After the 2004 election, the Green and Libertarian Parties paid for a statewide recount where 3 percent of the vote in counties was to be examined. Green Party observers reported the company programming and servicing the county vote-count tabulators in 41 mostly rural Republican-majority counties, Triad Government Services, Inc., replaced hard drives before the recount was conducted. In Hocking County, when the Board of Election Deputy Director, Sherole Eaton questioned this and recounted the incident in sworn affidavits used in litigation, she subsequently was fired from her job.
David Cobb, the 2004 Green presidential candidate, raised hard disk incident when testifying at a congressional field hearing by the House Judiciary Committee's Democratic staff in Ohio in December 2004. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who now chairs the committee, asked the FBI to investigate at that time, but nothing came of the investigation.
According to previous statements by Spoonamore, the family that controls Triad and related sister companies, the Rapp family of Xenia, Ohio, are evangelical Republicans and GOP donors. Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Lincoln Bronzeville litigation have previously stated that the 2004 Ohio presidential results only had to be altered in three southeastern counties -- Warren, Cleremont and Butler -- to increase George W. Bush's margin to re-elect him to a second term.
One Rapp family firm, Rapp Systems Corporation, sells commemorative editions of the Palm Beach County Florida "butterfly ballot" that confused elderly Democratic voters in 2000 who mistakenly voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.
"In my opinion, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to make a secure touch screen voting system," Spoonamore said. "None. Secure systems are predicated on establishing securely the identity of every user of the system. Voting is predicated on being anonymous. It is impossible to have a system that does both. It is possible to design relatively secure optical scan machines, but even these can be hacked in even the best of cases. In the case of optical scan (systems where hand-marked paper ballots are scanned by computer counters) you have the ability to recount manually the paper ballot itself, and the ability to spot check the machines for errors against a sample of hand recounting."
In November 2008, approximately 30 percent of the country will be using paperless electronic voting machines, according to VerifiedVoting.org. However, the vote counting landscape in some battleground states will not be the same in 2008 as it was in 2004. Lawyers and other election protection experts -- inside the Democratic Party and in outside non-partisan groups -- are developing numerous checks and balances to attempt to monitor the accuracy of the various stages of tabulating the vote count. These efforts are much more extensive and informed than in 2004.
In Ohio, for instance, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, has forced some of the state's cities to transition from paperless voting to optical scan system, as one response to problems associated with paperless voting. And just this week Brunner decided to allow observers from minor political parties, such as the Greens, to be observers inside polling places and at tabulation rooms in county Boards of Elections. Those observers will be able to track whether local vote totals are being accurately tallied for county-wide counts, which is where they believe vote totals were altered in 2004.
In other 2008 battleground states using paperless voting systems, such as Pennsylvania, there appear to be less-developed plans to monitor the various layers of voting process, although election integrity activists have been pushing for precincts to be supplied with paper ballots if there are machine malfunctions. The Democratic National Committee has extensively surveyed the voting systems in every county in the U.S., which they did not do in 2004, but party officials do not comment on their election protection plans.
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and author of Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting (AlterNet Books, 2008).
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