Feinstein's voting record, that I made this negative comment. Touchscreen voting (paperless voting) SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED. It is criminal, in my opinion, that it was authorized in the first place, and lavishly funded by the Anthrax Congress, engineered by the biggest crooks in that Congress--Tom Delay and Bob Ney--and It is criminal that election officials across the country were bribed and bullied to accept this egregiously non-transparent, secretly programmed, private corporate voting system. It is because some of our Democratic Party leaders, like Sen. Feinstein, are such shills for the corporate rulers and war profiteers, that this criminally non-transparent voting system could have spread to one third of the nation between 2002 and 2004. And completely non-transparent voting--the touchscreens (truly a Stalinist voting system)--is just the very worst of it. There is more. All of our votes are now counted by central tabulators run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by two corporations with very close ties to the Bush regime and far rightwing causes (Diebold and ES&S). And even with the optiscan machines--where you vote on a paper ballot which is scanned into the electronic system--the audit/recount controls, in existence AND proposed (by Holt in HR 550, and by Feinstein), are extremely inadequate to guard against high speed, invisible fraud.
These private corporations--and their supporters in both parties--have nearly destroyed our election system. They have infected our election system with the corporate disease: SECRECY! It so anti-democratic, it is ludicrous.
For them to now slap a "paper trail" and a minimal "audit" on this privatized, corporatized, secrecy-ridden, theft of our democracy, is insufficient, to say the least, and very misleading. A "paper trail" that is never or rarely counted, and an easily manipulated 2% audit, do not solve the fundamental problems of TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY, FOR-PROFIT elections!
But I think it is even worse than this. It's not just the money--the billions of dollars in contracts for corporate-run election systems. It's the PURPOSE of the SECRECY. FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people opposed the Iraq War, way back at the beginning, before the invasion (Feb. '03). 56% would be a landslide in a presidential election. And, if you're going to have an unjust, heinous war, in a democracy, with that big a majority opposed to it, you have to fix the elections. That's what they did, in my opinion. The so-called "Help America Vote Act"--which was passed near simultaneously with the Iraq War resolution--was actually the "Help America Vote For the Iraq War Act." The "trade secret" elections were part 2 of the war plan. Invade Iraq despite majority opposition; then manufacture an endorsement of that war with "trade secret," proprietary vote counting, conducted by two corporations with close ties to the Bush regime and to far rightwing causes--Diebold and ES&S--the chief beneficiaries of the HAVA billions.
So, when one of these gungho corporatists and war supporters says she is now going to repair the damage, pardon my skepticism.
The warning signs to look for, in Feinstein's legislation (which will likely parallel HR 550) are:
1. The fundamental flaw in HR 550: Rewarding these criminal corporations for their lies about their crapass, secretly programmed, hackable voting systems, by giving them MORE multi-billions in contracts to "fix the problems." They screwed us over, royally. Now we're paying them MORE money to patch up this mess--for printers, for upgrades, for replacing the touchscreens, for more "servicing"? It's kind of like Bush blowing up Iraq, then paying Cheney's corporation billions of dollars to fix it. And did they? With our corporate rulers, it's not about fixing things. It's about PRETENDING TO (and keeping those billions in contracts coming in).
2. No paper trail is just one of the problems. With both optiscans (which have a ballot that is never, or rarely, counted, but is scanned right into the electronic system) and the touchscreens (even with a paper trail or real ballot), and all paper ballots (such as Absentee Ballots, which are now just scanned right in, and never, or rarely, counted), you are separating the vote from the evidence of the vote, and turning the "vote" into a bunch of electrons which are "sent" to central electronic tabulators. This separation is how fraud can EASILY occur, without detection. Again: The ballots are NOT COUNTED. MACHINES turn them into ELECTRONS. The content of the vote thus becomes nebulous and manipulable. Even with a 2% audit (match of ballots to electronic totals), proposed by HR 550, the peril to the vote is great. Electronic programs are used to select where that small audit will occur. The electronic fraud may be directed to occur in certain precincts, which the audit can avoid. The basic problem is that NO ONE HANDCOUNTS THE BALLOTS before electronics are used. And the electronics are run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, that most voters do not understand (have no literacy in), and that--even with the code in escrow--most people have no right to review. The touchscreens are egregiously non-transparent. You can't even audit those totals. But the optiscans are not that much better. High speed, invisible and massive-scale fraud can still easily occur. And any bill that permits high speed, invisible, and massive-scale fraud to continue as a threat is a crime, in my opinion. (With the traditional handcounting system--the most reliable system--fraud could occur, but not at high speeds, not invisibly, and not on a massive scale. The "checks and balances" were the slow, human speed of counting, many eyes on the counting, and the LIMITS on undetectable miscounting or disappearances of ballots, etc. You could dump a hundred or even a thousand ballots in the river, but not a million of them--and not in every precinct in the country.)
