US/voting

Overview

This article is about voting in the United States, various related issues and proposed solutions.

This is a growing seedling article. You can help Issuepedia by watering it.

Related Articles

• Gerrymandering is a problem which significantly reduces the fairness of many elections in the US.
• There have been repeated allegations of election fraud recently, especially in the 2000 and 2004 elections; Diebold and several other companies have been implicated.

Opinions

• David Brin:
  • David Brin: Gerrymandering: 9-part article about the evils of gerrymandering
  • The Electoral College: a surprisingly easy fix: a proposed solution to the current winner-takes-all voting

News

• 2006-09-21 Former Diebold Consultant Admits Company Altered Software for '02 GA Election
• 2006-02-01 ...Ohio GOP guts election protection
• 2006-01-04 Voting machine source code must be available for review in Wisconsin; North Carolina also apparently has an open-source voting machine law, but reports are that citizens are having to file suit for it to be enforced (somewhere in The Independent within the past month or two; I don't have time to look just now).
• 2005-12-18 (NY Times editorial) The Business of Voting
• 2005-11-14 Has American democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005's referenda defeats? by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Online Journal Contributing Writers

Leads

The following has been shamelessly copied from here without further checking (yet) (it's late and I should probably be doing something else anyway):

20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html (article in Rolling Stone says "Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic.")
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on v otes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
11. Diebold is based in Ohio. http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm
12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
13. Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm
14. Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years. http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio. http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother. http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm
20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation. http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm

Links

• Electoral Vote: tracks voting projections and results

things to read up on

• 11-22-2005: Updates on felons - Jeffrey Dean and John Elder

voting reform initiatives

• Californians for Electoral Reform
• California IRV Coalition (IRV = Instant Runoff Voting)