"The Right to Count: Democracy v. Electronic Voting" - A documentary by Richard Van Slyke

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By Joan Brunwasser (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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Many people contend that we will never move away from computerized voting because computers are here to stay and moving to paper ballots would be a step backwards. But if you were to ask anyone who has seen his vote flip on the screen from his choice to the opposing candidate, or who has been turned away from the polls because his computerized voter registration had mysteriously disappeared, he would tell you which system is the real step backwards. If we truly believe that it is crucial for each vote to be cast and counted safely and accurately, it is hard to believe that electronic voting will get us there. The opposite seems to be true, however adamantly the diehards dismiss the ever-increasing evidence of study after independent study, and hack after hack.

The Black Box Voting/Harri Hursti hack discussed in the movie was featured in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy and clearly demonstrated the perils of electronic voting. Armed with his own laptop and an inexpensive crop scan (memory card reader), Hursti succeeded in hacking into and altering the simulated election caught on film. As Dan Wallach of Rice University explains, a memory card with no integrity check allowed false information to infect the machine, producing a "false result". The manipulation of the memory card code itself meant that "all those standard protections failed to recognize that the software had miscounted all the ballots." All of the visible signs pointed to a "false result". Florida is uniquely at risk because of a law on the books that forbids machine counted ballots from being recounted by hand. As Leon County Superintendent of Elections Ion Sancho says, that law is predicated on the assumption that the votes were counted accurately in the first place. The BBV/Hurst hack proves that there is absolutely no reason to make that assumption; moreover, the law means that anyone pulling off that kind of vote fraud would never be caught since no meaningful recount can be made. Talk about a Catch-22. How does this system serve the voter or truly reflect the voter's choice?

The notorious case of the 18,000 undervotes in the November 2006 Congressional race makes Sarasota, Florida the poster child for what can go wrong with electronic voting. It is also a quirk of timing that The Right To Count won the audience award of the Gallop Gallery Independent Film Competition of the 2006 Sarasota Film Festival shortly after that infamous local election. The juxtaposition couldn't be more clear, fortuitous or impossible to ignore.

I urge you to take on this issue of voting integrity, study it, and make it your own. I've stated many times that no matter what your political persuasion or demographics, what happens during elections affects us all, each and every single day. Watch some of the excellent documentaries (Dorothy Fadiman's Stealing America: Vote by Vote and David Earnhardt's Eternal Vigilance for starters) that demand much less energy or time than reading a book. Or, read a book (try any of the following: Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money can Buy; Did George W Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman; What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election; Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them); Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud and the Official Count by Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss or Hacked! High Tech Election Theft in America 11 Experts Expose the Truth, edited by Abbe Waldman DeLozier and Vickie Karp). Decisions will be made quite soon about the direction our elections will take, and with them, the country. Make your voice heard before it's too late.

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Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election (more...)

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Book Recommendations for "Computer Hacking Corporations"

Handbook on Corporate Fraud: Prevention, Detection, and Investigation
by Jack Bologna

$49.95

Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann