Those who voted in the recent municipal election were exposed to the first voting machines ever used in this province. The municipal administration has stated that they were very happy with the results and would be using them again. At the poll I attended, I asked who was supplying the machines and was told they were from Diebold Inc. of the United States, a major supplier of voting machines.

There is widespread controversy in the United States over the use of the new electronic voting machines, particularly those which use touch screens. A number of studies done by political science and computer studies departments have shown that the results recorded by these machines can be manipulated. There was a public focus on these machines in Florida during the presidential election in 2000 and in Ohio during the presidential election in 2004.

A widely cited study was done by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. It concluded that “Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection.” The software can “modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machines, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss.”

Furthermore, the Princeton study confirmed that “anyone with physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software.” These machines are also “susceptible to voting-machine viruses” which can be used to steal votes.

But what about the system used in Regina, where machines count the votes and post the results on a central data base but retain the paper ballots?  The July 2006 election in Mexico showed that vote results can be manipulated at the central computers. This can only be rectified if the electoral authorities agree to a recount of the paper ballots. The majority demand in Mexico for a full recount was rejected by government authorities after a number of limited re-counts showed discrepancies which suggested that if there were a complete recount, the opposition party of the democratic left would have been elected. When a group of university political science departments asked for access to the ballots to perform their own recount, the federal election authorities ordered all the ballots to be burned.

In Ohio in 2004 the Republican Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, flatly refused to allow any recount of votes in disputed areas. Judicial actions by the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, which demanded a count of the paper ballots, were refused by the courts. In the case of Florida in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to a recount that was in progress. A recount carried out later by a group of newspapers showed that Al Gore actually carried Florida.

The controversy does not stop here. Diebold voting machines were widely used in Ohio. Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., was a strong supporter of George W. Bush. At one fund raising event in 2003 he stated that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its elector votes to the president.”

When I voted in the municipal election I asked the poll worker which voting list they were using. They were using none. All that was required was to list an address and sign a name. There was no identification required. In Mexico under the electoral system used by governments of the Institutional Revolutionary Party there was a common practice known as “carousel voting.”  The PRI would give a group of people a free breakfast and then load them on a bus and they would go from poll to poll voting all day. This was before the official voting list and voting identification cards. We could try this at the next Regina municipal election, eh?
   

Comments

Written by pelliott on 2006-11-07 06:37:19 Is it just me, or is the world starting to look like a bad science fiction movie?

Written by flopsy on 2006-11-07 23:43:53 My concern is that there were no numbers that i could notice. no one even seemed to be manualy counting the number of voters, to ensure that it jibed with the electronic count. any hack on the system could just lose a few votes, and no one would know. it would just be called a low voter turn out. the people in atendance at the poll just seemed to be there to socialize, not to keep any kind of an eye on things.

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