The ‘conspiracy’ continues

blog_icon_vote2.jpgThe Georgia Supreme Court just issued a unanimous decision that says the state can continue to use electronic touchscreen voting machines in elections and rejects the argument that these machines are unconstitutional because they can be fraudulently manipulated. The high court’s ruling was logical, rational and intelligently reasoned — which means we can look forward to hearing more tiresome rants that the justices are now part of the “conspiracy” to steal elections in Georgia.


There was a time when I let myself become involved in conversations with the voting machine critics who show up regularly at State Election Board meetings to urge that the electronic machines be junked. I don’t do that anymore, because I have found that this is a group of people who largely are impervious to such concepts as logic, reasoning, and the lessons of history.

I have also swapped several emails with Garland Favorito, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the electronic machines (interestingly, his aversion to electronic balloting does not extend to the sending of electronic emails). My exchanges with Garland have always been civil and polite, but in each one of them I have asked him a variation of this question: Please cite for me one election — just one — that has been stolen or fraudulently manipulated in Georgia because of the use of electronic touchscreen voting machines. He has never answered that question.

The point I have tried to make to Garland and the others who insist that the state must throw out the electronic machines and return to the days of “reliable” paper ballots is this: Georgia has a long history of elections being stolen through the use of fraudulent paper ballots. How is reverting to that system going to make voting any more safe and reliable than it is today?

One prime example: the legendary 1946 governor’s race when hundreds of dead voters in Telfair County, in the words of the late Ben Fortson, “arose from their graves, marched to the polls in alphabetical order, and cast their write-in votes for Herman Talmadge.” Those write-in votes were cast on paper.

When a Sumter County peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter ran against an incumbent state senator in 1962, also back in the days of paper ballots, the incumbent stole the election from the political newcomer. Carter was able to have those fraudulent results overturned in court (he had a good lawyer, Charlie Kirbo) and was eventually seated in the Legislature.

“No balloting system is perfect,” said today’s ruling written by Justice George Carley. “Traditional paper ballots, as became evident during the 2000 presidential election, are prone to overvotes, undervotes, ‘hanging chads,’ and other mechanical and human errors that may thwart voter intent.”

“The unfortunate reality is that the possibility of electoral fraud can never be completely eliminated, no matter which type of ballot is used,” Carley noted.

When former secretary of state Cathy Cox finalized the purchase of these electronic voting machines several years ago, she also inspired the startup of the persistent group of conspiracy theorists who are convinced these machines subvert the voting process.

Throughout Cox’s last couple of years in office, these conspiracy theorists argued with her at every turn that the touchscreen machines were susceptible to being hacked and would lead to elections being stolen by campaigns that manipulated the vote tabulations.

Cox disagreed with their dire assessments and continued to use the electronic machines statewide. When she was defeated in the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial primary, the conspiracy theorists celebrated her defeat and awaited the entrance of the new secretary of state, Karen Handel, who would surely listen to them and get rid of those cursed electronic machines.

As it turned out, Handel paid even less attention to the conspiracy theorists than did her predecessor. Georgia continued to use the electronic machines in her first cycle as the state’s chief elections officer and they’ll be used again in the 2010 elections.

If electronic voting machines really were being manipulated to steal elections, then logic suggests that recent election results would have turned out differently.

The first statewide election in which the electronic machines were used was in 2002. Cathy Cox, the state’s chief elections officer, was a Democrat. But that was the election when Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes was upset by Republican Sonny Perdue (Barnes’ top strategist, Bobby Kahn, has rejected the contention that electronic machines “stole” the election for Perdue).

In 2006, Cox was still in charge of state elections and was running against Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Taylor defeated her in the primary without a runoff.

If Cox was involved in some conspiracy to have herself and other Democrats win elections through voting machine tampering, she obviously didn’t do a very good job of it.

In 2008, Handel, a Republican, had become the state’s chief elections officer. But even with a GOP stalwart in charge of the elections, Republican legislators John Heard, Allen Freeman, and Steve Tumlin were each upset by their Democratic challengers. Democrat Toney Collins won the Republican House seat that was vacated by Bob Mumford. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss was forced into a high-risk runoff election with Democrat Jim Martin.

If there was really a conspiracy at the highest levels to rig the election results for Republican candidates, then Heard, Freeman and Tumlin would still be in office and Chambliss would never have had to worry about that runoff.

I guess that’s all part of the conspiracy too.


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4 responses to “The ‘conspiracy’ continues”

  1. J.M. Prince Avatar
    J.M. Prince

    I think the essential problem here Tom is with the way the original DRE voting machines were set up and designed. There’s no independently verifiable audit trail of the votes. None what so ever. (Unlike the prior ‘Opti-Scan’ machines with their ‘fill in the bubble cards). So now in the event of any dispute, (which we now realize happens more often than we care to believe), there’s literally no recourse but to ‘run the machine again’ to get the infamous ‘machine counts’, which really recapitulates the errors that may have been seen in the first place, and resolve nothing. So again, some process whereby the votes & voting intent can be Recorded & independently verified at some later date is probably essential for the security of and trust in the process. And unfortunately the early DRE machines such as we signed on for are unable to do this. This ‘design flaw’ (and yes that’s what it was) was built in because it was simply cheaper to produce it that way. And yes, getting to a reliable & quick voting system where an independent audit-able trail can be easily maintained is a bit more complicated & more expensive. For many good & valid reasons. But it’s still desperately needed.

