November 2008 is coming up fast. Every voter should know the facts about the machines we will be using. These machines determine our history, they are paid for by our, the tax payers’, money. The election will determine the voice of our country. Do you think the machines will reflect the voice of the voters?

At least 80% of our votes are accounted for through ES&S and Diebold companies. Their operations have been banned in some states due to blatant corruption and gross misrepresentation of votes.

ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of U.S. votes. Diebold is the second largest voting machine manufacturer. Diebold employed five convicted felons as senior managers and to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.

Jeff Dean, Diebold’s Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on Diebold’s central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree. He wrote and maintained proprietary codes used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior VP of Global Election Systems (GES). In January 2002 GES was purchased by Diebold. Before GES hired Dean, public court documents revealed that he had served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme involving a ” high degree of sophistication and planning.” Diebold’s Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software.

The Vice-president of Diebold and the President of ES&S are brothers.

There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. These voting machines do not leave paper trails, yet Diebold makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines which log each and every transaction and can generate a paper trail. In a nutshell, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machines is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. A paper trail would document that the votes are correct. Diebold has the technology to easily record this information, but they do not.

Both ES&S and Diebold have been caught installing uncertified software in their machines. Although there is no known certification process that will protect against vote rigging or technical failure, it is a requirement of most, if not all, states.

Many states and counties may think that they can dodge the bullet by not using the highly insecure and error-prone touch screen voting machines which will process 28.9 of all votes this year. A huge threat to making our votes count still remains—computerized ballot scanners. They will count 57.6 percent of all votes cast, including absentee ballots.

In August 2004, CBS, HBO, CNN and many other media stations and journalists reported several stories that uncovered a Diebold plot to rig the elections. These reports were based on a letter from Diebold’s CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. In his invitation to a benefit for President Bush, Mr. Odell wrote: “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.” 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.” (From http://www.cbsnews.com/)

Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S and was caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

Two more interesting facts about Diebold: Ohio’s voting results raised many eyebrows during the last presidential elections. Diebold is based in Ohio and no international election observers were allowed at the polls in Ohio.

Approximately 28.9% to 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch-screen voting machines with no paper trail.

All—not some—but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. Serious voting anomalies in Florida have been mathematically demonstrated.

Research studies published in the mainstream media uncovered potential massive election fraud. One example (and there are many like examples to pick from) was 93,000 extra votes in Cuyahoga County, Ohio before the county corrected their figures during the last presidential elections in 2004.

HBO will be rerunning a show called “Hacking Democracy”. This is a must for those who would like to see how a grandmother in Washington State stumbled across high security information on a Diebold website as well as information and explanations about our voting system. The early version of this show can be viewed here.

The security information about our voting machines is not restricted to any one party or group of people. The information to access and change voting results without any record of the changes can be found and used by anyone. Even people who are not computer savvy can successfully change voting results. In early 2003, activists found a version of Diebold’s secret software on the Internet. The code had so many security flaws that one group would later post a video of a chimpanzee changing votes on YouTube.

Something must be done to ensure that our votes are not hijacked into cyberspace. Paper ballots are not perfect, but until something better comes along, they may be the least of the evils in our voting system. At least there would be a paper trail. Let’s make our votes count and make sure they are counted without corruption.

Laura Hughes is a full-time mom and ham radio operator.

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