E-voting

Speaking of free speech and its relationship to free software: Slashdot reports that Ireland is no better off than the US—they too have e-voting with no accountability or paper trail, and no access to the source code of the voting control software.

In the US, Professor Felten is leading a charge to convince Congress to institute sensible e-voting practices, including the aforementioned paper trails and open code.

Why is this necessary? You may ask. Well. Did you know that Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel is part owner of the e-voting machine company that made the machines that tabulated 85% of the votes in the last two elections in which Hagel ran? Did you know that:

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company’s computer-controlled voting machines showed he’d won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel’s “Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election.” According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.com, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

And

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel “was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska.”

(from Common Dreams)

Sort of creates an “appearance of impropriety,” doesn’t it?

Let me add that I am not endorsing Common Dreams’ paranoid vision of a corporate voting machine control conspiracy. I know of no evidence that supports their implication that the Hagel and Chambliss victories in the 2002 Senate campaign were obtained by voting machine fraud. But the point is, I don’t know. No one knows—because the machines are closed-source and can’t be audited, and they create no paper trail for later review. The opportunity for abuse here should be obvious to anyone.

Write your Rep. in support of Professor Felten’s bill, so that we can put these conspiracy theories to bed, before they do any more damage to the idea that we are a democratic nation of laws and fair play.

Filed under: politics