Unverifiable Voting

Unverifiable voting -- that is, having your vote recorded only electronically, without a "paper trail" to verify that it was recorded accurately -- is becoming more and more prevalent in this country. Because we can no longer verify that our votes are being recorded the way we cast them, we are leaving our elections wide open to fraud. But does that mean that fraud is actually happening? Read on.

On my monthly TV show of Saturday, September 13, 2003, one of my guests and I discussed the problem of unverifiable voting and its consequences. For example, since we are allowing our votes to fall into the hands of a few large corporations, most of which have some sort of interest in the outcomes of the elections, we are turning the very essence of our Republic over to people who put themselves, their power, and their wealth before the integrity of the nation or the rights of the people. (Can you say, "conflict of interest," my friends?)

Here are some other resources to help you get informed on this important topic:

• The article "How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election", posted in September of 2003, has a good overview of the problem. (Yes, it was posted before the election - it was obvious, even then, what was going to happen; we just didn't know in just which states the election would be stolen.) It covers the issue of unverifiable voting and describes some of the vote thefts that had already been perpetrated up to that point, using unverifiable voting systems.
  
  
• The article "Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program" shows in detail how a team of investigators, using only publicly-available materials, successfully changed the results of a demonstration election in the Diebold touch-screen voting system. The article then goes on to show how that team then succesfully erased all trace of their having made the changes, so that the system retained no record of there ever having been a "correction" in the votes.
  (Warning: there are a lot of images in this web page, so it'll take quite a while to download on phone-speed connections.)
  
  
• The author of the previous article, Bev Harris, maintains the "BlackBoxVoting.org" web site, describing the unverifiable voting problem. For a while, Diebold used the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to force her to take the site down - there was a link on her page to an unrelated site with copyrighted Diebold material posted there without Diebold's permission. In other words, her just having a link to a site with internal Diebold memos that prove the insecurity of its systems got her site pulled off the net.
  
  Finally, Ms. Harris has published a book, entitled Black Box Voting, about the problem. Because she feels so strongly about this issue, she is making the entire book available in PDF format on her web site at no charge. This is a book that anyone interested in reclaiming the integrity of our voting system must read. In case the ".org" site gets hacked (which happens a lot), you can find all the chapters of the book on this site, as well, here.