi?function=donate.

From the text that's been slowly starting to circulate on LiveJournal: "Even if you don't think a recount would change the results, it might bring far more of the voting irregularites and problems with the various voting machine systems into public view." This is about the future of American elections, not about clinging to a last shred of hope for Kerry. This is about exposing problems so that they can be repaired.

For more information about this effort -- press releases, background, and commentary -- see the following:

• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6446237/#041111c
• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6368819/#0411010c
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/badnarik/348099.html
• http://www.gp.org/press/pr_11_11_04.html
• http://badnarik.org/
• http://www.votecobb.org/

Part II -- Why You Should Care If You Don't Already

I don't want this to be "please use your resources for my agenda"; I want to convince you to make this your agenda. If nothing else, I'd like people to keep talking about this stuff so that awareness of it filters out to all those people who are neither news-junkies nor bloggers, so that it will eventually be the general population, not just the activists, asking our leaders to fix what's wrong.

Here's the short version: I want to feel I can trust elections to be fair and reliable. I want you to want that as well. So far we know that some people played dirty, but not how coordinated it was nor the full scope of the effects. We know that some voting machines were inaccurate and that at least some of the problems were innocent (if you count inadequate testing innocent) glitches, but we only know of the most obvious cases and we don't know whether there's evidence of deliberate tampering waiting to be uncovered. We know that there's some statistical fishiness regarding the exit polls, but neither side's explanation (evidence of vote tampering or improper use of statistics/bad sampling) is convincing yet. There's a lot we don't know. What we do know is that the final numbers aren't quite correct and that voter suppression tactics were employed. What we don't know is how far off the tallies are, and how effective the voter suppression attempts were. We know we have problems. We don't know how big (or how many) those problems are. We know that the process is broken enough to leave widespread suspicion of cheating -- not just among the tinfoil-hat crowd -- because we do have evidence that things didn't work quite the way they were supposed to.

This is a core -- and nonpartisan -- issue. I'd like to be able to trust the process. Obviously the losers are a bit more urgently concerned than the winners at this moment, but what if next time the shoe is on the other foot? If Democrats start winning close races where there's evidence of incorrect vote tabulation, will Republicans wish they'd gotten on board to fix the problems now? If wealthy Democrats purchase companies that manufacture voting machines, will Republicans get around to asking for greater scrutiny of the programming?

Even if, as I expect, the final outcome this year is correct, the process as it stands now is both vulnerable and unreliable. I'm sure we can do better. And that we must. (Banks manage a huge number of electronic transactions each day -- what's the error rate for ATMs?)

We know that there exist countries who manage elections that are more reliable than ours. National pride, if nothing else, ought to drive us to do better.

The longer version is this collection of links. This is not every relevant link I've seen in the past week or two; just the ones that I got back after a couple of browser-crashes and remembered to copy or bookmark once I decided to start collecting them. Many came from twistedchick, but I think I've got a few that she hasn't yet, as well. Feel free to suggest others in comments.

