Thom Hartmann: Why Ireland scrapped their voting machines

[thomhartmann]

Ireland decided this week to scrap their voting machines--like the ones here stored in Dublin. They're selling them for scrap metal, because they found they were too unreliable and too easy to hack. They'd only used them once, back in 2002, but that was enough. Unfortunately, America hasn't learned as quickly as the Irish. It used to be in America that exit polls were the gold standard to determine if there were shenanigans in an election. For over a century we used them, and we got very, very good at it. They almost never deviated by more than a few tenths of a point from the actual electoral outcome, and when they did, it was a sure sign of fraud.

Such a sure sign that exit polls were used successfully to expose - and then overturn - fraudulent elections in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia. Polling companies were really good at this, and had great success in the election of 1998, when voting machines only recorded 7 percent of the national vote. But in the elections of 2000 and 2002, something odd began to happen. It was called "red shift" because, in certain states where there were a lot of voting machines being used, Republican candidates did better in the vote the machines reported than in the exit polls. In the election of 2004, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio led the charge with a red shift toward George W. Bush of 276,000 votes in New York, 228,000 in Florida, 190,000 in Pennsylvania, 169,000 in Ohio.

It had started two years earlier, in 2002, when voting machines began to appear everywhere across America because George W. Bush signed into effect a law called the Help America Vote Act or HAVA that gave billions of dollars to the states so they could buy these machines from private corporations like Diebold and ES&S. It was the high water point of the privatization of our vote. For two centuries, our vote was counted by volunteers and government workers overseen by representatives of the political parties. That all changed between 2000 and 2004 - now over 90 percent of our vote is recorded or counted in secret on corporate machines, and those corporations tell us who one our elections. Why is it secret? Because, the voting machine companies say, they have copyright and trademark "rights" to keep their software and hardware secret from us.

And so that red-shift has continued, and in some cases accelerated, in every election since 2002 to this day. Expect to see it this November, if any of the exit polling companies will release their raw data - something most stopped doing when their numbers went screwy in 2004. Back in 2004, Tina Brown had a TV show called "Topic A with Tina Brown" on CNBC. And one day she was off, and Howard Dean filled in for her. Dean had Bev Harris of Black Box Voting dot org on the show, and together, show how easy it is to rig an election. It took only 0 seconds to change the outcome of an election. A few months later, on March 7th of 2005, John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz-Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States." Connelly said that Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

Canada experimented with voting machines and dumped them, as did the Netherlands. This week it's Ireland. We should follow suit. It's not just that any technology - particularly a secret, proprietary technology - is vulnerable to hackers. Far more important is the concept of our commons. We have government to administer our commons - the things we all own in common. Our roads and parks and police and fire stations. Our army and our libraries and our public schools. And, of course, government itself is the ultimate commons. And the way we tell government how to behave is through our vote.

So the lynchpin of our republic is the vote - it's the most crucial of the commons, of the thing that lets us do everything else. And, without any public debate or discussion, George W. Bush turned that most important part of the commons over fewer than a half-dozen very secretive and Republican Party connected corporations. This is insane. We need to learn from Ireland's experience, and sell our voting machines for scrap metal and go back to counting paper ballots by hand, like virtually every other developed country in the world does. Privatizing our vote was a crime against democracy. It's time to undo that crime and take our votes back from Diebold and the other corporations. You can learn more over at blackboxvoting.org



The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann on RT TV & FSTV "live" 9pm and 11pm check www.thomhartmann.com/tv for local listings

[msongs]

1. as I say often, the democratic party is NOT interested in this issue at all nt

[allan01]

2. re:Thom Hartmann: Why Ireland scrapped their voting machines

we should go to all one voting standard
. vote by mail. well what about votor fraud the repugs would whine . the vote by mail in california was started by the ca rebublican party as a way to get around the democrats and willie brown at the time . more voter fraud here and it has been shown on the m$m that it is so easy to hack on these machines. let us vote with the way they do it in iraq and or afganistan, ink on on our thumbs to show that we voted. what about the internet. no paper trail and easy to hack. so many ways to cheat and steal our votes

[AnotherMcIntosh]

3. If our top leaders are not interested in this, why should we be?

[stillwaiting]

4. They are not "our" leaders. They are theirs.

And, that is the exact reason why we should be interested in this.