(2008) And now for something really scary. According to Jonathan Simon, an election-reform activist, we can expect that the "2008 election is going to be manipulated," as have each of those beginning with the 2000 Bush vs Kerry contest.

This documentary (more polemic than balanced report) - written, directed, and produced by David Earnhardt - examines the many and various voting irregularities that have taken place in hundreds of counties over the past eight years, affecting tens of thousands of votes, possibly the result of intentional manipulation. However, the film does not question or offer rebuttals from any of those allegedly responsible for the irregularities.

In Ohio at polling places during the 2004 presidential election, journalist Harvey Wasserman claims the election was rigged, citing at least 36 different instances of problems voters encountered at the polls, from long lines (some people complained of having waited nine, twelve, fifteen hours to cast a ballot) because not enough voting machines had been allocated or the machines were broken to fake fliers (misrepresenting the date of the election) to purged voter roles. People of color and from the inner-cities were targeted, says Andrew Gumbel, author of Steal This Vote. The Green Party candidate for president, David Cobb, alleges that a misallocation of voting machines was intentional.

A comparison of election results with exit polls in Ohio revealed "a new phenomenon," what statistical experts said was a near impossible reversal of what people said they had voted (51% for Kerry, 48% for Bush) with the official tally (51% for Bush, 48% for Kerry): the distorted results further reinforced the impression that the voting process had been compromised. Ten other states experienced similar contradictions between exit polls and official totals, all favoring Bush.

Political columnist Robert Koehler complains about the lack of attention to the irregularities: "Where's the media?" In Pennsylvania, some precincts reported a previously unheard of 80% undervote, meaning four out of five people who cast a vote somehow neglected to choose one of the presidential candidates. "Something desperately not right," admitted an election official. In New Mexico, where the highest rate of undervoting in the nation occurred with 21,084 instances of people supposedly declining to indicate their choice for president, George W. Bush won the state by 5,988 votes.

In the fiasco of Florida in 2000, Bush's cousin at Fox News made the first call on television, giving the state to Bush. African Americans in Florida were found to have been ten times more likely to have been disenfranchised than whites. Since then new electronic voting machines, some with touch screens, were purchased throughout the country, intended to correct the earlier problems of poorly designed paper ballots, punch cards, and other problems. However, these inauditable, paperless "black boxes" - "You see no problems" - were vulnerable to security breaches.

In particular the machines from Diebold Election Systems Inc., which were responsible for counting 33 million votes in 2004, became suspect in numerous places, beginning with two counties in California where thousands of voters couldn't vote during an election in 2003, resulting in decertification of the machines there. Whistleblower Steve Heller provided proof that the company was using "illegal software" in its machines; however, he was charged with criminal conduct by violating an attorney-client privilege ("What is legal is not always wrong") as his method of exposing the misconduct. Diebold's owner announced during a fund raiser for the GOP that he was committed to delivering the vote to the Republicans. In ward 1-B in Gahanna, Ohio, after 638 voters had voted by machine, the "black box" indicated over 4,000 votes for Bush.

Not only does every vote deserve to be counted, inventor Athan Gibbs believed that every voter deserved to verify his/her vote, to which goal his TruVote system was dedicated, providing a receipt of the machine's tabulation. Gibbs died in a traffic accident just as his company was beginning to attract attention. Diebold manufactures ATMs, which supply customers with a receipt of every transaction: Why not for their voting machines?

Formerly a software engineer with Yang's YEI software company, Clinton Curtis, previously registered as a Republican, was asked to create software with a hidden code for an electronic machine that would flip votes in favor of a particular candidate. The customer was Florida House speaker Tom Feeney, who was lobbying for YEI while serving in the legislature. After resigning from YEI, Curtis ran as a Democrat against Feeney in 2006 (by then a two-term incumbent) for a seat in the US House of Representatives and lost, though after the election he collected affidavits from voters, indicating a significant difference between how the voters said they voted and the election results.

In Emory County, Utah, Bruce Funk, an elected official trying to "save democracy," lost his job when he contacted Black Box Voting with his concern that the new Diebold machines in his district were vulnerable to a virus.

Citizen vigilance at the grassroots level is required as the 2006 mid-term elections showed that many of the same problems raised their ugly heads. In addition to demands that all electronic voting machines be required to provide a paper receipt, the National Election Reform Conference and other activists, such as Bev Harris with Black Box Voting, suggest changes to the election process toward guaranteeing that every vote be counted, including a recommendation that election day be a national holiday.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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