You don’t need to corrupt the software in electronic voting machines to gain an unfair advantage for one party in an election. All you need do, in certain, select precincts (e.g., ones which vote predominately Democratic), is simply delay getting the the electronic cards needed to operate them when the polls open:
In Montgomery County, the problems began Tuesday morning when voters arrived at polling places to find the electronic voting machines could not be used because election officials had not delivered the cards voters needed to operate them.
Voters were told to come back later or were given provisional ballots or photocopies of provisional ballots to fill out. At some precincts, the cards arrived quickly and the process was moving normally within an hour of polls opening. At other locations, it took three hours for the cards to arrive. Some voters left without casting ballots.
“I just couldn’t vote,” said Ellen Coppley, who lives in Chevy Chase but works in Washington, D.C., and had a meeting Tuesday night that she couldn’t miss. “You can’t declare an election when some of your people weren’t allowed to vote.”
(cont. below with UPDATE)
Now, some may say I’m being overly suspicious here. It may have been an innocent mistake after all, or simple ordinary negligence that the cards necessary to vote on these computerized voting machines in Maryland didn’t make it to the polls on time. Perhaps. But not every precinct in every state across the country experienced these types of “problems” with e-voting machines yesterday. Far from it, in fact:
Few glitches for new touch screens
Touch-screen voting started off with a few technical snags, but most local voter[s] who tried the new machines said they were pleased with the voting alternative. […]
Overall, voters were impressed with the touch-screens, Ertmer said based on talks with poll workers.
Tim Murray, 48, found the touch-screen at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, 1860 Wisconsin Ave., easy to use.
“It’s idiot-proof,” Murray said.
Tim’s wife Jill, 41, said the touch screen process went smoothly for her.
“It was pretty good and really easy and, boom, boom, boom, it was done,” Jill Murray said.
Ken Osmond, 41, voting in Ward 10 tested the touch screens himself for the possibility of crossover voting. Osmond said he intentionally entered the wrong party candidate. The computer alerted him of the error.
“I think these machines are a necessary part of insuring democracy,” Osmond said. “When these things fail, people just shrug their shoulders and blame it on powers beyond their control. But these machines tutor the voters through the process.”
Well, color me paranoid, but how can these machines work so splendidly in a middle to upper middle class, 92% white city in Wisconsin, and yet in counties in Maryland with a significantly higher percentage of minority residents, cards necessary to operate the machines are not delivered until well after the polls open, resulting in the many people being denied their right to vote.
Of course, the problem in Maryland wasn’t limited to the failure to deliver cards for voting machines. There was also this little tidbit that I find highly disturbing:
In Baltimore, some election judges did not show up on time, some failed to appear at all, and others had trouble getting into the facilities, said Bill Varga, an attorney for the city’s Board of Elections. A number of polling places opened as much as an hour late.
Other problems included judges unfamiliar with the new voting system and problems with new computerized voter rolls, Varga said. There was also a lack of Republican judges — state law requires a Republican judge and a Democratic judge at each polling place, but eight out of every nine registered voters in the city are Democrats. Varga said he did not have an estimate of how many of the city’s 220 polling places opened late.
“There are not enough Republican judges willing to come out and sacrifice to work the polls,” said Armstead Jones, president of the city Board of Elections.
Not enough Republican poll judges willing to work at polling places in a city where 8 out of 9 registered voters are Democrats? Gee, I wonder how that could happen?
In short, you don’t need to corrupt the voting machines to rig an election. All you need do is make it harder for voters in Democratic districts to vote on those machines, for one reason or another. Not enough machines, or machines which lack the proper electronic cards to operate them, or not enough trained poll workers, or not enough Republican poll judges. So many ways for Republicans to suppress the vote in Democratic districts, and with such relative ease, too.
Expect to see these same issues crop up this November, but on a much larger scale. This primary election was only a dry run, after all. The real election will be much, much worse.
Update [2006-9-13 11:44:59 by Steven D]: Just saw this first hand report on how fouled up the Diebold machines were in Montgomery County yesterday. While reading it compare it to the completely different description of voters’ experiences with Diebold machines in Oshkosh, Wisconson from the report I cited above:
Around 7:15, when we had been open for business for 15 minutes already, a gentlemen shows up saying that he is a judge from another precinct nearby and that they did not receive any smartcards, so that they could not operate their election. We had 60 smartcards, and the chief judge suggested that we give them 20 so that they could at least get their election started. As she was handing them over, I suggested that we had to somehow verify his claim. After all, anyone could walk in off the street and claim this guy’s story, and we would give them 20 access cards. The chief judge agreed with me. The guy pulled out his driver’s license to prove who he was, but I told him that we were not doubting who he was, we just wanted to verify that we should give him the cards. He seemed to understand that. After calling the board of elections, we were told to give him the cards and we did. A little later, several voters who came in informed us that news reports were saying that in Montgomery county, there was a widespread problem of missing smatcards. I could only imagine what a nightmare that was for those poll workers because as it was, our precinct did not have this problem, and as you’ll see, it was still tough going.
My precinct uses Diebold Accuvote TS, the same one that we analyzed in our study 3 years ago. The first problem we encountered was that two of the voting machine’s security tag numbers did not match our records. After a call to the board of elections, we were told to set those aside and not use them. So, we were down to 10. We set up those machines in a daisy chain fashion, as described in the judge manual, and as we learned in our training. We plugged the first one into the wall and taped the wire to the floor with electric tape so nobody would trip over it. About two hours into the voting, I noticed that the little power readout on the machines was red, and I thought that this meant that the machines were on battery power. I pointed this out to one of the chief judges, but she said this was normal. An hour later, I checked again, and this time, the machines were on extremely low power. This time, I took the plug out to of the wall and tried another outlet nearby. The power icon turned green. I showed several of the judges, and we confirmed that the original outlet was indeed dead. Had I not checked this twice, those machines would have died in the middle of the election, most likely in the middle of people voting. I hate to think about how we would have handled that. A couple of hours later, the board of elections informed us that we should use the two voting machines with the mismatched tags, so we added them and used them the rest of the day (!). […]
Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to “help”, and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn’t seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, “one day.” I said, “You mean they hired you yesterday?” And he replied, “yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on.” I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it’s too compressed.” Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn’t doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn’t see him again.
One place (Wisconsin), the machines are “idiot proof.” And in another (Maryland), they are a nightmare. Odd how that works.
