corrente

This is it. This is THE story on electronic voting machines. I never ever though I would say this but the situation is about a thousand times worse than we ever thought. Bev Harris should just be given a special Pulitzer right now for this work.

It should be on the front page of every paper in America and the lead item on every damn newscast from now till the problem is fixed. Until then (um, don't hold your breath) it can be found at inthesetimes.com, whose headline was so perfect I had no choice but to steal it:

In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman requested was denied. Three months after the election, the vendor shrugged. “Something happened. I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark Kelley of ES&S.

When I began researching this story in October 2002, the media was reporting that electronic voting machines are fun and speedy, but I looked in vain for articles reporting that they are accurate. I discovered four magic words, “voting machines and glitch,” which, when entered into a search engine, yielded a shocking result: A staggering pile of miscounts was accumulating. These were reported locally but had never been compiled in a single place, so reporters were missing a disturbing pattern.

I published a compendium of 56 documented cases in which voting machines got it wrong.

How do voting-machine makers respond to these reports? With shrugs. They indicate that their miscounts are nothing to be concerned about. One of their favorite phrases is: “It didn’t change the result.”

Except, of course, when it did:

Nope, I ain't a-gonna give you any more. You can read the whole thing in under 15 minutes. Then get busy Astroturfing it to every friend, enemy, media outlet and total stranger whose address you can find.

UPDATE: Upon rereading it occurs to me that newer readers may not be aware that Bev Harris is executive director of BlackBoxVoting.com, a group that has been almost singlehandedly trying to get the truth out about the deficiencies of un-auditable electronic voting machines and the importance of paper trails. Also, I should have given credit to somebody who left this link in a comment thread at dKos where I ran across it.