Missourians for Honest Elections have been slogging along for five years now trying to get touchscreen voting machines banned in this state. Which they ought to be. Those blankety blank DREs are unreliable, expensive, capable of being hacked into but not capable of providing an accurate recount.

The MOHE members have been terriers who’ve sunk their teeth into this issue and hung on. Now they’re reaping the rewards of their tenacity. They got a Republican in the House last year to sponsor a bill to making the touchscreens illegal in Missouri. This year, the bill, HB 1490, is being sponsored by Republican Mike McGhee and co-sponsored by three Republicans and three Democrats. It’s been easier this year to find Republican co-sponsors since they saw to their alarm that in the NY 23 race last fall, no reliable means to audit election results existed.

Having gotten the issue thus far in the legislature, MOHE now needs our help. They’re asking that we call our reps and senators and ask them to support the bill. And MOHE offers these talking points:

• DREs are more costly than paper ballots when additional costs of special storage, poll worker training, and technical support are considered.
• DREs actually create longer voting lines than paper ballots because with paper ballots many more people can vote at the same time: there is no need to wait for a machine to become free.
• DREs contain proprietary software that cannot be reviewed.
• DREs have been demonstrated to be highly vulnerable to hacking–even by voters at the polls.
• DREs have proved to be mechanically unreliable.
• DREs do not offer a software independent means for election officials to verify election results. It follows from this point that they are never truly auditable.

Call or write. P-p-please?

When I was in grade school, back in the dark ages when our parents used mechanical voting machines with little levers next to the names, our teachers took us to the gym for what they called “mock elections.”  We got to pull down the little levers and open the curtain with a long handle which recorded our vote and cleared the machine for the next person.  It was a given that all good citizens voted and that democracy was guaranteed for all of us.

Fast forward to Florida in late 2000 or Ohio in late 2004.  Democracy guaranteed?  Not a chance.

Could Missouri be the next victim?

On Tuesday, December 15, Brad Friedman of BradBlog brought his latest subversive documentary to the main campus of Webster University.  The title, “Murder, Spies and Voting Lies” sounds kind of corny and hyperbolic.  It’s not.

It’s the story of Clint Curtis, a software designer from Florida who was asked to write a “vote flipping” program for GOP bigwigs back in 2000.  At the time, Curtis was a loyal GOP but not crazy about doing something nefarious.  Long story short, he did what he was asked to do by his employer, Yang Enterprises, but quit when he suspected something fishy was going on.  As of last week, Curtis was still alive and has run for office twice in Florida and lost.  An investigator putting together the case was not so lucky.  He turned up dead in a motel in Valdosta, GA, just before he was to turn over his findings.  All kinds of strange things continue to happen to this day.  

Why could Missouri be the next victim?    

Friedman thinks Missouri is a prime target because our elections are so close.  As he said, people who know how to rig elections are like the Mafia.  They don’t go for the billion dollar heist.  They take a little here, a little there.  A few votes flipped in this county, a few hundred names purged from the list in another county, and pretty soon you’re talking election night victory parties.

Electronic voting machines use secret software and secret vote counting that we, the people, are not allowed to inspect.  Touch-screen vote counting equipment (DRE’s) run on privately-owned software that can never be tested by public officials, is vulnerable to hacking and creates election results that can’t be audited without assuming the software worked correctly.

And, no, the little spool of paper tape is NOT a “paper trail.”  According to Cynthia Richards, president of Missourians for Honest Elections when voters in St. Louis County were asked if they looked at the paper behind the glass door to see if their vote was properly recorded, most of them said they either didn’t bother, forgot to look or couldn’t see the print.

About a dozen states have de-certified the DRE’s they were using because of problems they created, and Missouri could too.  Richards said when she and other citizens concerned about this problem  visited with Secretary of State Robin Carnahan’s staff, no one at SOS could refute the charges made against the DRE’s.  Neither could they say why Secretary Carnahan hasn’t used her authority to de-certify the machines.

Having failed with Secretary Carnahan, Missourians for Honest Elections found state representatives to introduce a bill in 2009 to require paper ballots in Missouri.  While the bill did get a hearing in committee, it was never brought up for a vote.  Not to be deterred, MoHonElections is currently lobbying state reps to join Rep. Mike McGhee in sponsoring similar legislation in 2010.

As I left the movie Tuesday evening, I commented to a friend that what we really have are “mock elections” for adults now.  If we don’t know for sure if the vote tallies reflect the actual will of the voters, these are not only mock in the sense of being pretend elections, they mock us and our faith in the democratic process.  Maybe that’s okay with a majority of the sleepwalkers in our state, but I’m going to lobby my state rep tomorrow to support this legislation.

For more information, contact Cynthia Richards at (314) 727-6586, crichar03@yahoo.com  

Missourians for Honest Elections has been spitting into the wind for the last couple of years about e-voting machines in Missouri. I can’t honestly say the wind has shifted in their favor, but one of their number, Pat Berg, got a thorough, well written op ed piece published today in the Post-Dispatch.

With calm, non-partisan language, she quickly cataloged the number and type of machine malfunctions in St. Louis in the Feb. 5th primary and reminded readers of how touchscreens lost 18,000 votes in a tight congressional race in Florida in ’06.

Pat was wise enough not to mention that the Democrat in that race would probably have won that election had those votes not been lost. Leaving  out that argument kept the issue nonpartisan.

Still speaking in an even tone of voice, she got to the business of deliberate e-voting hanky-pank:

A variety of academic and technical studies and investigations, however, have discovered that the software of some DREs is vulnerable to manipulation and hacking, including some techniques that can erase all traces and evidence of such interference.

An extensive audit by Election Science Institute of the May 2006 primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, found different results in four different tallies compiled by DRE machines made by Diebold, Inc., an Ohio company. Differences were noted among the records on a machine’s removable computer memory card, its computer hard drive, individual votes recorded on a removable paper roll and the printed summary on the roll. If the system worked properly, all four numbers should be identical. And the differences were great enough to have affected the outcome of an election, depending on which number was used.

(Similar machines are being used in the city of St. Louis, Kansas City and other counties in Missouri. St. Louis County’s machines, although from a different manufacturer, have essentially the same architecture.)

These kinds of discrepancies have been attributed to the programming of the machines’ software and clearly demonstrate that the software can be corrupted, whether intentionally or as a result of human error.

Pat made it clear that switching to a paper system is practical and easy and praised California Secretary of State Debra Bowen for limiting the use of touchscreens.

Pat Berg made no direct plea to Robin Carnahan, but I’m going to. Carnahan has resisted entreaties to follow Bowen’s lead and has implied that she sees no problem with the machines. But the problems are real and verifiable, and it is her job to protect our votes. I know that standing up against the forces that want these machines would be difficult for Carnahan. She’d be rocking the political boat.

But this year’s election promises record turnouts, with perhaps as much as 80-85 percent of registered voters turning up at the polls. When citizens are that concerned about the direction of the country, they should at least get honest elections. So we need that kind of courage from Carnahan. We need it before next November.