My mother jokingly said she was bordering on "tin-foil hat" country, a reference to the term for conspiracy theorists and alien abductees. But she wasn't making radical claims about CIA plots and secret government programs. Her new first priority was voter fraud. And while many on the Internet are saying the election was stolen or rigged, there is a sizable number of people concerned with the process of voting, the realization that every vote did not and does not count, and the fact that we are doing very little to fix it.
This was "tin-foil hat" country because the only places to read about voter fraud a few weeks ago were independent news sites and primarily liberal weblogs. The coverage in the mainstream media has increased in the past week, but it's too little, too late. The most liberal media outlet-print news-is asking questions, but they're making no serious push to reconsider the 2004 election before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 13.
There are several serious issues at hand. Few legitimate steps were taken after the 2000 presidential election to address voting irregularities and voter fraud. The Help America Vote Act was just another ironic catch phrase; our right to vote was hindered, not helped, this past November. There are serious flaws in so-called "advancements" like electronic voting machines. Review of voting procedures and irregularities is being stalled as time runs out. The problems of this election are not being addressed, and in turn we are not addressing the potential problems of the next election. And the media, which controls the focus of the general population, has barely said a word.
The official review of the 2000 election was released in late 2001, during that tense, post-9/11 period when dissent was all but forbidden. The facts showed that had a recount been carried out in time, Al Gore would have won. This truth was largely brushed aside by the media. Questioning the legitimacy of the president was considered everything from unpatriotic to treasonous.
Many states' solution to the voting errors of 2000 was to adopt newer electronic voting machines. Though the touch screens are simpler to operate than paper ballots, they open a whole host of problems that lawmakers across the country should have foreseen or chose to ignore. These machines, produced by only a few companies, leave no paper trail, are not error-proof and had malfunctioned in elections held long before the 2004 presidential race. Reports of machine problems range from machines freezing, overheating, over or undercounting votes and even recording one particular candidate no matter which button is pressed. People would not want machines with this kind of track record involved in their finances. Their votes, though, clearly aren't worth as much.
During one of the longest presidential campaigns in history, party supporters on both sides devoted countless resources to registering new voters and getting every American to vote. However, they are doing very little, in terms of meaningful action, to ensure that the votes are actually counted. The electronic voting booths put in place were not a solution to the problems of Florida and other states in 2000. Problems sprang up in the midterm elections. The 2002 Alabama governor's race was flipped by a machine error, just one example of perhaps thousands of voting "glitches."
Suspicions were raised when the CEO of Diebold, the company that produces a third of these machines, infamously promised to win the election in Ohio for Bush, no matter what the cost. But the real problems are inherent in the machines themselves. Most technology, like computer software or Web sites, is subjected to testing and then to rapid customer use. If there is a problem on a high volume Web site, it is spotted and fixed immediately. Voting machines, though, are only available for rapid customer use on a few election days throughout the year. The machines have barely been tested, and they are riddled with problems.
We heard a lot about this before the election. In Wash., Bev Harris founded a group called Black Box Voting, a nonpartisan, non-profit organization that investigates voting irregularities nationwide. Before the election, she was on talk shows and news programs urging people to make sure their votes were properly recorded. Since the election, she has traveled the country demanding audits and recounts, but news coverage has been scant.
To demand recounts is not to be a partisan grasping at straws. In a post on their Web site this past Sunday, Black Box Voting "is honing in on seven investigations right now. To the surprise of some, five of the counties we are investigating are Democratic. A national investigation we are doing trends Republican. Our members just want clean elections. We want answers, not theories, statistics, or potentialities, and therefore we are concentrating on areas which have anomalies, and where we believe we can get the facts."
There are people like Harris working across the country. They are working against officials like Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who has effectively stalled any recounts in the election's most pivotal state and has now certified the Ohio vote for Bush. A recount will begin next week, but regardless of the outcome, Blackwell's certification means that it may not matter anyway. They are working against the media, which immediately wrote off Bush's margin of victory as too large to contest. We should question the legitimacy of every election, but the mainstream media framed the results in such a way that anyone who did so seemed desperate, perhaps even a member of the "tin foil hat" crowd.
Bush was re-elected this November. That can't be helped. We cannot, however, say that every vote was counted. We need to be as concerned about voter fraud as we were in the months prior to the election. The media needs to take notice, because it shapes what the nation thinks about. More importantly, we need to look to the next election. We cannot urge people to vote only to have their votes lost, destroyed, or changed. Democracy rests on the idea of a voice for all. We have four years to fix this. Let's get started.
Minkel can be reached at elminkel@amherst.edu