    And yes there Have been many instances where in the DRE machines have produced ‘incredible’ results or more famously ‘lost’ 10’s of Thousands of votes (mainly, yes, famously in FL) with No recourse but to ‘note the discrepancy’ & ‘move on’. No correction is possible. It is not possible to ‘go back’ to try and properly discern any ‘voter intent’ because the machines are literally incapable of recording this in a manner that they can later be examined. Indeed, some of the ‘cards’ upon which the votes are cast are commonly ‘zeroed’ out & Used again, (or simply discarded) as with any computer bubble memory.

    So yes there are many obvious & real problems with the prior ‘OptiScan’ machines that were commonly in use in the state. Each system does have its own errors that they’re prone too. On the Optiscan machines it was often a higher rate of ‘user’ or ‘voter’ error evidently with some folks being wholly unfamiliar how to properly fill out the ‘SAT’ like ‘student test’ bubbles. (After all they only became fashionable during & after the 1970’s in most schools). But with many of the early computerized systems you retained a paper trail so that the voter’s intent might be later examined & scrutinized. (Many ran directly on the old IBM Punch card systems too). This is what all the public ‘hub bub’ about the Bush v Gore ‘recount’ was all about. If ALL the votes had been properly counted in that infamous 2000 Prez election, using any reasonable interpretation of the actual voters intent as recorded & discerned on the Cards, Al Gore would have likely won. (Even the Newspaper consortium examining this question years later was convinced of this ‘in most scenarios’).

    The new generation of machines went for the easier but probably less accurate & facile ‘solution’ of making any true real ‘recount’ literally impossible. Or the ‘Jim Baker’ solution, (he who kept on announcing throughout the Fl recount in the 2000 election that ‘all the Machine recounts’ were in and Bush ‘won’). Yes, while that was a ‘technically’ correct claim, we now know for a variety of very good & valid reasons, (some planned poorly, some delicate & probably deliberate subterfuge as well), that the FL voter’s intent was not well recorded on many of these systems on that day. And yes, plenty of serious mathematically inclined & statistical studies have shown that.

    So now, we have our ‘Black box’ voting http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ wherein we’ve got to ‘trust’ these few very secretive huge multi-national conglomerates & corporations with the entire process of ‘unverified’ votes going into the computer, being counted, but unable to be Independently Audited. By anyone. Which was always going to be a problem. With or without any required conspiracy. It’s just poorly designed to engender trust. As Reagan was famous for saying “Trust, but verify”. You really can’t have one for long without the other being part of the system of ‘checks & balances’.

    And again paper ballots are notoriously variable & prone to all sorts of fraudulent shenanigans as we well know. But they too were always Independently Audit-able. Which is why someone took care to ‘hide’ them (& the boxes or ‘lose them’) until well after the election. But there are still ways of handling those contingencies too. It’s not for nothing that the entire Canadian system of ‘Elections Canada’ is still done on yes, well designed specialty Paper Ballots. Today. With very little problem. We need their health care system (Medicaid) And to adopt their voting system too probably!

    http://www.elections.ca/home.asp

    Sorry for the length, but it’s one of my ‘hobby-horses’. And yes, I think Cathy Cox was hurt by deciding to eventually not try and better address some of these concerns & meeting with more of those ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘worried’ about the voting system. Although it would have been very difficult or impossible to satisfy everyone, it was probably worth the extra effort. Yes, at the moment, we seem to have plenty of people dissatisfied with the way it works. It may work just ‘fine’ most of the time. We hope & trust? But for when things are at all close? There’s really no way of going back and trying to Better discern a voter’s intent, the way you can still do with the ‘Opti-scan’ machines, still used for absentee balloting in many venues. JMP

  2. griftdrift Avatar
    griftdrift

    Awesome

  3. RJekot Avatar
    RJekot

    You know, Mr. Crawford, I’m really surprised we have to have this debate yet again, but I’ll repeat what we have said for years in response to this comment of yours:

    Georgia has a long history of elections being stolen through the use of fraudulent paper ballots. How is reverting to that system going to make voting any more safe and reliable than it is today?

    No one has ever advocated for a return to a plain paper ballot system. What we have advocated for is a paper ballot which is used to confirm what the computer tells us.

    We advocate for a verifiable voting system which does NOT exist in Georgia today.

    Please stop using Cathy Cox’s script from 7 years ago to browbeat the people who have fought long and hard for a return to verifiable election in Georgia.

    As I said to Cliff Tatum 7 years ago at KSU, all we are asking for is a system which PROVES what the computer says. After all, the IRS would not allow ME to show up at an audit with my Quickbooks printout and call that proof of anything. The IRS wants the shoebox full of receipts. So do the voters in Georgia.

  4. JerryT Avatar
    JerryT

    The thing is, if the electronic vote had been manipulated, we would never know it. With those paper ballot examples you cite, at least we knew the ballots were missing. We could have had a re-vote if it was deemed necessary.

    It’s pretty weird to me to think that the only “red flag” indicating vote manipulation is that the result doesn’t come out the way we expected it to.

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