- Electronic voter registration databases: HAVA required every state in the nation to implement electronic voter registration databases.
- Electronic voting machines: HAVA mandated accessible voting equipment, specifically recommending computerized touch screen machines.
- Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: HAVA created the Election Assistance Commission, four presidential appointees with broad and ever-expanding powers over the nation's election systems.
The last HAVA outcome, the EAC, is by far the most troubling. This powerful presidential commission is the election reform gift that keeps on giving in a continual "re-visioning" of America's election systems.
Post-HAVA elections have delivered one disaster after another - from e-voting crashes, unequal distribution of expensive computerized equipment, registration database complications and abuse (13),electoral lawsuits, and the multi-billion dollar e-voting industry's complete and utter failure to deliver quality product (14).
Rise of the Machine
The media painted Election 2000 as a problem of butterfly ballots and pregnant chads (15), incessantly playing video clips of Florida election officials staring at computer punch cards trying to discern the "intent" of the voter.(16)
America was told that paper ballots caused chaos in Florida, and HAVA would take care of that, distributing nearly $3 billion to the states to buy electronic voter registration databases and computerized voting machines.
The number of American votes counted by computers went from 40% in 2000, to 70% in 2004, and 80% in 2006. (17)
This was a cataclysmic change for election systems, traditionally used to ten to twenty-year management cycles. Election officials continue to struggle with the transformation of familiar and manageable low-tech elections to the complex high-tech theatre wrought by HAVA.
The destabilizing effect on America's mechanism of democracy has been substantial. Techno-elections have caused shortages of poll workers, who, with an average age of 72 years, are averse to the complexities of e-voting (18).Techno-elections have brought general confusion and the inability of our public officials to independently administer our elections without the e-voting industry's support services.
Corporate employees now appear at our elections to assist pollworkers in using their equipment, administer "fixes" when their equipment malfunctions, and to hold vote data and election results in their black box secret vaults away from public scrutiny.
A Republican House attorney, involved in the drafting of HAVA, has remarked to me
"They are trying to complexify our elections to the point where citizens have no idea what is going on."
As well, county and municipal coffers are emptied each election cycle to meet the newly enriched and empowered e-voting industry's ever-increasing demands for programming, maintenance, upgrades and training.(19)
It would be easy enough to end this story with a cynical glance at this piece of pork barrel legislation that sold the American public a bill of goods and lined the pockets of a generally corrupt industry delivering an unforgivably shoddy product to our nation.
But this is more than just a story of greedy corporations.
Rabbits and Rabbit Holes
In the chaos generated by the corporate media's hanging chad illusion, nobody pointed out that the much maligned Florida "paper ballots" were really just the paper component (the computer punch cards and computer-scannable paper) of a failed computerized voting system, poorly designed and in some cases delivered on intentionally defective paper (20).
New Hampshire has a more than two hundred year history of grassroots elections, using voter marked paper ballots counted by human hands. Nearly half of New Hampshire polling places still counts paper ballots by hand.
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