• http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ -- One of the main sites for information about the problems with electronic voting as currently implemented, probably the main site for activism on that front. This is Bev Harris' organization, which filed a huge number of FOIA requests just after the election.
• http://www.intl-news.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1623 -- 10,000 more votes counted than votes cast in Nebraska.
• http://ohvotesuppression.blogspot.com/ -- Blog with entries covering various suspicious aspects of the election in Ohio. Less "gotcha" than "hey, we need more light over here". Includes the 4000 extra votes in Gahanna (which were corrected, but still demonstrate that flaws do exist with the machines).
• http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2004/11/of-course-they-stole-it.html -- What made people suspicious about exit poll discrepancies: "the exit polls have an average 5% discrepancy in the states where there's electronic voting without a verified audit trail. In the states where there's a paper trail, the results match the exit polling."
• http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_seetheforest_archive.html#109953493247885462 -- A similar complaint about exit poll discrepancies not passing "the smell test", with observations regarding precedents involving electronic voting and exit polls in 2002.
• http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/53438/6175 -- Further analysis of the exit poll issue.
• http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/10133265.htm -- More than 4,500 votes lost due to a buffer overflow in voting machines in North Carolina; could force state to vote again.
• http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&e=4&u=/ap/20041105/ap_on_el_pr/voting_problems -- AP story about precincts reporting more votes than voters in Ohio, including the previously mentioned thousands of electronic votes but also mentioning 75 extra votes produced on a punch-card tabulating machine. Note that the glitches reported here have been or are being corrected; the reason we need a thorough investigation is to find out what glitches haven't been discovered yet and to get a comprehensive assessment of the situation.
• http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/special_packages/election2004/10165561.htm -- Manual recount reverses optical-scan glitch. "The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana's Franklin County."
• http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php -- Errors plague voting process in Ohio and Pennsylvania glitches that were caught and corrected; combination of hardware malfunctions and human error: initial tally of negative twenty five million votes; touch screen systems misrecording touches; damaged absentee ballots.
• http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Election_2004_Problems -- Collection of links to other articls on the subject. Similar to this entry.
• http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/2004votefraud.html -- A collection of articles about various malfunctions, glitches, suspicious events, suspicious activities, attempts to change rules on provisional ballots after the fact, etc., nationwide One paragraph summary of each, labelled with date and category, and links to full story. 303 items listed the last time I looked.
• http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp -- A tabulation of election problems reported in the media, similar to the whatreallyhappened site.
• http://verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5196 -- Article from before 2 Nov. about problems with early voting, including machine malfunctions (about 5% of the reported problems).
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/fructivore/7894.html -- First-person description of volunteering for a vote-problems hotline.
• https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapNation -- Election Incident Reporting System: detailed list of incidents reported to 1-866-OUR-VOTE on election day, from the trivial to the shocking, and colour coded maps showing where most of the calls came from. (Note that the raw number of incidents at a location doesn't tell the whole story, as "Voter confused about location of polling place" counts as an incident if the voter in question called the hotline to ask for help. 33,619 incidents recorded.) Also colour coded maps showing what voting technologies were used where.
• http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/850 -- First-person report from a polling site in a mostly minority precinct in Columbus, asking why so few machines for so many voters, why the whiter districts had such shorter lines, and wondering whether it was a deliberate ploy to discourage minorities from voting.
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/althaea/547956.html -- First-person report of polling-place irregularities in Tennessee. 200+ new registrations not recorded; poll workers attempting to turn away voters who should be given provisional ballots. Scroll down in comments for report of intimidation in the parking lot.
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/vvvexation/67062.html -- and http://www.livejournal.com/users/vvvexation/67294.html -- Poll workers confused about rules and procedures. May not have affected results, but poll workers ignorant of the rules are not the most reassuring sign
• http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2004/10/sample_rightwin.html -- Vote-supression letter.
• http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810 -- Pre-election article summarizing Republican vote-suppression efforts in Ohio known at that time.
• http://www.intl-news.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1624 -- Republican-funded voter intimidation at polls in Philadelphia.
• http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/10/28/192844/76 -- From just before the election, about the "caging" effort in Ohio to try to get Democratic voters stricken from the rolls.
• http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm -- 2003 article providing background on suspicious machine-voting results since 1996.
• http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php -- The infamous "Kerry Won" article from Greg Palast, which most of you will have heard of whether you've read it or not. Inflammatory and/or inspiring, and denounced already by the "paint the protesters as whiners or cranks" brigade, but a good idea to read for the background information presented even if you disagree with his conclusions. Basicaly, the challenge and investigation folks are trying to mount now is actually years overdue.
• http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/special_packages/election2004/10168779.htm -- Florida election decided by coin toss. Not a glitch, just an example of how close some races are.

"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery." -- Thomas Paine