3. Loopholes that permit trade secret programming. HR-550 proposes putting the "trade secret" code in escrow, but access to it is still quite restricted. HR-550 also has a loophole. It says that trade secret programming "in the voting machines" should be escrowed. This leaves a loophole for the central tabulators. (It should say in "the voting SYSTEM", not just in the voting machines. Putting the code in escrow is not exactly open source--it's another compromise to get those billions of our tax dollars into the pockets of the electronic voting corporations. And this is the kind of thing that corporations know how to exploit. And, thus far, the story has been a hogfest of corporate lawyers and lobbyists WRITING and then exploiting loopholes and deliberate laxities and lack of accountability in our election system.
4. Inadequate auditing. 2% is inadequate (HR 550). These new, and extremely insecure and insider hackable voting systems should NEVER have been allowed in the first place without a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT AUDIT at least for the first few go-rounds (2002, 2004). That it wasn't IS NUTS. Some states have NO AUDIT. The best--the best!--have a 1% audit. And in one third of our nation's voting systems, of course, no audit is even possible, because of the fast proliferation of paperless touchscreens. So HR 550 looks attractive. It corrects the horrors (paperless voting, no audit). But it is paltry compared to what should be happening--total transparency, every vote counted IN PUBLIC (100% REAL counting). ALL our votes will continue to be at great risk--even with HR 550. And HR 550 may well be amended to favor corporate control even more (--my worry about Feinstein--that even this weak, corporate-friendly bill will be gutted).
5. Bad centralization and the "culture of secrecy." The main thrust of electronic voting is to get the people out of the voting system--to have a centrally controlled electronic system that many voters do not understand, and in which no one can WATCH the vote counting. Centrally controlled electronic voting systems eliminate all those sharp-eyed, white-haired, little old community ladies who used to hand you your ballot, and then took custody of the box you placed it in. To the extent that people do not understand computer programming code, and are not computer experts, they cannot even understand how the votes are counted, let alone watch it. HR 550 promotes this centralization of the voting system, and elimination of the watchers. For instance, it strengthens the federal Election Assistance Commission (--a commission that has done immense damage to our voting system!). We NEED people in the system--many eyes and ears. THAT is our safety. People. Electronic voting--with rules, testing, and escrowed secret code, under control of the President (who appoints the EAC)--is extremely dangerous. It's bad enough being centrally controlled by secretaries of state--but guess what? Not even our secretaries of state have been permitted to review the secret code! So who has REALLY been controlling everything? The corporate vendors! HR 550 does little or nothing to put the voting system back under PUBLIC CONTROL, and in fact, reinforces PRIVATE control in many significant ways, while providing the public with minimum--and almost cosmetic--tools--to try to fight for transparency, election by election.
6. Lack of other reforms, or weak reforms. There are many ways that the secretly programmed electronic vote totals are enforced (over real vote counting). In NM, the governor--a Democrat!--required a one million dollar bond for a recount request in 2004. Recounts have been made unconscionably expensive, difficult and rare. It doesn't matter if you have a paper ballot backup if you can't get those paper ballots counted! There are laws, rules, restrictions all over the map making it harder and harder for people to get vote counting information, and to monitor elections. The thrust of it all is secrecy and government officials "circling the wagons" with their corporate partners, against the public--the voters! These sorts of laws--and the attitude they reflect--and also corrupt practices, such as lavish lobbying, and revolving door employment, need to be addressed, and, if they are not addressed (and they are not, in HR 550), then corporations will continue using them to keep control of the system in any states that remain corrupt (which is just about all of them, at present). The billions spent on rotten e-voting systems have been used, in turn, to RESTRICT public access to information, and the public's ability to monitor elections. For instance, obstructionist election officials will say, a recount will cost us too much money. But that's after they spent $10 million on a Diebold system--that half the voters don't trust, and won't use (--won't use voluntarily; their Absentee Ballot votes get scanned into the riggable electronic system anyway). Federal election law needs to RE-ENFORCE openness, access to information, visibility, and accountability, and to need to oppose the whole range of new laws that PROHIBIT or restrict these fundamentals of honest elections. HR 550 does little or nothing to counter the "culture of secrecy" around elections that has accompanied corporate control over elections.
