Eureka Times-Standard: Scary tale of technology

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http://www.times-standard.com/business/ci_4578792

Scary tale of technology
by Jim Nelson
Article Launched:10/31/2006 04:33:19 AM PST

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We all must indeed have faith come Nov. 7. We'll need to put our faith in a flawed system that cannot guarantee verifiable results. I don't intend to scare anyone away from the polling place. By all means, please vote. Just be aware that when you insert your ballot into the Diebold optical scanners used throughout Humboldt County,there is no absolute guarantee that your vote will be counted correctly, or that the results cannot be tampered with. In fact, we can only be one percent certain that our intended ballot results will even make it to election headquarters. That's the number of paper ballots that are actually verified by hand, just one percent.

Here are just a few anomalies from the 2004 election based on scary voting elections technology. According to the Associated Press (http://tinyurl.com/7wc8r), 4,530 votes were lost in Carteret County, N.C. due to the computer memory limit of the voting machines used. The Palm Beach Post (http://tinyurl.com/8kbb4) reported that in Broward County, Fla., the voting machines actually started counting backwards as final results were being tabulated. In Lancaster County, Neb., the Lincoln Journal Star (http://tinyurl.com/8kbb4) reported that optical scanners used there at times incorrectly detected two ballots, therefore counting many votes twice.

In a letter to the Government Accountability Office (http://tinyurl.com/b978j) on Nov. 5, 2004, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee requested an immediate investigation of the efficacy of voting machines due to numerous reports from voters indicating that machines were flipping Kerry votes to Bush. In fact, according to the Election Incident Reporting System (www.voteprotect.org) more than 42,000 similar incidents were reported across the United States.

But problems occur in every election, not just the debacle that occurred in November 2004. Let's look at some scary things that happened during Humboldt County's most recent election on June 6. In Eureka, two memory cards failed from Diebold optical scanners. Two more failed in Arcata. In Rio Dell, Hydesville, Scotia and Fortuna, the scanners were unable to transmit their data by modem to the central tabulator at the elections department headquarters for various reasons.

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So what is one to do, besides run away scared? For starters, I recommend getting educated about how flawed our elections system really is. A great place to start is the comprehensive blog found at WeDoNotConsent.Blogspot.com that is published by local advocacy journalist Dave Berman who helped contribute to this article.