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What we are looking at here is the Corporate Rulers' FALLBACK position. Touchscreens, bad. Optiscans, good. Optiscans make it a little harder for them to steal our elections, but not much. And the people who LET ALL THIS HAPPEN, without raising a whisper of objection to Bushite corporations counting all our votes in secret--corporatist Democrats like Feinstein, and like Christopher Dodd (who actually colluded with the likes of Tom Delay and Bob Ney to get this done--to destroy our election system)--are now taking the corporate fallback position, on cue. It is very suspicious.
I'm sorry to be negative. Truly. I think we've made great strides on the election reform issue, in a very short time. I am very happy about that. I think public consciousness has gotten very high. These last elections, we had a huge voter revolt against the machines--in the form of Absentee Ballot voting. This was a PROTEST against the machines--ordinary voters trying to get around the rigged electronics by voting with an Absentee Ballot. 50% of the entire state of California voted by AB, and it increased dramatically all over the nation. That's a big constituency for election reform. I am very encouraged. And I'm not so much against HR 550 as I am appalled at how weak it is, and that even its weak repairs could be lost in joint House-Senate committee, with Feinstein in charge.
They should be entirely repealing the so-called "Help America Vote Act" that caused all this lethal damage to our election system. They should be throwing these criminal Bushite corporations out of our election system. They should be calling for 100% paper ballot, handcounted elections for the foreseeable future. That's how bad e-voting is. No part of it is trustworthy. And the corruption, and the "culture of secrecy," that these e-voting corporations have infected our election system with are killing our democracy--as, I believe, they were intended to.
Let me just tell you who these corporations are:
DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and
ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things). Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they are run by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich.
These are the people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy. This is what Diane Feinstein has said nothing about, until now. And now that the war is a disaster, and now that we're $10 TRILLION in debt--and all these corporations' pockets have been stuffed with our kids' and our grandkids' money--now she's going to fix it?
I think we have a right--not to mention a duty--to be skeptical. Our fundamental right, and mechanism, for controlling our government--our right to vote--was taken away. A lot of damage has been done. A lot of horses are already out of the barn. And it's going to take decades and maybe the whole century to repair our democracy, our economy and our reputation in the world--not to mention the damage done TO the world--in global warming, in nuclear proliferation, in the impoverishment of other peoples, in bad example on war and torture, in destabilization of the Middle East (and all the attendant horrors)--by this Bushite regime and by corporate Democrats.
The true will of the majority in this country--70% against the Iraq War, 84% against any US participation in a widened Mideast war, and 92% (!) wanting vote counting they can SEE--is NOT adequately reflected in the new Congress, even with all the Democratic wins. The Bushites, the warmongers and the corporatists STILL have too much control. Diebold and ES&S are not the only reason for this, but they are the final tweak to our election system, that rightwing corporations can EASILY and UNDETECTABLY inflict, to keep a lid on real reform, and to thwart the will of the people. We showed, in the '06 midterms, that we can--to some extent--overwhelm their secret vote tabulation code (which likely has to be pre-programmed) by sheer numbers of votes. But the fact that they HAVE that capability is extraordinarily dangerous to our democracy, and I don't think that Diane Feinstein is going to be quick to remove it. It hasn't bothered her up to this point.
Russ Holt is probably more sincere, but even Holt and the 170 or so co-signers of HR 550 either don't want, or know that they cannot GET, fundamental reform. Continued electronic voting with a paper ballot and a 2% audit is NOT fundamental reform. It perpetuates the corruption that has nearly destroyed our election system, and that has made reform so difficult.
HR 550 is being sold as the middle-of-the-road, sensible solution. But why is there a problem? The "why" is essential to understanding what "middle-of-the-road means, in this case. The right, in this case, is total non-transparency in our elections. Paperless touchscreen voting, run on secret code. (Stalinist elections.) The left is total transparency--the common and traditional, gold-plated standard for honest elections. And the middle is SEMI-transparency. Elections in which, if you have the money and the time, you can fight for a recount, or you can sue to try to get a look at the secret code . Is SEMI-transparency in the election system better than total non-transparency? Yes. Is it acceptable in American democracy? No way.
But that's what the corporate Democrats are going to give us--semi-transparency. That's why I made my sneering remark about Feinstein. And let's hope she doesn't add more handicaps--or even prohibitons--in our fight for real vote counting, which will now, necesarrily, have to occur at the state/local level, if we cannot get HAVA repealed (as it should be).
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For more on HR 550, see:
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2006/11/22/p12366 
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